I was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and at age ten moved with my family to Clinton, fifty miles south along the Mississippi River. Outsiders tend to think of Iowa as flat. Much of the state is, but where I come from the bluffs rise straight up out of the river. Dubuque has an operating cable car (funicular railway) that a wealthy banker built to carry him from his office in the floodplain to his home on the bluffs 300 feet above. The view out over the river into Illinois is spectacular.
Others thought so too. All over the area are Amerind grave mounds looking down from the bluffs. One of them's on the farm that belonged to my father-in-law.
My dad was an electrician, but nobody in Iowa is very far from a farm. Family friends had farms when I was a boy; my wife's family were and are dairy farmers. I've spent enough time on and around some of the most productive family farms in the world to have a feeling for the life.
Which is very, very hard. The work has to be done every day, no matter how you feel or what the weather's doing: you can't call in sick and tell the cows that they won't be milked this morning. The machinery is dangerous beyond the imagination of a modern factory worker; the organo-phosphate insecticides were invented just in time for World War II, where they provided the Nazis with the first nerve gases; and even city-dwellers know that if anybody gets rich from agriculture, it isn't the family farmer.
The characters in this story are modeled on real people but they're not my in-laws. The farm is one my in-laws owned, including details like the curio cabinet and the hunting rifle.
I frequently use a story that has greatly impressed me as a model for one of my own. This isn't quite so direct a case as some, but I want to mention the similarities to Theodore Sturgeon's "Killdozer." The title (which was the genesis of the story) comes from Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
As he swung the tractor for a final pass across Sac Ridge Field, Deehalter saw that dirt had been turned on the side of the Indian mound. The big man threw in the hand clutch of the Allis-Chalmers and throttled the diesel back to idle as he glared at the new trench through the barbed wire. "That goddam Kernes," he whispered. "If I've got to work with him much longer…"
He revved the engine and slammed the tractor back in gear. The farmer's scowl was as black as the hair curling up his arms from the backs of his hands to the shirtsleeves rolled at his biceps.
At the south end of the field, Deehalter raised the cultivator and drove the Allis down the long, looping trail back to the farm buildings. There was a way of sorts straight west from the top of the ridge, but it was too steep for the tractor. The more gradual slope took Deehalter through half a dozen gates and eventually back to the buildings from the southwest. To the left loomed the barn and the three concrete silos peering over its roof at him. The milking parlor was a one-story addition to the barn's east side, facing the equipment shed and the gas pump. And at the pump was Tom Kernes with his ten-year old son, Deehalter's nephew, putting gas in the jeep.
Deehalter pulled up beside them and let the diesel clatter for a moment before he shut it off. Kernes, a short, ginger-headed man, looked up. His arms were not tan but a deep red, with brighter slashes where the straps of his undershirt had interrupted part of the sunlight. Kernes was thirty-five, five years younger than his brother-in-law, but his crinkly, sunburned face would have passed for any age. "Finish Sac Ridge already, Dee?" he asked in his pleasant, throaty voice. The tension in his muscles showed that he had correctly read Deehalter's anger.
"Kernes, what've you been doing with the Indian mound?" the bigger man demanded from the tractor seat. "You know to leave that the hell alone!" A pick and shovel lay in the back of the jeep. Deehalter noticed them and a black flush moved across his face.
Kernes' skin was too red to show the blood, but his voice rose to the challenge. "When Old John owned the farm, he could say what he pleased; but he's dead now. I'm damned if I'm not going to get an Indian skull like yours." Gesturing eastward at the ridge, the little man added, "I own half this goddam place and I'm going to get a skull."
The curio cabinet in Deehalter's parlor had been assembled by his grandfather before the first world war. Among its agates and arrowheads, sword-cane and ostrich plumes, was a brown human skull. The family had always assumed the skull came from a mound somewhere, but not even Old John had been sure. It fascinated Kernes, perhaps only because Deehalter had refused to give it to him. The main house and its furnishings, including the cabinet, had gone to Deehalter under his father's will-just as the new house in which his sister Alice lived with Kernes and their children had gone to her. The rest of the six-hundred-acre farm was willed to Deehalter and Alice jointly, with the provision that if either of them tried to partition the property, the whole of it went to the other. Deehalter had talked to a lawyer and he was sure Kernes had done the same. The worst news either of the men had heard in a long time was that the will would probably stand up in court.
"There's a law against digging up mounds," Deehalter muttered.
"There's a law against keeping an Indian skull on display," the shorter man blazed back. "You going to bring the law in here, Dee?"
"Well, "Deehalter said lamely, "you don't get everything in the mound. You've no right to that."
Kernes stood, arms akimbo, sweat from the June sun glittering on his face. "If I do all the goddam digging, I do," he said. "And anyhow, I get the skull out first."
Deehalter wiped his face with his huge, calloused palm. He didn't like to fool with the mound. Old John had whaled him within an inch of his life thirty years ago, when he had caught his son poking into the smooth slope with a posthole digger. But Deehalter remembered also the nightmare that had awakened him for months after that afternoon, and that dream was of nothing so common as a beating by his father. Still, to let Kernes take everything…"All right," Deehalter said, "I'll help you dig. But I get my pick of anything besides a skull. Wouldn't be surprised if there was gold in with a chief."Actually, Deehalter knew enough about mounds to doubt there would be anything that would interest a non-archeologist-often the mounds hadn't even been built over a body. But that wasn't anything the big farmer was going to say to his brother-in-law.
"Dad," said the Kernes boy unexpectedly."If Uncle Dee helps you, you don't need me, do you?"
Kernes looked at the child as though he wanted to hit him. "Go on, then," he snapped. "But I want that goddam toolshed painted when I get back. All of it!"
The boy took off running for the house. Wiener, the farm's part-collie, chased after him barking. "Kid's been listening to his mother," Kernes grumbled. "From the way Alice's been carrying on, you'd think Old John was going to come out of his grave if I dug up that mound. He must've knocked that into her head with a maul."
"He was strong on it," Deehalter agreed absently."I know when he was a boy, there was still a couple Sac Indians on the farm. Maybe they talked to him. But he was strong about a lot of things."
"Well, you ready to go?" Kernes demanded. He had hung up the pump nozzle and now remembered to cap the jeep's tank.
Deehalter grimaced."I'll put the cultivator in the shed," he said. "Then we'll go."
Kernes drove, taking the direct trail through the east pasture. There was a rivulet to ford and a pair of gullies that had to be skirted, but the hard going didn't start until they reached the foot of the ridge. They had bought the jeep ten years before from Army surplus, and the sharp grades of the ridge slope made the motor wheeze even in the granny gear. Cedars studded the slope, interspersed with bull thistles whose purple bracts were ready to burst open. There was a final switch-back just before the trail reached the summit. As Kernes hauled the wheel hard to the left, the motor spluttered and died. Deehalter swung out of the jeep and walked the last thirty yards while the smaller man cursed and trod on the starter.
The mound was built on the north end of the ridge. That part had never been opened as a field because the soil was too thinly spread above the bedrock. The mound was oval, about fifteen feet long on the east-west axis and three or four feet high. Though small, it was clearly artificial, a welt of earth on the smooth table of the ridge. Kernes' trench was in the center of the south side, halfway in and down to the level of the surrounding soil. Deehalter was examining the digging when the jeep heaved itself up behind him and was cut off again.
"We just kept hitting rocks," the smaller man explained. "We didn't get near as far as I'd figured before we started."
Deehalter squatted on his haunches and poked into the excavation with a finger like a corncob. "You didn't hit rocks," he said, "you hit a rock. One god-dam slab. There's no way we're going to clear that dirt off it without a week of work or renting a bulldozer. And even if we cleared downto the rock, that slab's a foot thick and must weigh tons. We're just wasting our time here-or we would be if we didn't go on back right now."
Kernes swore. "We could hook a chain to the Allis-" he began.
Deehalter cut him off. "We'd have to get the dirt off the top first, and that'd take all goddam summer. This was a bad idea to start, and it got worse quick. Come on, let's go back." He straightened.
"What about dynamite?" blurted Kernes.
Deehalter stared at his brother-in-law. The smaller man would not meet his gaze but continued, "There's still a stick under the seat from when you blew up the beaver dam. We could use it."
"Kernes," Deehalter said, "you're so afraid of that dynamite that you'd rather leave it in the jeep than touch it to get it out. Besides, it'll blow the shit out of anything under that slab-if there is anything and the slab's not flat on bedrock all the way across. What're you trying to prove?"
Kernes' red face grew even brighter with embarrassment, oranger."Look," he said, "I'm gonna get into this goddam thing if I got to hire a contractor. I said I would and I will. You don't want to help, that's your goddam business."
Deehalter eyed him a moment longer. "Oh, I'll do my part," he said. He gestured to the pick and added, "You see if you can cut a slot an inch deep and maybe eight inches long in the seam between the top slab and the bedrock. I'll get the dynamite ready." He grinned. "Unless you want to do that instead?"
Kernes' only response was to heft the tool with a choked grip and begin chopping at the stone.
Deehalter flipped the jeep's seat forward and lifted out the corrugated cardboard box beneath it. There was, as Kernes had said, still one stick of dynamite left along with a roll of wire and a smaller box of blasting caps. The explosive terrified Kernes in the way snakes or spiders do other men. Deehalter had deliberately refused to take the stick out of the jeep despite his brother-in-law's frequent requests. Finally Kernes had ceased to mention it-until now. Kernes was so stubbornly determined to have an Indian skull that he had overridden his fear of the explosive. It occurred to Deehalter that he was doing the same thing himself with his fear of the mound.
The big farmer leaned against the jeep as he dug a fuze pocket in the dynamite with a pencil stub. Kernes was chipping the soft rock effectively, even in the confined space. "Not too wide," Deehalter warned as he twisted the leads from the blasting cap onto the extension wire.
He didn't like what they were doing. Shapes from long-ago nightmares were hovering over his mind, unclear but no less unpleasant for that. He'd never heard of Indians using stone in their mounds, and that bothered him too. Still, why not? The Mississippi Basin was rich in soft yellow limestone, already layered by its floodings and strandings in the shallow seas of its deposition. So it wasn't the stone or anything else rational which was eating at Deehalter; it was just that something felt cold and very wrong inside him.
"That enough, Dee?" Kernes asked, panting. His sleeveless undershirt was gray with sweat.
Deehalter leaned forward."It'll do," he acknowledged. Kernes was shrinking back from the explosive in Deehalter's hand."Run the jeep over the crest of the ridge and get the hood open. There's enough wire to reach to there."
While his brother-in-law scrambled to obey, Deehalter knelt in the trench and made his own preparations. First he set the blasting cap in the hole in the end of the dynamite. Then he carefully kneaded the explosive into the slot Kernes had cut in the rock. The heavy waxed paper and its fillings of sawdust, ammonium nitrate, and nitroglycerin were hot and deformed easily. A lot of people didn't know how to use dynamite; they wasted the force of the blast. Deehalter didn't want to blow the mound open, but he'd be damned if he wouldn't do it right if he did it at all.
When the dynamite had been molded into the rock, the big man shoveled dirt down on top of it and used his boots to firmly tamp the pile. The thin wire looped out of the earth like the shadow of a grass blade. Deehalter hung the coil on the pick handle, using it as a loose spindle from which to unwind the wire as he walked to the jeep.
"This far enough away?" Kernes asked, eying the mound apprehensively.
"Unless a really big chunk comes straight down," Deehalter said, silently pleased at the other man's nervousness. "Christ, it's just one stick, even if it is sixty-percent equivalent."
Kernes bent down behind the jeep. Deehalter squatted at the front, protected from the blast by the brow of the hill. He held the bare end of one wire to the negative post of the battery, then touched the other lead to the positive side. Nothing happened. "God dammit," he said, prodding the wire to cut through the white corrosion on the post.
The dynamite exploded with a loud thump.
"Jesus!" Kernes shouted as he bounced to his feet. Deehalter, more experienced, hunched under his baseball cap while dirt and tiny rock fragments rained over him and the jeep. Then at last he stood and followed his brother-in-law. The smaller man was now cursing and trying to brush dirt from his head and shoulders with his left hand; in his right he carried a battery spotlight.
Acrid black smoke curled in the pit like a knot of snakes. The sod walls of the trench looked as they had before the explosion, but the earth compacted over the charge was gone and the exposed edge of the rock slab had shattered. Because the limestone could neither move nor compress, the shock had broken it as thoroughly as a twenty-foot fall could have.
Kernes bent down over the opening and grasped a chunk of stone to toss out of the way. The dynamite fumes looped a tendril over his face. Kernes coughed and quivered, and for an instant Deehalter thought the other man lost focus. Then Kernes was on his feet again, fanning the shovel blade to clear the smoke faster and crying, "By God, Dee, there's really something in there! By God!"
Deehalter waited, frowning, as Kernes shoveled at the rubble. A little prying with the blade was enough to crumble the edge of the slab into fist-sized pieces like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. More dirt fell in, but that was easily scooped away. The actual opening stayed small because the only cavity in the bedrock was a shallow, water-cut basin. It sloped so gradually that even after a two-foot scallop had been nibbled from the overlying slab there was barely enough room to reach an arm into the hollow.
The fumes had dissipated. Kernes scattered a last shovelful of dirt and gravel, then tossed the tool aside as well. Kneeling down with his face as close to the opening as he could get it and still leave room for the spotlight, he began to search the cavity. "God damn," Kernes said suddenly. "Goddamn!" He tried to reach in left-handed, found there was too little room, and shoved the light back out of the way since he had already located the object in his head. The spotlight beam touched grass blades shaded from the sun, a color rather than an illumination.
"Look at this, Deehalter!" cried Kernes as he scrabbled backward. "By God!"
"I've seen skulls before," the black-haired man said sourly, eyeing the discolored bone which his brother-in-law held hooked through the eye sockets. The lower jaw was missing, but the explosion seemed to have done little damage. Unless the front teeth…
"There's other stuff in there too," Kernes bubbled.
"Then it's mine," said Deehalter sharply.
"Did I goddamn say it wasn't?" Kernes demanded. "And you can get it out for yourself, too," he added, looking down at his shirt, muddied by dirt and perspiration.
Deehalter said nothing further. He lay down carefully in the fresh earth and directed the spotlight past his head. He could see other bones in the shallow cavity. The explosion had shaken them, but their order was too precise for any large animals to have stripped away the flesh. Indeed, the bundles of skin and tendon still clinging to the thighs indicated that not even mice had entered the tomb. The stone-to-stone seal must have been surprisingly close.
Metal glittered beyond the bones. Deehalter marked its place and reached in, edging himself forward so that his shoulder pressed hard against the ragged lip of the slab. He expected to feel revulsion or the sudden fear of his childhood, but the cavity was dry and empty even of death. His wrist brushed over rib bones and he thought the object beyond them was too far; then his fingertips touched it, touched them, and he lifted them carefully out.
Kernes stopped studying the skull in the sunlight from different angles. "What the hell you got there. Dee?" he asked warily.
Deehalter wasn't sure himself, so he said nothing. He held the two halves of a hollow metal teardrop, six inches long. On the outside it was black and bubbled-looking; within, the spherical cavity was no larger than a hickory nut. The mating surfaces and the cavity itself were a rich silver color, untarnished and as smooth as the lenses of a camera.
"One of them's mine," said Kernes abruptly."The skull and half the rest."He reached for one of the pieces.
"Like hell," said Deehalter, mildly because he was concentrating on the chunks of metal. His big shoulder blocked Kernes away without effort."Besides, it's all one thing," he added, holding the sections so that the polished surfaces mated. Then, when he tried to part them, the halves did not reseparate.
"Aw," Kernes said in disbelief and again put a hand out for the object. This time Deehalter let him take it. Despite all the ginger-haired man's tugging and pushing, the teardrop held together. It was only after Kernes, sweating and angry, had handed back the object that Deehalter found the trick of it. You had to rotate the halves along the plane of the separation-which, since there was no visible line, was purely a matter of luck the first time it worked.
"Let's get on home," Deehalter said. He nodded westward toward the sun. Sunset was still an hour away, but it would take them a while to drive back. The ridge was already casting its broad shadow across the high ground to the east. "Besides," Deehalter added, almost under his breath, "I don't like the feeling I get up here sometimes."
But it was almost two weeks before Deehalter had any reason for his uneasiness…
Despite the full moon low in the west and the light of the big mercury vapor lamp above the cow yard to the north of the barn, the plump blonde stumbled twice on the graveled path to the car. The second time she caught Deehalter's arm and clung there giggling. More to be shut of her than for chivalry, the farmer opened the passenger door of the Chrysler and handed her in. Naturally, she flopped across his lap when he got in on the driver's side. He pushed her upright in disgust.
It was 3 a.m. and there were no lights yet in Alice and her husband's house. Deehalter knew they had seen him bring Wendy home in the evening, knew also that Wiener would awaken them as he chased the car. Kernes had once complained to Deehalter, red-faced, about the example he set for his nephew and nieces by bringing whores home to their grandfather's house. Deehalter had told him that under the will it was his house, and that when Kernes and Alice quit fucking intheir house, he'd consider quitting it in his. The smaller man hadn't quite taken a swing as Deehalter had hoped he might.
When the car began to scrunch down the drive past the new house, Wiener came loping toward them from the barn. He barked once every other time his forefeet touched the ground. The noise was more irritating than even a quick staccato would have been. The car windows were closed against the night's damp chill. Deehalter's finger was poised on the switch to roll the glass down and shout at the mongrel, when Wendy's scream snapped his head around.
The bank to the left sloped up from the drive, so the thing standing there was only in the edge of the lights. It was wire thin and tall-twice the height of a man at a fleeting glance, though a part of Deehalter knew that was the effect of the bank and the angle. A flat lizard-snout of teeth glittered sharply. Then the beast turned and the big car leaped forward down the drive as Dee-halter floored the accelerator. Wendy was still screaming, her face buried in her hands, when the car banged over the slotted cattle-guard and fishtailed onto the gravel county road.
Deehalter kept his speedometer dangerously above sixty for the first three miles, until they reached the tavern and gas station at Five Points. There he braked to a stop and turned on the dome light. The girl whimpered. Deehalter's big hands gripped her shoulders and hauled her upright. "Shut up," he said tightly.
"W-what was it?" she blubbered.
"Shut up, for Christ's sake!" Deehalter shouted. "It wasn't a goddamned thing!" He brought his face close to Wendy's. The girl's eyes were as fearful as they had been minutes before at the sight of the creature. "You saw a cat in the headlights, that's all. You'renot going to get everybody and his brother tramping over my farm shooting my milking herd. You're going to keep your goddamn mouth shut, do you hear?"
The blonde was nodding to the rhythm of Deehalter's words. Tears streamed from her eyes, and when she tried to wipe them she smeared the remains of her eye shadow across her cheeks.
Deehalter released her suddenly and put the car in gear. Neither of them spoke during the rest of the ride to town. When the big farmer stopped in front of the girl's apartment, she stumbled out and ran up the steps without bothering to close the car door. Deehalter locked it after he slammed it shut.
He drove back to the farm at a moderate pace that slowed appreciably as he came nearer. The night had only its usual motions and noises now. Deehalter was waiting in his locked car an hour later, alone with nothing but a memory to disturb him, when Kernes came out of his house to start milking.
After lunch-a full meal of fried steak and potatoes; Deehalter had cooked for himself and his father as well before Old John died-the big man walked down the drive and began searching the grassy bank to the left of it. Once when he looked up, he saw his sister watching him intently from the Kernes' kitchen window. He waved but she ducked away. Toward three o'clock, Kernes himself came back in the jeep from inspecting the fences around the northwest pasture. Deehalter hailed him. After a moment's hesitation, the ginger-haired man swung the vehicle up the bank and stopped.
"Come look at this," Deehalter said. The turf was marked fuzzily where he pointed. "Doesn't it look like three claw prints?" he asked.
Kernes looked at him strangely. "Claw prints? What do you mean, Dee?"
"It-oh, Christ, I don't know," said the big man, straightening and lifting his cap to run his hand through his hair. He looked glumly back past the barn to the long bulk of Sac Ridge.
"Haven't seen Wiener today, have you?" Kernes asked unexpectedly.
"Not since I took Wendy home this morning," replied Deehalter, his own expression odd. "Barked at the car as usual. You must've heard him."
"Learned to sleep through it, I guess," said Kernes, and the words did not quite ring true… though that might have been the blurred print on the ground and Deehalter's blurred memory of what had made the print. Kernes got into the jeep. "Usually he chases a rabbit, he gets back for breakfast. Kids've about worried me to death about that damn dog."
"I'll ride to the barn with you," Deehalter said. They did not speak about the dog-or the print-for the rest of the afternoon.
In the evening, after Deehalter had finished his turn at milking, Alice came out to the barn to help wash down the equipment. Alice Kernes was ten years younger than her brother. Though they had never been close, there was a thread of mutual affection despite Deehalter's reciprocated hatred for his brother-in-law. Alice hummed as she polished the glass tubing and stainless steel; a short woman with her black hair tied back by a kerchief and a man's shirt flapping over the waistband of her gray skirt.
"Wiener been back yet?" Deehalter asked with feigned disinterest.
"No, have you seen him?"Alice said, pausing to catch the shake of Deehalter's head. "Susie's been crying all day. Tom went out to quiet the dog down this morning and I think he scared him off. But he'll be back tonight, I figure."
Deehalter flipped the switch that would drain the water now being cycled through the transfer piping. "Kernes got up to chase him?"
"Uh-huh. Did you get the big tank?"
"Yeah, we can call it a night," Deehalter said. Bloodstains are hard to identify in heavy grass, harder even than footprints in the sod beneath, so he made no mention of the splotches he had found thirty yards from the drive that afternoon. There had been no body, not even a swatch of dog fur torn off in a struggle.
But despite that, Deehalter guessed that the mongrel would not be coming home that night.
A cow awakened Deehalter with a blat like a cut-off klaxon horn. His Remington. 30-06 leaned against the window frame, bathed in moonlight. Deehalter stripped a shell into the autoloader's chamber from the full magazine before he pulled on his dungarees and boots. Shirtless, his baggy trousers weighted down by the rest of the box of ammunition, Deehalter unlocked the front door and began running across the yard.
There were one hundred and sixty cattle in the barn, and from the noise they had all gone wild. Over their bellows came clatters and splintering as the frantic tons of beef smashed the fittings of the barn. Normally in the summer, the cows were free to wander in and out of the yard and to the pasture beyond, but tonight Deehalter had penned them for safety. He was a hundred feet from the electric fence of the yard, cursing his mistake in having concentrated the herd and then left it unprotected, when one of the black-and-white Holsteins smashed from the barn into the cow yard through both halves of the Dutch door.
There was something behind it.
The thing's tongue and the blood on its jaws were black in the mercury floodlight. Erect against the side of the barn it was almost eight feet tall, though only the shadows gave mass to its spindly limbs. It saw Deehalter and skidded on the slippery concrete, its claws rasping through the slime. Deehalter threw his rifle to his shoulder. It was as if he were aiming at a skeleton made of coat hangers, the thing was so thin. Deehalter's hands shook. The creature bent forward, cocking its hips back for balance. It opened its jaws so wide that every needle tooth seemed pointed at the farmer. Then it screamed like a plunging shell as Deehalter fired. His bullet punched neatly through the side of the barn ten feet above the ground.
With a single stride, the creature disappeared back within the building. Deehalter slammed another shot through the empty doorway.
Panting, the big man knelt and fumbled out the box of ammunition without letting go of the rifle. His shoulder ached. The empty cases shone silver pale on the grass to his right. When Deehalter had reloaded, he shuffled forward again. He held his rifle out as if he were thrusting it through fluid. The yard was filled with milling cows. Deehalter moved past them to the low milking parlor and tried in vain to peer through the dusty windows. Then, holding the rifle awkwardly like a huge pistol, he unlatched the door and flipped on the light. There was nothing in the parlor, and its metal gates to the barn were still closed.
Deehalter turned on the lights in the main building. There was only a score of frightened cows still within. The half-loft eight feet above the bare floor had only a little straw in it. The loft door in the south wall hung askew. There were deep scratches around its broken latch. From the left, Deehalter grimly surveyed the barn. The interior walls were spattered with blood. A heifer was dead in her stall; long gouges reddened the hides of several others of the herd.
It was almost dawn. The black-haired farmer stood at the loft door, cursing and staring out into the red sunrise, which pulled the shadow of the ridge like a long curtain over the pasture.
The door to the milking parlor banged. Deehalter swung around and raised the muzzle of his rifle. It was Kernes barefooted and in torn pajamas with Alice, wide-eyed, behind him. Seeing the blood and the dead heifer, she shouted at her husband, "My God, Tom, have you and George been shooting cows?"
Kernes gaped. Deehalter couldn't understand why the question was directed at his brother-in-law."No, it was a, a-"Deehalter began and stuttered to a halt, uncertain both of the truth and what he should say about it. To change the subject he said, "We got to phone Doc Jepson. Some of the cows' been-cut."
"Phone the vet?" blazed Alice-Kernes still had not spoken. She reached back into the parlor for the extension which hung on the wall higher than a cow carries its head. "We'll call the Sheriff, we'll call-"
"Put down that goddamn phone!" Deehalter said, not loudly but too loudly to be ignored by anyone who knew him well.
Alice was in a rage herself, but she stepped back from the phone and watched her brother descend carefully from the loft. "What did it, George?" she asked.
"I didn't get a good look."
"Goddammit, George," Alice said, letting go of her anger now that Deehalter had cooled enough not to shoot her dead in a fury, "why won't you let me get help?"
"Because we're in the milk business," the big man said, sagging against the ladder in mental exhaustion. Kernes wasn't really listening; Alice's face was blank. "Because if we go tell people there's an eight-foot lizard on our farm-"
Kernes swore. Deehalter shouted, "All right, I saw it, what the hell's the difference? Something killed the cow, didn't it?" He glared at the others, then went on, "First they'll think we're crazy. And then when they learn it's true, they'll say, 'Strontium 90,' or 'What're they spraying their fields with to do that?' or 'There's something in their water.' And we'll never sell another pint of milk from here as long as we live. Youknow what the dairy business is like!"
Alice nodded sharply."Then we'll just raise hogs," she said, "or corn-or we'll sell the farm and all get jobs with Purina, for God's sake. Spring Hill Dairies isn't the whole-"
"Alice!"
Kernes' eyes were flicking from one sibling to the other, a spectator rather than a referee. Alice glared at him, then said to her brother, "All right, George. But I'm taking the kids into town to stay with Iris until you come to your senses." Then, to her husband, she added, "Tom, are you coming too?"
"If you leave here, Kernes," said Deehalter quietly, "you'll never come back. I don't give a shit what the law says."
The men stared at each other. "I'll stay," Kernes said. Alice banged through the gate and into the milking parlor without a look behind her."I'd have stayed anyway, Alice!" the smaller man shouted.
"Call Doc Jepson," Deehalter repeated wearily. "We can tell him it was dogs or something-" the tooth marks were too high and broad for that to be other than a transparent lie-"and hope we can scotch this thing before worse happens."
Numbly, Kernes made the call. As the little man hung up, they heard the rasping starter of the old station wagon. A moment later, gravel spattered as Alice rocketed down the drive. Almost as fast as he himself had driven the night before, Deehalter thought.
"It's because of what we took out of that mound," Kernes said in a small voice.
Deehalter shook his head in irritation. "This thing didn't come from a skull or a little bit of iron," he snapped. "It's big, big enough to kill a Holstein."
"It was there just the same," Kernes replied. "We've got to close that grave up with everything in it again. Then maybe we'll be okay."
"You're nuts," Deehalter said. But he remembered the thing's eyes and the gape of its jaws; and he knew that sometime that day he would help Kernes bury the objects again.
Deehalter walked to the mound and the parked jeep without speaking. In the field behind him, the crows settled noisily on the carrion again.
Kernes had lifted out a pair of shovels and the gunny sack holding the objects. "Well?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Deehalter with a shrug, "it was Wiener."
Kernes began to undo the knot which closed the sack's throat. Without looking up, he said, "I think it's the moon. That's why it didn't come out when we opened the mound. It needed the full moon to bring it out."
"Bullshit," said Deehalter."Isaw the thing and it's not moonlight, it's as solid as you or me. Damn sight solider than old Wiener there," he added with a grim twist of his head. "Moonlight's just light, anyway."
"Fluorescent light's just light too," Kernes retorted, "but it makes plants grow like they don't with a regular light bulb. Christ, Dee, don't youfeel the moon on you at night?"
Deehalter did, but he wasn't about to admit that weakness even in the noon sun. Kernes had paused after opening the bag, unwilling either to dump the contents back into the hole without ceremony or to touch them again barehanded. The big man hesitated also. Then he glanced at the guns in easy reach, between the front seats of the jeep, and lifted out the skull.
The bone felt warm. Because Deehalter had not really taken a look at it before, he did so now at this last opportunity. The teeth were damaged in a way that at first he could not explain. Then the farmer cursed, set the skull down on the ground, and stretched out in the open trench. The angle was too flat for Deehalter to have been able to see anything even if he had brought a flashlight this trip, but his fingertips found the shallow grooves he expected in the under-surface of the slab.
"Christ," he muttered, standing up again. "That poor sucker was alive when they covered him up in there. He didn't have a damned thing to dig with, so he tried to scrape through the stone with his teeth."
Kernes stared at the skull and looked a little sicker than he had before. His finger traced but did not touch the front teeth. All four of the incisors were worn across the flats as if by a file. They had been ground down well into the nerve canals. One of the front pair had cracked about halfway from the root. "Yeah, I'd seen that but I didn't think…" he said. "Jesus, what a way to go. He surely must've known he couldn't chew his way through a foot of rock."
"Maybe he didn't know there was a foot of it," Deehalter said. "Besides, he didn't have a lot of choice."
Carefully, the big man set the skull as far back into the mound as his arm would reach. The litter of bone and rock chips within scrunched under his shirtsleeve.
The rippled, iron teardrop was still closed. Deehalter looked at it for a moment, then twisted it to split the halves because they had been separate when he found them. The metal divided with a soft gasp like a cold jar being opened. Deehalter set the halves under the slab as carefully as he had the discolored skull.
Almost before he rolled out of the way, his brother-in-law was tossing a shovelful of earth into the hole. Kernes worked feverishly at the soil pile he and his son had thrown up in digging the pit. By the time Deehalter had brushed himself off and picked up a shovel, the blast-crumbled edge of the slab had been buried again.
They finished their work before noon, leaving on the mound's side a black scar that sealed off the greater blackness within.
The barn windows were green fiberglass which the western moonlight outlined sharply against the walls. The diffused illumination was weak and without distinct shadows, It made the loft floor an overlay of grays on grays which wobbled softly as Deehalter paced along it. The cattle penned below murmured, occasionally blatting loudly at their unfamiliar restraint. At each outburst, Deehalter would pause and lean over the loft rail with his rifle forward; but the bellowing was never for any reason that had to do with why two armed men were watching the barn tonight.
At the north end of the loft, Deehalter stopped and looked out the open loading door. The cow yard below was scraped and hosed off daily, but animal waste had stained the concrete an indelible brown which became purple in the mercury light.
To the left, within the fence of the cow yard and in the corner it formed with the barn, hunched Kernes with a shotgun loaded with deer slugs. From Deehalter's angle, the smaller man was foreshortened into a stump growing from the concrete. Nothing moved in the night, though the automatic feeder in the hog pens flapped several times. As Deehalter watched silently, Kernes looked up at the moon. Despite the coolness of the night and the breeze from the west, Kernes pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
Deehalter turned and began pacing back to the south end of the barn. He had finished his thermos of coffee hours ago, and it was only by staying in motion that he was able to keep awake. He couldn't understand how Kernes could huddle in the same corner since ten o'clock and still be alert; but then, Kernes wasn't a person Deehalterwanted to understand.
Deehalter peered out the south door. Nothing, nothing, of course nothing. A fox barked in the invisible distance and the big man's grip tightened on his rifle stock. He caught himself before he threw a bullet out into the night in frustration; then he began to pace back.
But each time the creature had come, it was in the near dawn. As if it were striding to the farm from far away, or because it got a late start. The notch he and Kernes had blasted in the Indian mound faced southwest. Moonlight would not have entered it until nearly morning. But there was no living thing in that narrow rock basin, only a litter of bones and what was probably a meteorite.
Why had that Indian been sealed up alive?
Nothing but bones and iron in the mound. Briefly, Deehalter's mind turned over a memory of awakening to seize his rifle in the pattern of moonlight etched across his room by the Venetian blinds. Now he held the weapon close and bent forward to look at his brother-in-law.
Kernes had moved slightly, out along the electric fence. The yard light colored his shirt blue but could not throw a shadow forward into the glare of the full moon. Kernes was staring west at that mottled orb. His shotgun barrel traced nervous arcs, rising and slipping back to a high port. It was almost as if the smaller man were wishing he could fire at the moon, but catching himself a moment before he did anything that… crazy.
Kernes' bodyslithered.
"Kernes!" Deehalter screamed.
The man below turned and was a man again. The shotgun had fallen to the concrete. Kernes' clothing was awry from having something monstrously thin start to clamber out of it. Part of Deehalter's mind wondered what Kernes had thought in the mornings when he found himself naked in the pasture, his tangled pajamas outside his house.
Now the small farmer was looking up at Deehalter, his face as dead and horrified as that of the statue of Laocoon. Then he changed again, and the long jaws spread to hiss at the man above. Deehalter laid his open sights in the middle of the thing's breastbone and squeezed off the shot.
The bullet flew high because of the angle, but the big man was hunter enough to have allowed for that. The soft-nose spiked through the lower mandible and into the throat, exiting at last through the creature's back. The jacketed lead, partly expanded but with only a fraction of its energy gone, slapped the concrete beyond and splashed away in a shower of sparks and a riven howl.
The thing that had been Kernes hurtled backwards and slid until it struck the fence. Its stick-thin limbs thrashed, shredding remnants of its clothing with claws and the strength of a grizzly. Its jaws snapped. The hole in its throat was small, but Deehalter knew that the supersonic bullet would have left a wound cavity like a pie tin in the back.
The entrance wound had closed. The beast was scrabbling to its feet.
Deehalter screamed and shot it through the chest, an off-center impact that spun the creature again to the concrete. This time Deehalter couldsee the plastic flesh closing on the scale-dusted torso. He remembered Wiener and the gullied throat of the Holstein. With only that instant's hesitation, the big man braced his rifle in front of him and leaped through the window to his right. The fiberglass panel sprang out in a piece as the frame tore. Deehalter stumbled headlong onto the low roof of the milking parlor, rolled, and jumped to the ground. The jeep was only twenty feet away and he ran for it.
There was no ignition lock. Deehalter flipped the power on and stabbed at the starter button under the clutch pedal. The engine ground but did not catch. There was a tearing noise behind him, and despite himself the big man turned to look. The creature was in the cow yard fence. The top strand was electrified. Blue sparks crackled about the thing's foreclaws. Its shape was in a state of flux so swift as to be almost subliminal. It was as if superimposed holograms of Kernes and the creature he had become were being projected onto the fence. Then the hot wire snapped and the thing's legs cut the remaining strands like sickles through fog.
Deehalter fired one-handed and missed. He steadied the rifle, locking his left elbow on the tubular seat-frame, and knocked the creature back into the cow yard with no top to its skull. Then the engine chugged and the big farmer threw the jeep into second gear at higher revs than the worn clutch was used to. Spewing gravel but without the power to sideslip, the vehicle churned forward.
For choice, Deehalter would have run west for the county road as he had two nights before in his Chrysler. That would have meant turning and trying to race past the cow yard, where the creature was already on its feet again and striding toward him. Deehalter had small need of his imagination to picture that scene: the long-clawed arms hooking over the steering wheel and plucking him out like the meat from a walnut half, leaving the empty jeep to careen into a ditch. He was headed instead toward Sac Ridge and the mound from which the horror must have come.
Deehalter had the headlights on, but they were mounted too low to show up potholes in time even at moderate speed-and his present speed was anything but moderate. The jeep jounced so badly that only the big man's grip on the steering wheel kept him in the vehicle. The shovels in the back did spin out into the night. It occurred to Deehalter that the rifle which he had wedged butt-downward beneath the back seat might fire and end him permanently as it had been unable to do to the thing pursuing. He did not care. He only knew that he had looked down the creature's gaping jaws and would rather anything than die between them.
Despite his panic, Deehalter shifted into compound low to cross the stream, knowing that any attempt to mount the slippery bank in a higher gear would have meant sliding back into certain death. On the rutted pasture beyond, he revved and slam-shifted. He was proud of his skill only for the instant before the low moon flicked a leaping shadow across the corner of his eye. Fear washed away pride and everything else.
Despite the ruts the jeep made good time in the pasture, but as the old vehicle began to climb the side of the ridge Deehalter knew the creature must be gaining. There was no choice, nowhere else to run. If he turned either north or south, the thing's long shanks would cut it across the slant of his right angle.
Where had the creature come from originally? Perhaps the Indians had known; but even if the teardrop was the source, it could as easily have fallen a million years before and a thousand miles away, carried south on a glacier. Deehalter could picture a nervous band of Sacs dragging one of their number to the rock basin, bound or unconscious. Or would it have been a tribe from the pre-Columbian past? There was nothing in the mound to date it. Something had come from the cocoon of iron and been trapped again between layers of rock. Trapped until he and Kernes had freed it in a vapor which merged with the black tendrils of the dynamite.
As Deehalter neared the top of the ridge, he glanced sideways. The creature was a foot behind him and a foot to the left, its right leg poised to stride and its yard-long right arm poised to rip the farmer's throat open. Deehalter slammed on the brakes, acting by reflex. It was the proper reflex, even though the jeep stalled. The beast's claws swept where Deehalter's head should have been, and its body belled and rebounded from the unyielding fender. For a moment, the thing sprawled backwards on the hillside; then it twisted upright, lizard-quick, and lunged.
Deehalter touched the muzzle of his Remington to the scaly ribs and blew the creature a dozen yards down the hill. The cartridge case sailed away in a high arc, the mouth of it eroded by the excessive pressures from the blocked muzzle.
And though Deehalter still had the part box in his pocket, that had been the last round in the weapon.
In stalling, Deehalter had flooded the jeep's engine. He leaped out, winded already with fear, and topped the ridge with two long strides. The headlights were waning yellow behind him, where he could already hear the creature moving. The sky to the east was the color of blood. Deehalter ran for the mound as if its gentle contours could protect him. He tried to jump to its top, but his foot sank in the soft earth of the diggings. The big man windmilled forward onto his face in the grass beyond. His grip on the empty rifle had flayed his right knuckles against the ground. His twisted ankle gave a twinge; it might or might not bear his weight again.
Deehalter turned, trying to fumble another cartridge into the breech of the rifle. It was too late. Hissing like a cat in a lethal rage, the creature leaped delicately to the top of the mound.
It was even thinner than it had looked when flickering shadows had bulked its limbs. It had to be thin, of course, with only Kernes' hundred and thirty pounds to clothe its frame. The curve of the mound made the creature's height monstrous, even though its legs were poised to lunge and it carried its flat skull forward like that of a near-sighted mantis. The narrow lips drew apart in a momentary grin, gray-white and then crimson as the first rays of the sun touched the creature over the rim of the next hill.
For a moment the leer hung there. Deehalter, on his back, stared at it like a rabbit spitted by the gaze of a hunting serpent. Then the thing was gone and the fear was gone, and Deehalter's practiced fingers slid a live round into the chamber of the ought-six.
"Wh-what's the matter, Dee?" Kernes whimpered. He was pitiful in his nakedness, more pitiful in his stunned surprise at where he found himself. Kernes really hadn't known what was happening, Deehalter realized. Perhaps Alice had begun to guess where her husband had been going in the night. That may have been why she had been so quick to run, before suspicion could become certainty.
"Dee, why're you looking at me like that?" Kernes begged.
Deehalter stood. His ankle only throbbed. If his first bullet had killed the creature as it should have, he would have buried the body and claimed that something had dragged Kernes away. Perhaps he would have buried it here in the mound from which the creature had escaped to begin with. Alice and Dr. Jepson could testify to the cattle's previous injuries, whatever they might surmise had caused them.
The same story would be sufficient now.
"Goodbye, you son of a bitch," Deehalter said, and he raised his rifle. He fired point blank into the smaller man's chest.
Kerneswhuffed backwards as if a giant had kicked him. There was a look of amazement on his face and nothing more; but momentarily, something hung in the air between the dead man and the living, something as impalpable as the muzzle blast that rocked the hillside-and as real.
Deehalter's fleshgave and for a startled second he/it knew why the Indians had buried their possessed brother alive, to trap the contagion with him in the rock instead of merely passing it on to raven and slay again…
Then the sun was bright on Deehalter's back, casting his shadow across the body of the man he had murdered. He recalled nothing of the moment just past.
Except that when he remembered the creature's last red leer, he seemed to be seeing the image in a mirror.
A Land Of Romance
L. Sprague de Camp had greater influence on me as an SF reader and writer than anyone else. After World War II, a number of fans became publishers, joining August Derleth of Arkham House in reprinting works from Golden Age and earlier pulps. The Clinton (Iowa) Public Library in 1957 had a large collection of these books. (The entrance of major publishers, particularly Doubleday, into the SF market in the early '50s crushed the niche companies with the exception of Arkham House itself.)
Two of the small presses, Fantasy Press and Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc, collected a good deal of Sprague's fiction from Astounding and Unknown (Worlds). Either his rigor, intelligence, and focus on plot formed my opinion of what SF and fantasy should be, or they perfectly matched the model lurking somewhere in my childish subconscious.
In later years I got to know Sprague on terms of friendship, though we weren't as close as I was with Manly Wade Wellman, his contemporary and friend from the '30s and '40s. I encouraged Jim Baen to reprint the stories of Sprague's which I most liked. I did introductions for the volumes and stories in the style of Sprague's work as part of that encouragement.
Harry Turtledove, who like me was greatly influenced by Sprague, proposed a de Camp Festschrift to Baen Books. I happily wrote "A Land of Romance" for it, trying to create a story that Sprague might've written for Unknown.
I'll add two minor notes about the story itself. The full name of the former Secretary of Defense is Robert Strange McNamara, and the greatest buffalo meat entrepreneur in the country is Ted Turner (at the time I wrote the story, Mr. Jane Fonda). Both of those facts have bearing on the text.
The marketing bullpen at Strangeco Headquarters held seventy-five desks. Howard Jones was the only person in the huge room when the phone began ringing. He ignored the sound and went on with what he was doing. It was a wrong number-it had to be. Nobody'd be calling seriously on a Sunday morning.
Dynamic twenty-five-year-old executive… Howard sucked in his gut as he typed, not that there was much gut to worry about. Ready to take on adventurous new challenges…
The phone continued to ring. It could be the manager of one of the Middle Eastern outlets where they kept a Friday-Saturday weekend, with a problem that only a bold-aswashbuckling -marketing professional like Howard Jones could take on. Did Strangeco have a branch in the Casbah of Algiers?
The company slogan circled the ceiling in shimmering neon letters: It's not a sandwich-it's a Strangewich! Slices of kangaroo, cassowary, and elk in a secret dressing! Strangewich-the healthy alternative!
The phonestill rang. Howard's image staring from the resume on the screen had a stern look. Was he missing his big chance? The caller could be a headhunter who needed the hard-charging determination of a man willing to work all the hours on the clock.
Howard grabbed the phone and punched line one. "Strangeco Inc!" he said in what he hoped was a stalwart tone. "Howard Jones, Assistant Marketing Associate speaking. How may I help you?"
"Oh!" said the male voice on the other end of the line. "Oh, I'm very sorry, I didn't mean to disturb anybody important."
Sure, a wrong number. Well, Howard had known that there wouldn't really be a summons to a life of dizzying adventure when he "I'm at Mr. Strange's house," the voice continued, "and I was hoping somebody could come over to help me word an advertisement. I'm sorry to have-"
"Wait!" Howard said. He knew the call couldn't be what it sounded like, but it was sure the most interesting thing going this Sunday morning. Itsounded like the most interesting thing of a lifetime for Howard Albing Jones.
"Ah, sir," he continued, hoping that the fellow wasn't offended that Howard had bellowed at him a moment ago."You say you're calling from Mr. Strange's house. That would be, ah, which house?"
"Oh, dear, he probably does have a lot of them, doesn't he?" the voice said. "I mean the one right next door, though. Do you think that you could send somebody not too important over to help me, sir?"
Howard cleared his throat."Well, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't mind visiting the Strange Mansion myself. But, ah, Strangeco staff isn't ordinarily allowed across the skyway, you know."
"Oh, that's all right," the voice said in obvious relief. "Mr. Strange said I could call on any of his people for whatever I wished. But I really don't like to disturb you, Mr. Jones."
"Quite all right, Mister…" Howard said. "Ah, I'm afraid I didn't catch your name?"
"Oh, I'm Wally Popple," the voice said. "Just come over whenever you're ready to, Mr. Jones. I'll tell the guards to send you down."
He hung up. Howard replaced his handset and stared at the resume photograph. That Howard Jones looked very professional in blue suit, blue shirt, and a tie with an insouciant slash of red. Whereas today-Sunday-Assistant Marketing Associate Jones wore jeans and a Fuqua School of Business sweatshirt.
Howard rose to his feet. Daring, swashbuckling Howard Jones was going to risk entering the Strange Mansion in casual clothes.
A transparent tube arched between the third floors of the Strange Mansion and Strangeco Headquarters to connect the two sprawling buildings. When Strange occasionally called an executive to the mansion, the rest of the staff lined the windows to watch the chosen person shuffle through open air in fear of what waited on the other side.
Shortly thereafter, sometimes only minutes later, the summoned parties returned. A few of them moved at once to larger offices; most began to clean out their desks.
Only executives were known to use the skyway, though rumor had it that sometimes Robert Strange himself crossed over at midnight to pace the halls of his headquarters silently as a bat. Now it was Howard Jones who looked out over cornfields and woodland in one direction and the vast staff parking lot in the other.
The skyway was hot and musty. That made sense when Howard thought about it: a clear plastic tube was going to heat up in the bright sun, and the arch meant the hottest air would hang in the middle like the bubble in a level. Howard had never before considered physics when he daydreamed of receiving Robert Strange's summons.
The wrought-iron grill at the far end was delicate but still a real barrier, even without the two guards on the other side watching as Howard approached. They were alert, very big, and not in the least friendly.
Muscle-bound, Howard told himself. I could slice them into lunchmeat with my rapier!
He knew he was lying, and it didn't even make him feel better. Quite apart from big mennot necessarily being slow, this pair held shotguns.
"Good morning!" Howard said, trying for "brightly" and hitting "brittle" instead. "I have an urgent summons from Mr. Popple!"
Christ on a crutch! What if this was some kid's practical joke? Let's see if we can scam some sucker into busting into the Strange Mansion! Maybe they'll shoot him right where we can watch!
Howard glanced down, which probably wasn't the smartest thing to do now that he wasn't protected by the excitement of the thing. At least he didn't see kids with a cell phone and gleeful expressions peering up expectantly.
One of the guards said, "Who're you?" His tone would have been a little too grim for a judge passing a death sentence.
Howard's mind went blank. All he could think of was the accusing glare of his resume picture-but wait! Beside the picture was a name!
"Howard Albing Jones!" he said triumphantly.
"Nothing here about 'Albing,' " said the other guard.
The first guard shrugged. "Look, it's Sunday," he said to his partner. Fixing Howard with a glare that could've set rivets, he said, "We're letting you in, buddy. But as Howard Jones, that's all. That's how you sign the book."
"All right," said Howard. "I'm willing to be flexible."
One guard unlocked the grating; the other nodded Howard toward a folio bound in some unfamiliar form of leather, waiting open on a stand in the doorway. The last name above Howard's was that of a regional manager who'd been sobbing as he trudged into the parking lot for the last time.
The first guard pinned a blank metal badge on Howard's sweatshirt, right in the center of Fuqua. "Keep it on," he said. "See the yellow strip?"
He gestured with his shotgun, then returned the muzzle to point just under where the badge rested.
An amber track lighted up in the center of the hallway beyond. The glow was so faint that it illuminated only itself. Focusing his eyes on it meant that Howard didn't have to stare at the shotgun.
"Right," he said. "Right!"
"You follow it," said the guard. "It'll take you where you're supposed to go. And youdon't step off it, you understand?"
"Right," said Howard, afraid that he sounded brittle again."I certainly don't want you gentlemen coming after me."
The other guard laughed. "Oh, we wouldn't do that," he said. "Pete and me watch-" he nodded to the bank of TV monitors, blanked during Howard's presence "-but we ain't cleared to go wandering around the mansion. Believe me, buddy, we're not ready to die."
Howard walked down the hall with a fixed smile until the amber strip led him around a corner. He risked a glance backwards then and saw that the light was fading behind him. He supposed it'd reappear when it was time for him to leave.
He supposed so.
Howard hadn't had any idea of what the inside of the Strange Mansion would be like. There were a thousand rumors about the Wizard of Fast Food but almost no facts. Howard himself had envisioned cathedral-vaulted ceilings and swaying chandeliers from which a bold man could swing one-handed while the blade of his rapier parried the thrusts of a score of minions.
There might be chandeliers, stone ledges, and high balconies on the other side of the blank gray walls but that no longer seemed likely. The corridor surfaces were extruded from some dense plastic, and the doors fitted like airlocks with no external latches.
The amber strip led through branching corridors, occasionally going downward by ramps. The building sighed and murmured like a sleeping beast.
Howard tried to imagine the Thief of Baghdad dancing away from foes in this featureless warren, but he quickly gave it up as a bad job. It was like trying to imagine King Kong on the set of2001.
The strip of light stopped at a closed door. Howard eyed the blank panel, then tried knocking. It was like rapping his knuckles on a bank vault, soundless and rather painful.
"Hello?" he said diffidently. "Hello!"
The corridor stretched to right and left, empty and silent. The amber glow had melted into the surrounding gray, leaving only a vague memory of itself. What would Robin Hood have done?
"Hello!" Howard shouted. "Mister Popple!"
"Hello," said the pleasant voice of the girl who'd come up behind him.
Howard executed a leap and pirouette that would have done Robin-or for that matter, a Bolshoi prima ballerina-proud. "Wha?" he said.
The girl was of middle height with short black hair and a perky expression that implied her pale skin was hereditary rather than a look."I'm afraid Wally gets distracted," she said with a smile."Come around through my rooms and I'll let you in from the side. The laboratory started out as a garage, you know."
"Ah, I was told not to leave…" Howard said, tilting forward slightly without actually moving his feet from the point at which the guide strip had deposited him. After the guards' casual threats, he no longer believed that the worst thing that could happen to him in the Strange Mansion was that he'd lose his job.
"Oh, give me that," the girl said. She deftly unpinned the badge from Howard's sweatshirt and pressed her thumb in the middle of its blankness, then handed it back to him. "There, I've turned it off."
She walked toward the door she'd come out of, bringing Howard with her by her breezy nonchalance. He said, "Ah, you work here, miss?"
"Actually, the only people who work here are Wally and the cleaning crews," the girl said. "And my father, of course. I'm Genie Strange."
She led Howard into a room with low, Japanese-style furniture and translucent walls of pastel blue. It was like walking along the bottom of a shallow sea.
"Have you known Wally long?" Genie said, apparently unaware that she'd numbed Howard by telling him she was Robert Strange's daughter."He's such a sweetheart, don't you think? Of course, I don't get to meet many people. Robert says that's for my safety, but…"
"I've enjoyed my contact with Mr. Popple so far," Howard said. He didn't see any reason to amplify the truthful comment. Well, the more or less truthful comment.
Genie opened another door at the end of the short hallway at the back of the suite. "Wally?" she called. "I brought your visitor."
The laboratory buzzed like a meadow full of bees. The lighting was that of an ordinary office; Howard's eyes had adapted to the corridors' muted illumination, so he sneezed. If the room had been a garage, then it was intended for people who drove semis.
Black silk hangings concealed the walls. Though benches full of equipment filled much of the interior, the floor was incongruously covered in Turkish rugs-runners a meter wide and four meters long-except for a patch of bare concrete around a floor drain in an outside corner.
"Oh, my goodness, Mr. Jones!"said the wispy little man who'd been bent over a circuit board when they entered. He bustled toward them, raising his glasses to his forehead."I'd meant to leave the door open but I forgot completely. Oh, I Iphigenia, you must think I'm the greatest fool on Earth!"
"What I think is that you're the sweetest person I know, Wally," the girl said, patting his bald head. He blushed crimson. "But just a little absentminded, perhaps."
"Mr. Jones is going to help me advertise for a volunteer," Wally said to the girl. "I don't see how we can get anybody, and we reallymust have someone, you know."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones," Genie said, offering her hand with mock formality.
"Ah, Howard, please," Howard said. "Ah, I have a position with Strangeco. A very lowly one at present."
"That's what my father likes in employees," Genie said in a half-joking tone. "Lowliness. My stepfather, I should say. Mother buried two husbands, but Robert buried her."
Howard shook her hand, aware that he was learning things about the Wizard of Fast Food that the tabloids would pay good money for. Remembering the uneasiness he'd felt while walking through the mansion, he also realized that the money he'd get for invading Strange's privacy couldn't possibly be good enough.
An area twenty feet square in the center of the lab was empty of equipment. Across it, beyond Wally as Howard faced him, was what looked like an irregular, razor-thin sheet of glass on which bright images flickered. If that was really the flat-plate computer display it looked like, it was more advanced than anything Howard had heard of on the market.
"Well, Mr. Popple…" Howard said. If the conversation continued in the direction Genie was taking it, Howard would learn things he didn't think he'd be safe knowing. "If you could tell me just what you need from me?"
"Oh, please call me Wally," the little man said, taking Howard's hand and leading him toward the thin display. "You see, this piece of mica is a, well, a window you could call it."
Wally glanced over his shoulder, then averted his eyes with another bright blush. As he'd obviously hoped, Genie was following them.
"I noticed that shadows seemed to move in it," Wally said, peering intently at what indeed was a piece of mica rather than a high-tech construction. Hair-fine wires from a buss at the back touched the sheet's ragged circumference at perhaps a hundred places. "That was six years ago. By modulating the current to each sheet separately-it's not one crystal, you know, it's a series of sheets like a stack of paper and there's a dielectric between each pair-I was able to sharpen the images to, well, what you see now."
Howard eyed the display. A group of brightly dressed people walked through a formal garden. The women wore dresses whose long trains were held by page boys, and the men were in tights and tunics with puffed sleeves. They carried swords as well, long-bladed rapiers with jeweled hilts.
"How do you generate the images, Wally?"Howard said."This isn't fed from a broadcast signal, is it?"
"They aren't generated at all," Genie said. "They're real. Show Howard how you can move the point of view, Wally."
Obediently the little man stepped to the computer terminal on the bench beside the slab of mica. On the monitor was a graph with about thirty bars in each of two superimposed rows.
Wally touched keys, watching the mica. A bar shrank or increased at each stroke, and the picture shifted with the jerking clarity of a rotated kaleidoscope.
"Hey!" said Howard as what he thought was a lion turned and raised its feathered head. Its hooked beak opened and the long forked tongue vibrated in a cry which the mica didn't transmit. "That's a chimera!"
"I thought so at first," said Genie, "but they're supposed to be part goat too."
"I don't think it's anything that has a name in our world," Wally said, making further small adjustments. "Of course the people seem to be, well, normal."
"Not normal where I come from!" Howard said. Except maybe in his dreams. "And what do you mean aboutour world? Where's that?"
He pointed. The image tumbled into a scene of vividly dressed gallants fencing while a semicircle of women and other men watched. The duelists were good, damned good, and they didn't have buttons on their swords.
"Robert thinks it's fairyland," Genie said. Her tone was neutral, but Howard heard emotion just beneath the surface of the words. "He thinks Wally's a wizard. Robert also thinks he's a wizard himself."
"Your father has been very generous in supporting my researches, Iphigenia," the little man said, glancing toward but not quite at Genie. "I wish I could convince him that these effects are ordinary science-"
He paused and added self-consciously, "Ordinary physics, at any rate. I'm afraid my researches have been too empirical to qualify as proper science. But the underlying laws are physical, not magic."
The mica showed the dim interior of a great hall, the sort of place that Howard had imagined the Strange Mansion might be. A troupe of acrobats capered on the rush-strewn flagstones, executing remarkable jumps while juggling lighted torches.
Splendid men and gorgeous women watched from tables around the margins of the hall, and over the balcony railings peered children and soberly dressed servants. At the center of the high table was a grave, bearded man wearing a crown. He held a crystal staff in which violet sparks danced.
Beside the king, occasionally rubbing its scaly head on the back of his carved throne, was a dragon the size of a rhinoceros. It didn't look exactly unfriendly, but its eyes had the trick of constantly scanning in every direction.
"I…"said Howard. "Wally, this is wonderful, just completely amazing, but I don't understand what you want me for. You've already succeeded!"
The image shifted again. Instead of answering, Wally gazed with rapt attention at the new scene. A spring shot from a wooded hillside to splash over rocks into a pool twenty feet below. Butterflies hovered in the flowery glade; in the surrounding forest were vine-woven bowers.
"Wally built the window on his own," Genie said in a low voice."What Robert is interested in is opening a door into… that."
She nodded toward the mica. A couple, hand in hand, walked toward the pool. The man knelt, dipped a silver goblet into the limpid water, and offered it to the lovely woman at his side. She sipped, then returned the cup for him to drink in turn.
Wally shuddered as though he'd been dropped into the pool. He tapped his keyboard several times at random, blurring the image into a curtain of electronic snow.
He turned to Howard and said, speaking very quickly to focus his mind somewhere other than where it wanted to go, "Mr. Strange felt that if we could see the other place, we could enter it. A person could enter it. He's correct-I sent a rabbit through the portal last week-but I don't think anyone will be willing to go when they realize how dangerous it is. That's why I need you to help me write the advertisement for the volunteer, Mr. Jones."
This was going to work better if the little guy was relaxed… which probably wouldn't happen as long as Genie Strange was in the same room, that was obvious, but Howard at least had to try to calm him down.
"Howard, Wally," Howard said, patting Wally on the shoulder. "Please call me Howard. Now, what's dangerous about the trip? Do you wind up wearing a fly's head if things go wrong?"
"No, it wasn't that, Mister-ah, Howard," Wally said, pursing his lips. "The problem occurred later."
He adjusted the values on his display again, bringing the image of the royal entertainment back onto the mica. A young girl danced on the back of a horse which curveted slowly, its hooves striking occasional sparks from the flagstones. It was pretty ordinary-looking except for the straight horn in the center of its forehead.
Seeing that Wally wasn't going to say more, Howard raised an eyebrow to Genie. She shrugged and said, "I didn't see it myself-Robert won't let me in here while the tests are going on. But all that really happened is that the rabbit hopped out, perfectly all right, and a lizard ate it. The same thing could have happened anywhere."
"The lizard stared at the poor rabbit and drew it straight into its jaws, step by step," Wally said without looking at the others."It knew it was doomed but it went anyway. I've never in my life seen anything so horrible."
Then you don't watch the TV news a lot, Howard thought. Aloud he said, "It was a basilisk, you mean? Not just a lizard?"
"It was a lizard," Wally insisted stubbornly."But it wasn't a lizard from, well, this world. It was horrible, and there are any number of other horrible things over there. It's really too dangerous to send somebody into that world, but that's the only way we can get… things."
"Well, an assault rifle ought to take care of any basilisks that come by," Howard said reasonably. "Or dragons either, which is more to the point. Basilisks aren't supposed to be big enough to eat people."
He sighed."I hate to say this, Wally, but science always seems to win out over romance. Ireally hate to say it."
"But that's just what I mean, Howard," Wally said despairingly."I had a leash on the bunny so I could pull it back, but it didn't pass through the portal. The leash was still lying on the floor when the bunny disappeared. The volunteer won't be able to take a gun or even clothes, and I really don't believe he'll be able to bring the scepter back for Mr. Strange."
"Robert thinks that purple scepter gives the fairy king his power," Genie said, her hands clasped behind her back as if to underscore the restraint in her voice. "Robert wants someone to go through Wally's portal and steal the scepter."
With absolutely no feeling she added, "Robert sacrificed a black hen the night Wally sent the rabbit through. He did it over the drain there-"
She nodded toward the bare concrete.
"-but you can still smell the blood caught in the pipe. Can't you?"
"Now, Iphigenia," Wally said, blushing again. "Your father has his ways, but he's been very generous with me."
Howard's nose wrinkled. He'd noticed a faint musty odor, but the room was so ripe with the smells of electronics working-ozone, hot insulation, and flux-that he hadn't given any thought to it. He still wasn't sure that what he smelled was rotting blood rather than mildew or wet wool, but now that Genie'd spoken he wouldn't be able to get the other notion out of his mind.
"Wally, you're a genius!" the girl said so forcefully as to sound hostile. "You could go anywhere and find somebody to fund your work! I only wish you had."
Wally turned and looked her in the face for the first time. "Thank you for saying that, Iphigenia," he said, "but it isn't true. I went many places after I first saw what the mica could do, and they all sent me away. Your father thinks I'm a magician and he's wrong; but he doesn't call me crazy or a charlatan."
A door-the door that the light had led Howard to-opened. Robert Strange, identifiable from the rare photos that appeared in news features but much craggier andharsher in person, stepped through. He wore a long-sleeved black robe embroidered with symbols Howard didn't recognize, and through the sash at his waist he'd thrust a curved dagger of Arab style. Hilt and scabbard both were silver but decorated with runes filled with black niello.
"Who are you?" Strange demanded, his eyes fixed on Howard. His voice was like scales scraping on stone, and his black pupils had a reptilian glitter.
The news photographs hadn't shown the long scar down Strange's left cheekbone. There were many ways he could've been cut, but only one reason Howard could imagine that a man with Strange's money wouldn't have had the scar removed by plastic surgery: pride. It was a schlaeger scar, a vestige of the stylized duels with heavy sabers that still went on secretly at the old German universities. The purpose of a schlaeger bout wasn't to defeat one's foe but rather to get the scar as proof of courage and disregard for the laws which banned the practice.
Mind you, Howard was pretty sure that Strange's opponent had left his share of blood on the hall's floor as well.
"He's a-" said Genie before either Howard or Wally could speak.
"Iphigenia, go to your quarters at once," Strange said in the same rustling tone as before. He didn't speak loudly, but his voice cut through the buzz of electronics as surely as a mower would the flowery meadow that Howard thought of when entering the room. "You disturb Master Popple. I've warned you about this."
"But there's nobody else totalk to!"Genie said. Though she complained, she walked quickly toward the door of her suite.
Strange returned his attention to Howard. "I said," he repeated, "who are you?"
"Mr. Strange, I asked M-that is, Howard to help me-" Wally said.
"I'm the volunteer you requested for your experiment, sir," Howard said without the least suggestion of a quaver in his voice. "Wally here-Mr. Popple-noted that the agent won't be able to carry a gun into the other realm, so my skill with a rapier is crucial."
"You know how to use a sword?" Strange snapped.
"Yes, sir," Howard said, standing very straight and keeping his eyes on the tycoon's, hoping that would make him look open and honest. Even though Howard was telling the truth about the fencing, Strange's whole tone and manner made it seem that everything he was being told was a lie.
Besides considering that Strange might have him shot as a spy, there was the possibility that the Wizard of Fast Food would demand Howard duel him to prove his skill. Beating Strange would be dangerous-rich men were self-willed and explosive if they didn't get what they wanted. Losing to Strange might be even worse, especially since Howard didn't imagine he'd have buttons on his swords any more than the folk on the other side of the mica window did.
"Since I'm an employee of Strangeco," Howard continued, visualizing the Thief of Baghdad dancing over palace walls while monsters snarled beneath, "my devotion to you is already assured."
"You work for me?" Strange said. Then, as if he could remember each of the thirty thousand Strangeco employees worldwide, he said, "What's your name?"
The door swungalmost shut behind Genie. "Howard Albing Jones, sir," Howard said.
"Assistant Marketing Associate in the home office," Strange said. My God, maybe he did know all thirty thousand! "Devoted, are you? Pull the other leg, boy! But that doesn't matter if you've got the guts for the job."
"Yes, sir, I do," Howard said. He cleared his throat and went on, "I think I could honestly say I've been training all my life for this opportunity."
"You practice the Art also, Jones?" Strange demanded, the hectoring doubt back in his voice. "The Black Arts, I mean. That's what they call it, the pigmies who adepts like me crush under our heels!"
"Ah, I can't claim to be an adept, sir," Howard said. He couldn'thonestly claim to be anything but a guy who occasionally watched horror movies. As far as that went, he knew more about being a vampire than being a magician.
"No?" said Strange. "Well, I am, Jones. That's how I built Strangeco from a corner hot dog stand into what it is now. And by His Infernal Majesty! that's how I'll rule the world when I have the staff of power for myself. Nothing will stop me, Jones. Nothing!"
"Mr. Strange, I'm your man!" Howard said. He spoke enthusiastically despite his concern that Strange might reply something along the lines of, "Fine, I'll take your kidneys now to feed my pet ferrets."
"If you serve me well, you won't regret it," Strange said. Unspoken but much louder in Howard's mind was the corollary: But if you fail, I won't leave enough of you to bury!
"Master Popple, can you be ready to proceed in two hours?" Strange asked. When he talked to Wally, there was a respect in his tone that certainly hadn't been present when he spoke to Howard or Genie.
"Well, I suppose…"Wally said. He frowned in concentration, then shrugged and said, "I don't see why not, if Howard is willing. I suppose we could start right now, Mr. Strange."
"It'll take me the two hours to make my own preparations," Strange said with a curt shake of his head. "I respect your art, Master Popple, but I won't depend on it alone."
As he strode toward the door, Strange added without turning his head, "I'll have a black ewe sent over. And if that's not enough-we'll see!"
"Now hold your arms out from your shoulders, please, Howard," Wally said as he changed values on his display. Howard obeyed the way he would if a barber told him to tilt his head.
Waiting as the little man made adjustments gave Howard enough time to look over the room. Much of the racked equipment meant nothing to him, but his eyes kept coming back to a black cabinet that looked like a refrigerator-sized tube mating with a round sofa.
"Wally?" he said, his arms still out. "What's that in the northeast corner? Is it an air conditioner?"
"Oh, that's the computer that does the modulations," Wally said. "You can put your arms down now if you like. I used a Sun workstation to control the window, but the portal requires greatly more capacity. I'd thought we'd just couple a network of calculation servers to the workstation, but Mr. Strange provided a Cray instead to simplify the setup for the corrections."
"Oh," said Howard, wondering what a supercomputer cost. Pocket change to the Wizard of Fast Food, he supposed.
"Now if you'll turn counterclockwise, please…" Wally said. "About fifteen degrees."
Howard wore a cotton caftan that came from Genie's suite. She'd brought it in when Howard protested at standing buck naked in the middle of the floor with security cameras watching. Howard was willing to accept that the clothes wouldn't go through the portal with him, but waiting while Pete and his partner chuckled about his masculine endowments was a different matter.
Not that there was anything wrong with his masculine endowments.
Genie didn't stay, but Howard knew she was keeping abreast of what went on through the part-open door. He wasn't sure whether he was glad of that or not.
The mica window looked onto the glade where Howard would enter the other world if everything went right. Occasionally a small animal appeared briefly-once Howard saw what looked very much like a pink bass swimming through the air-but Wally had chosen the site because it was isolated. There was only so much you could get from leaves quivering, even if they did seem to be solid gold.
The carpets, layered like roof shingles over the concrete, weren't the neutrally exotic designs you normally saw on Oriental rugs. Some of these had stylized camels and birds, sure; but one had tanks, jets, and bright explosions, while peacock-winged devils capered as they tortured people against the black background of the newer-looking rugs.
Around where Howard stood was a six-pointed star drawn in lime like the markings of a football field. Howard would've expected a pentacle, but he didn't doubt Strange knew what he was doing.
All Howard himself was sure of was that he was taking a chance at adventure when it appeared. If that was a bad idea, then he hoped he wouldn't have long to regret his decision.
It might be a very bad idea.
"There," said Wally. "There's nothing more I can do until we actually begin building the charge. Then I may have to-"
Robert Strange entered through a pedestrian door set in one of the six vehicle doors along the outside wall. The black sheep he led looked puzzled, a feeling which Howard himself echoed.
"You're ready, Master Popple?" he asked.
"Ey-eh-he-e," said the sheep. Strange jerked the leash viciously. The cord looked like silver, but it was functional enough to choke the sheep to silence when Strange lifted his arm.
"Yes, Mr. Strange," Wally said. "I'm a little worried about Howard's mass, though. Eighty-seven kilos may be too much."
"Too much?" snapped Strange. "If you needed more transformers, you should have said so!"
"Too much for the fabric of the universe, Mr. Strange," said Wally, as mild as ever but completely undaunted at the anger of a man who scared the living crap out of Howard Jones. "I really don't want to go to more than thirty kilowatts."
Strange sniffed. "The subject's ready?" he said. "You, Jones; you're ready?"
"Ey-eh-he?" the sheep repeated, rolling its eyes. Her eyes, Howard assumed, since Strange said he was fetching a ewe. The tycoon's dagger hilt winked in the bright laboratory lighting.
"Yes, sir!" Howard said.
Strange grimaced, then bent and tied the leash around a ring set in the drain. He turned his head to Howard and said, "You know what you're going to do?"
"Sir, I'm going to enter the other land," Howard said. "I'll take the scepter from the king of that land and return here to you with it."
As a statement of intent it was concise and accurate. As a plan of action it lacked detail, but there wasn't enough information on this side of the portal to form a real plan. Howard was uneasily aware that his foray, even if he wound up in a dragon's gullet, would provide information so that the next agent could do better.
"All right," Strange said. "Give me a moment and then proceed."
There were drapes bunched among the wall hangings. As Strange spoke, he drew them along a track in the ceiling to separate his corner of the room from Howard and Wally. The ewe bleated again.
"You may begin, Master Popple," Strange called, his voice muffled by the thick fabric. He broke into a musical chant. The sounds from his throat weren't words, or at least words in English.
"You're ready, Howard?" Wally said.
Howard nodded. His throat was dry and he didn't want to embarrass himself by having his voice crack in the middle of a simple word like, "Yes."
Wally rotated a switch, cutting the ceiling lights to red beads among the dimming ghosts of the fluorescent fixtures. The sheet of mica, bright with the daylight of another world, shone like a lantern beside the little man as he typed commands.
There was a reptilian viciousness to Strange's voice, and the sheep was managing to whimper like a frightened baby. The hair on Howard's arms and the back of his neck began to rise. For a moment he thought that was his reaction to the sounds coming from beyond the drapes, but as the fluorescents cooled to absolute black Howard saw a faint violet aura clinging to three racks of equipment.
Wally was generating very high frequency current at a considerable voltage. Howard decided he didn't want to think abouthow high the voltage was.
Wally muttered as he worked. Though Howard could see his lips move, the words weren't audible over the hum of five transformers along the outside wall. The opening between Genie's door and the jamb was faintly visible.
The air spluttered. Howard felt a directionless pull, unpleasant without being really painful. Violet light flickered through the mica, a momentary pulse from the world across the barrier.
Strange shouted a final word. The sheep bleated on a rising note ending in so awful a gurgle that Howard pressed his hands to his ears before he remembered that moving might affect Wally's calculations. The ewe's hooves rattled on the concrete; the curtain billowed as the animal thrashed.
Howard would've covered his ears even if he had thought about Wally. The sound washorrible.
Wally typed, his eyes on the computer display. He'd sucked his lower lip between his teeth to chew as he concentrated. The transformers hummed louder but didn't change tone.
Howard felt the indescribable pull again. In the other world the violet haze formed again, this time in the shape of a human being.
A blue flash and aBANG! like a cannon shot engulfed the lab, stunning Howard into a wordless shout. He clapped his hands, a reflex to prove that he was still alive.
The air stank of burning tar. Dirty red flames licked from one of the transformers on the outside wall. Howard drew in a deep breath of relief. He immediately regretted it when acrid smoke brought on a fit of coughing.
Strange snatched open the curtains, his face a mask of cold fury. The ewe lay over the drain, her legs splayed like those of a squashed insect. Her eyes still had a puzzled look, but they were already beginning to glaze.
Wally changed values at his keyboard with a resigned expression. Howard looked for a fire extinguisher. He didn't see one, but he walked past Wally and turned the main lights back on. The transformer was smoldering itself out, though an occasional sizzle made Howard thankful that the floor was covered with non-conductive wool.
"What went wrong?" Strange said. "I know that the transformer failed; why did it fail?"
"The load was too great," Wally said simply. "We very nearly succeeded. If we replace the transformer-"
"We'll double the capacity," Strange said. "We'll make another attempt tonight, at midnight this time. I never thought you were careful enough with your timing, Master Popple."
"Sir, I don't think it would be safe to increase output beyond-" Wally said.
"We'll double it!" Strange said, his tone a rasp like steel grating on rib bones. "If we don't need the extra wattage, then we won't use it, but we'll use as much as it requires!"
He looked disgustedly at the dagger in his hand, then wiped the blade on the curtain and sheathed the weapon. He strode past Howard and Wally to the hall door; Howard watched him with a fixed smile, uncomfortably aware that instinct tensed him to run in case Strange leaped for his throat.
The Thief of Baghdad might've had a better idea. On the other hand, Howard didn't remember the Thief of Baghdad facing anything quite like Robert Strange.
Strange thumped the hall door closed; it was too heavy to bang. At the sound, Genie's door opened a little wider and the slim girl returned. She grimaced when she saw the ewe. It'd voided its bowels when it died, so that odor mingled with the fresh blood and burned insulation.
"Are you all right, Wally?" she asked. "And you, Howard. I'm not used to there being anybody but Wally here."
"I'm sorry you had to see that, Iphigenia," Wally said with a perturbed glance toward the ewe. "You really shouldn't have come in until the crew has cleaned things up."
"Wally, I've lived with Robert for fifteen years," Genie said bluntly."There've been worse things than the occasional dead animal. I was worried about you and Howard."
"It just tickled a little," Howard said. If he let himself think about events in the right way, he was pretty sure he could make the last ten minutes or so sound more heroic than they'd seemed while they were happening.
"There wasn't any risk, Iphigenia," Wally said. At first he didn't look directly at her, but then he raised his eyes with an effort of will. "Ah-I really appreciate your concern, but right now I have something important to discuss with Mr.-with Howard, that is. Can you, I mean would you…?"
"All right, Wally," the girl said, sounding puzzled and a little hurt. She nodded to Howard and walked to her room with swift, clean strides. This time the door shut firmly.
One of the vehicular doors in the outside wall started up with a rumble of heavy gears. A team of swarthy men, beardless but heavily mustached, stood beside a flatbed truck. They entered, paying no attention to Howard and Wally. One lifted the sheep over his shoulder and walked back to the truck with it; his three fellows started disconnecting the wrecked transformer. They talked among themselves in guttural singsongs.
"Will you come here please, Howard?"Wally said, showing no more interest in the workmen than they did in him. He adjusted the mica screen to show the spring again. "I, ah, have a favor to ask you."
A couple-not the same ones as before-sat on the pool's mossy coping, interlacing the fingers of one hand as they passed a cup back and forth with the other. Wally tightened the focus so that their mutually loving expressions were unmistakable.
"Yes, Wally?" Howard prodded.
"The water of this spring appears to have certain properties," Wally said. He looked fixedly at Howard to avoid watching the couple who'd begun to fondle one another. The statuesque blonde lay back on the sward and tugged her partner over her without bothering to walk to the privacy of the nearby bowers. "You'll have noticed that."
"I sure notice something," Howard said. He wasn't sure how he felt about the show: it was real people, not actors. Well, actors were real people too but they knew they were going to be watched.
The workmen hoisted the transformer by hand instead of bringing in a derrick for the job. It must weigh close to half a ton. They walked out and slid it onto the truck bed, forcing a squeal from the springs.
Wally grimaced and blurred the image to bright sparkles within the mica sheet."If I succeed in opening the portal to the other world, Howard," he said, "you'll have a very difficult job to gain the king's scepter. I don't believe in magic, not here or there either one, but the animal guarding the king appears formidable."
"The dragon," Howard said. "Yeah, it does."
If Howard let himself consider the details of how he was going to get the scepter, it'd scare the spit out of him. By limiting his thoughts to vague swoops across the hall on a handy rope, followed by a mighty leap from a balcony-level window, he was managing to keep his aplomb.
"And of course we're not sure it'll be possible to bring inanimate objects through the portal in this direction, since we can't do it while going the other way," Wally continued with a solemn nod. He started to refocus on the spring, then snatched his hand back from the keyboard with a blush.
"I understand all the difficulties and dangers you'll face, Howard," Wally said. He stared in the direction of Genie's closed door; he looked as if he was about to cry. "Regardless, I'd like you to do me a favor if you can. I'd like you to bring me a phial of water from the spring we just looked at. I… I'd be very grateful."
You poor little guy! Howard thought. Aloud he said, "Ah, Wally? I'll do what I can-"
Which might not be a heck of a lot. If Howard arrived, he'd be bare-assed naked and in the middle of a bunch of guys with swords they knew how to use. Not to mention the occasional dragon.
"-but you know, it isn't that hard to, ah, meet girls."He paused to choose the next words carefully."Lots of times just being around one for a while is enough to, you know, bring the two of you together. If you play your cards right."
The truck drove off with a snort of diesel exhaust as the garage door began to rumble down. The corpses of the sheep and transformer lay together in the bed of the vehicle.
"I've never played cards at all, Howard," the little man said with a sad smile."I guess this is hard for a handsome young man like you to understand, but…"
He turned his head away and wiped his eyes fiercely.
"Hey, that's all right, Wally," Howard said, patting him on the back."Sure, I'll take care of that if there's, you know, any way to do it. No problem."
Compared to the rest of the assignment, that was the gospel truth.
"Thank you, Howard," Wally said through a racking snuffle. "I'm, well, I'm lucky to have met a real hero like you in my time of need."
Only faintly audible through the heavy doors, another big truck was pulling up outside. A relay clicked and the machinery began to rumble again.
"I feel sure we're going to succeed," Wally added. "If we have to double the field strength, well, that's just what we're going to do. No matter what!"
Wally sounded a lot more cheerful when he made that promise than Howard was to hear it.
With the six new transformers in place, the line almost filled the outside wall. On that side only the curtained-off corner-they were already drawn-didn't have machinery squatting on it. Howard could still smell burned insulation. He'd never thought he'd be thankful for a stink like that, but it covered other possible reminders of the afternoon's experiment.
Wally looked at Howard and tried to force a grin. His expression would've been more appropriate for somebody being raped by a Christmas tree.
"Hey, buck up, buddy," Howard said. "We're going to be fine!"
Funny, but telling the lie made Howard feel that the words might possibly be true. Logically he knew a lot better.
The door hidden behind the curtain opened. Howard heard aclink over the hum of machinery as something hard brushed against the raised lintel. He wondered what animal Strange was bringing in to sacrifice this time. Howard had expected a heifer or maybe an elephant, but Strange would've had to raise the vehicular door to bring in animals that big.
Strange stuck his head out between two curtain panels. "Are you ready to proceed, Master Popple?" he asked. He held the curtains together so that all Howard could see was the throat of his garments. He seemed to be wearing the same silver-marked black satin as in the afternoon.
"I believe-"Wally said. He caught Howard's terse nod and continued, "Yes, we're ready, Mr. Strange. It'll take ninety seconds from whenever we start to build the field."
"Start now, then," Strange said curtly. He drew the curtains tight behind him and began to chant. His words had considerable musical power despite being complete gibberish. That was also true of opera, of course, so far as Howard was concerned.
Wally tried to smile again, then busied himself with his keyboard. The mica window looked onto the glade, empty save for trees and the flitting passage of a bird whose plumage was as purely blue as the summer sky. Howard watched the scientist, and he watched images on the mica; but more compelling than those, he listened through the curtains at his back to the sound of Robert Strange's voice chanting.
Howard felt the hairs lift from his body. Where those of his chest touched the loose caftan they tickled like the feeling at the back of a dry throat that you can't seem to swallow away. Violet haze blurred the air beyond the mica.
Genie Strange screamed.
Howard turned. The door to Genie's room was closed-closed and latched. The drapes around Strange and his activities bulged outward.
Genie hopped through and fell, dragging a section of the velvet down. The scarf used to gag her had slipped out of her mouth; it was the only garment she was wearing. Her wrists and ankles were tied together behind her back, but she'd managed to undo the cord that'd bound her to the drain.
Robert Strange, his face as hard and contorted as that of a marble demon, stepped out behind her. He grabbed a handful of Genie's black hair with his free hand.
"Hey!" Howard said. There was a bank of equipment between him and the Stranges. As gracefully as if he'd been practicing all his life, Howard took two running steps, planted his right palm on the rack, and leaped over with his legs swung off to his left side. Even the Thief of Baghdad would be impressed Until the caftan's billowing hem caught the chassis full of plug-in circuits on top of the rack. As Howard's legs straightened, the tightening cloth spilled him like a lassoed steer. Strange looked at him without expression.
Howard sprang up. The torn caftan, bunched now around his ankles, tripped him again.
Strange lifted Genie's head, avoiding her attempts to bite him. He poised the curved dagger in his right hand over her throat. Howard grabbed the sides of the rug on which he'd fallen and jerked with all his strength, snatching Strange's feet out from under him.
"You…!" shouted Strange as he toppled backward. Genie'd tossed her short hair free of his grip, but he didn't lose the dagger in his other hand. It was underneath when the Wizard of Fast Food hit the concrete.
The chassis that Howard'd dragged to the floor with him was popping and spluttering, but he wasn't prepared for the flash of violet light that filled the interior of the lab. It was so intense that Howard only vaguely noticed the accompanying thunderclap. He heard Wally cry out and turned.
Wally wasn't there. His clothing, from brown shoes to the pair of reading glasses he wore tilted up on his forehead, lay in the middle of the hexagram. The hundred and twenty-three pounds of Wally Popple had vanished.
Except for an image in the mica window.
Howard lifted Genie before he remembered that her stepfather and the dagger might be of more immediate concern. He looked back.
He'd been right the first time. Strange's face was turned toward Howard. He looked absolutely furious. He'd managed to thrash into a prone position while dying, but the silver hilt projecting from the middle of his back showed that dying was certainly what he'd done.
The transformer on the far left of the line shorted out. The one next to it went a heartbeat later, and when the third failed it showered the room with blobs of flaming tar. One of them slapped the mica window, and shattered it like a bomb.
"Can you please untie me, Howard?" asked the girl in his arms. "Though the way things are starting to happen in here, maybe that could wait till we're outside."
"Right!" said Howard. "Right!"
He paused to shrug off what was left of the caftan; it had started to burn as well. Somehow he couldn't get concerned about what the guards thought of him now.
Because he and Genie were going to be gone for at least three weeks and a fourth besides if the Chinese authorities agreed to open Tibet to Strangeco- which they would; Howard Jones wasn't called the Swashbuckler of Fast Food for nothing-Howard stopped by the mansion's former garage for a moment. He liked to, well, keep an eye on how things were going.
He'd had the big room cleaned and nearly Emptied immediately after the wedding, but he still smelled the bitterness of burned insulation. He supposed it was mostly in his mind by now.
Genie'd wanted to tear the garage down completely since it held nothing but bad memories for her, but she'd agreed to let Howard keep the room so long as he'd had the door into her old suite welded shut. She wasn't the sort of girl to object to the whim of the man who'd saved her life; besides, she loved her husband.
Howard went to the skeletal apparatus on the one rack remaining in the room. Three hair-fine filaments were still attached to the top edge of a piece of mica no bigger than a quarter.
Howard bent to peer into it. If you looked carefully at the right times, you could see images in the mica.
The focus wandered. Howard hadn't tried to adjust the apparatus himself or let anybody else take a look at it. Mostly all there was to see was snow, but this time he was in luck.
The peephole looked out at the spring where couples used to cavort. Wally was there with his entourage, checking the generating turbine he'd built to power the first electric lights in his new home. If Howard understood the preparations he'd seen going on in the royal palace last week, telephones were about to follow.
When Wally turned with a satisfied expression, Howard waved. He knew the little fellow couldn't see him, but it made Howard feel he was sort of keeping in touch. Wally walked out of the image area surrounded by courtiers.
Howard checked his watch and sighed; he needed to get moving. He'd promised the company fencing team that he and Genie would at least drop in on their match with Princeton. After Howard instituted morning unity-building fencing exercises throughout Strangeco, a number of the employees had become fencing enthusiasts.
Howard took a last look at the pool in the other world. He'd never seen Wally take a sip of the water, and it didn't seem likely that he ever would.
After all, a powerful wizard like Master Popple had to beat off beautiful women with a stick.
Smokie Joe
I've recently begun writing big-budget fantasy novels. The first question interviewers ask me is almost invariably, "Why did you switch from military SF to fantasy?"
The truth-as this volume proves-is that I started out writing fantasy. After I got back from Southeast Asia in 1971 I had first-hand knowledge of war and the military. I used that background in science fiction stories which eventually (and I mean eventually) got me a name for writing military SF; but I love fantasy, and I've never stopped writing it.
A British writer and editor, Michel Parry, edited a number of interesting original (or partly original) horror and fantasy anthologies in the 1970s. These didn't pay a lot-I believe everything I sold Michel was at a penny a word-but they were sales (and to real publishers like Mayflower and Star) at a time when there were very few outlets in the US for fantasy. (More places in the US would buy SF. For the most part I got rejections from them, but there were at least magazines to which I could send my stories.)
One of Michel's odder endeavors was to edit Devil's Kisses and More Devil's Kisses, anthologies of erotic horror stories, under the name Linda Lovecraft-the trademark of a chain of British sex shops. My understanding is that Linda Lovecraft, like Juan Valdez, was the figment of a marketing weasel's imagination; I recall Michel saying that he'd wondered if he was going to have to appear in court in drag and a blond wig after the raid.
We'll get to the raid later.
Michel asked me to submit to the second volume; I wrote "Smokie Joe." (The idiosyncratic spelling "smokie" seemed right for the character. I don't know why.) There's sex in it, but I don't want to meet the person who gets an erotic thrill from this one.
"Smokie Joe" is a deal-with-the-Devil story (set in Joliet, Illinois, though the setting isn't crucial to the plot). My problem with most of the genre is that the Devil doesn't come through as really evil. My Devil is evil; and I don't trivialize evil, especially since I came back from Viet Nam.
Michel sent me a copy of More Devil's Kisses hot off the presses. That was a good thing, because no sooner had the book hit the newsstands than the police impounded all copies on an obscenity complaint and briefly locked up the in-house editor. The charges were dropped when the publisher (Corgi) pulped the whole edition.
Because the matter didn't go to trial, there's no certainty as to which precise matters were the subject of the complaint. The best bet is that the Chris Miller piece had caused the problem, but that was a reprint from a magazine which had been sold in Britain without objection. The only other evidence is that when the book was brought out in Germany, two stories were dropped; Miller's and "Smokie Joe."
I've not only been banned in Britain, I've been banned in Germany too.
It was Saturday night but Tom Mullens' numbers parlor was as still as the morgue Big Tom expected to grace the next day. He was sweating. He pretended not to, thinking that it would be read as fear by the three sets of eyes trained on him across the counting table; but the drops runneled out of his still-dark curls and down his beefy face. He had always bragged that his two knobbly fists made him a match for any cheap gunman. Tullio's boys didn't work cheap, and Big Tom's throat had clogged with the old boast when he saw the cratered offal their Uzis had left of seven of his runners.
Lod Mahoney couldn't have cared less about Mullens' sweat: his eyes were blind and staring with his own fear. Lod was a paunchy, balding fifty-five, the armpits and long sleeves of his white shirt moist but his bow tie still a neat dark band of respectability. He had stayed this final, terrible week with Big Tom not out of loyalty but because he was only the bookkeeper he appeared to be. Criminal in his associations, not his instincts, Lod did not know how to run.
If Big Tom looked a boar at bay, his son Danny had the sulky nervousness of a well-whipped dog. His eyes darted back and forth among the others in the room, excited to be where he had never before been allowed, but pettish to know that it was only because his father did not trust him loose. Danny's adolescent face was an armature for the conflicting emotions his mind threw on it. On Monday gunshots had called him to a window. Memory of what he had seen in the street now dolloped occasional terror onto his expression.
Across from Big Tom, his hands delicate but almost as dark as the scarred maple on which they lay, smiled Smokie Joe. His goatee bobbled in a humor that no one with him in the room could see. "I can find a couple hard boys," he said in a honey-golden voice, "who can get you out of this yet, Big Tom."
"What?" Mullens snarled, clenching a fist to wipe away the smirk he was sure underlay the words. But Smokie Joe's calm belied a joke. The black eyes were placid, the perfect features composed beneath the slick black hair."Iceman," Big Tom muttered, but aloud he demanded, "All right, what's the hitch? What does anybody out of a funny farm want to get mixed up with me now?"
"Oh, well," his slim lieutenant said with the same suave ease that had taken him to the top of Mullens' organization in the brief months since he had appeared. He spread his palms upward. "They'll want a piece of the action, sure. Half of anything they generate after things get straightened around."
"That's nothing!" Big Tom said, astounded.
"Tom, they'll be Syndicate-" blurted Mahoney, a new fear stamping itself across his face.
"Do you think I care?" Mullens shouted. He stood, his eyes flicking to the blinds drawn across windows in which bullet-proof Lexan had replaced the glass. He rolled his arms as if lifting a huge weight to his chest. "I won't look at where help comes from now if it'll take out Tullio," he said. "My grandmother always said she was a witch, you know? When I saw this coming six months ago I opened her spell-book and prayed to the Devil he should help me. And I meant it, by God."
"Thought it was that simple?" smiled Smokie Joe as he, too, rose to his feet. "One thing, though," he added, leaning forward a little so that his knuckles rested on the table."You've got a choice, Big Tom. But after you choose, there's no going back… Do you understand?"
"I won't go back on my word," Mullens said. He took a deep breath because Smokie Joe seemed to have grown, to bulk huge in the artificial light. "I swear on my mother's grave."
"On your soul, Tom Mullens," demanded the honeyed voice.
"I swear on my soul."
"What the Hell do you think-" Danny Mullens began, but Smokie Joe's contempt froze him at his father's side.
"Hold your tongue when men talk, boy," Joe sneered. Then, to the entrance-way door that should have been guarded by slack-faced Rudy Luscher, he called, "Come on in, boys."
The door opened. Both the figures standing there were tall and dressed with the greasy casualness of back-yard mechanics. One was thin and pale, the other a squat giant whose stumpy legs gave him the build of a dwarf twice magnified. "Nick, Angelo; meet Big Tom Mullens, your new employer," said Joe, his hand indicating the newcomers with the grace of an emcee bringing on the star turn.
"Where the fuck is Rudy?" Big Tom asked. "Drunk, asleep…" the giant shrugged.
"If yourpeoplewereanygood, youwouldn'tneedus."Hisvoicewasincongruously as sweet as a chapel bell. "You want us to take out Tullio, Mr. Mullens?"
"Goddamned right," Mullens agreed with an angry nod. "Any way you can."
"And we're part of your organization afterwards," the corpse-pale newcomer added. Neither of them had any expression in their eyes."We get half of anything we bring in, and you give us a free hand."
"I already said so!"Big Tom blazed."Now, do you stand here all night waiting for Tullio to set up one last hit?"
Smokie Joe broke in with a laugh that chilled the room."Oh, don't worry about Tullio. Not after tomorrow morning."He was still laughing when Nick and Angelo turned and left the room. They closed the door very gently behind them.
The black Cadillac got a final dab before Tullio's chauffeur folded the chamois and stepped back. Every Sunday morning he parked squarely in front of St Irenaeus to let out two bodyguards and his employer: Tullio had not missed mass or made confession in thirty-seven years. By now people knew not to take Tullio's place at the curb. People knew-or they learned, like the owner of the red VW was going to learn. The chauffeur spat a gobbet that dribbled down the suitcase lashed like a dorsal fin to the Volkswagen's roof.
The small bomb behind the altar of St Irenaeus rattled the Sunday quiet and shivered the rose window on the street side. The chauffeur's jaw trembled. He dropped the cloth and jumped in to crank the big, silent engine of the Cadillac. The church doors slammed back, the bodyguards fanning to right and left with pistols in their hands. Tullio stumbled out behind them, his thin face yellow except where spatters of the priest's blood had marked it. The trio scuttled down the steps, their eyes darting about the street like lizards' tongues. Ruthless elbows and gun butts had ripped the gangsters through shocked churchgoers, but now the doors spilled out net-veiled women and men in dark suits.
The directional mine on the Volkswagen's roof sawed them down with over a thousand steel pellets.
Tullio's chauffeur hammered at his door, wedged by the force of the explosion. The four-inch glass of the windshield was fogged with shatter marks. The church facade was a haze of powdered stone; fresh splinters raised a hundred rosettes against the dark wood of the doors.
The steps of the church were an abattoir. In the middle of it sat Enrico Tullio, screaming like one of the damned. Much of the blood splashing him now was his own.
"Seventeen fucking bodies," screamed Big Tom Mullens, "and you didn't get Tullio! He'll use an H-bomb on us now if he has to!"
"Tullio won't use anything," Nick said unconcernedly. He opened his black eyes and stared full at Mullens. The heavy gang-boss felt the impact. His stomach sucked in and he used the back of his right fist to wipe spittle from his mouth.
"Tullio lost his guts through the holes that Claymore put in him," amplified Smokie Joe from the chair he had leaned back against the wall. "Sure, he'll live. He'll set up somewhere else, maybe go back to Chi and crawl to the boys who backed him for the takeover here. Butyou've seen the last of him, Big Tom. Every time he hears your name he'll remember the blast and the blood pouring down the stone beside him. When you play for keeps, you play the man; and Tullio knows now he can't play as hard as you."
The phone rang, loud and terrible in the silent room. Danny Mullens bit blood from his lower lip and backed against the wall. Big Tom stared at the phone as if it were a cobra clamped on his leg.
"Go ahead, Big Tom," rolled Smokie Joe's smooth voice."It can't be worse than you're already thinking, can it?"
Mullens shot him a glance full of violence. He had no one to back a play, though, beyond a terrified sixteen-year-old and a bookkeeper shock-stoned to immobility. He turned his anger on the caller instead, snarling, "Hello!" into the receiver. His red Irish face changed as he listened, moving through neutral blankness to beaming, incredulous triumph. "Sure," he boomed, "but you got one hour. If you can't get through the hospital bullshit by then, then God have mercy on you, Tullio-because I sure as Hell won't."
Whooping, Big Tom slammed down the receiver and swung over the table as if it were a vaulting horse. His arms embraced the two torpedoes. In his bubbling happiness he did not notice that they were still as coldly aloof as when he thought he had been tongue-lashing them for failure.
"Time to talk about payment, isn't it, Big Tom?" suggested Smokie Joe easily.
"Pay? Oh, Christ, yeah," Mullens said with startled generosity."Look, what do you guys really want for what you done?"
"What you promised," said bone-pale Angelo. "Half the take my girls pull in."
"And half of what I turn from skag," Nick added. "That'll be plenty when a few kids get strung out and start pushing it to their friends."
"Huh?" Big Tom said. "Jesus, nobody could get hooked on the shit that gets out here. It's already been cut fifteen to one."
"I've got contacts in Asia," Nick grinned. "What I move'll be pure as Ivory Soap."
His words jogged a scrap of newsreel in Big Tom's memory."You were in Viet Nam, weren't you?"he asked."That's where you learned to use one bomb to set up the real one out in front."
"We were in Nam," Angelo agreed with a smile that would have made a shark flinch. "We were sort of instructing there."
Lod Mahoney stepped to Mullens' side and caught him by the wrist."Tom," he pleaded, "for the love of God, you don't mean to go into heroin? There's money, there's all the money we need in numbers. You know the people you got to deal with in drugs and whores."
"Money?"sneered Smokie Joe from the other side."Peanuts! If you stick with that, you'll be a set-up for somebody else like Tullio who knows what can be done by a guy who's willing to. And if you welsh on us now, Big Tom, you won't have our help the next time it happens. What'll it be?"
Mullens tongued both corners of his lips, looking from Mahoney to the expectant violence of the two torpedoes."I gave my word," he said at last."I'll back anything you need to set up."
Their smiles dreadful reflections of one another, Nick and Angelo stepped to either side of the whimpering bookkeeper. "Smart cookie," said Smokie Joe. Nick's fist smashed Lod beneath the breastbone. As Mahoney doubled over, Angelo punched him in the back with enough power to pop a rib audibly. The plump man writhed on the floor like a crushed dog.
"He ain't dead," Nick said."He ain't even unconscious. But his spleen's busted and he'll bleed out in ten, twenty minutes."
Danny Mullens turned his face to the wall and vomited.
"Get rid of the meat, boys," Smokie Joe ordered. "Never trust somebody who gets religion," he added earnestly to Big Tom as Nick and Angelo carried Mahoney out the door."They're worse than the ones who've been goody-goody all the time. They think they've got something to make up for, and they don't mind putting your ass in the hot seat if they decide it's the 'right' thing to do."
The forelegs of Joe's chair thumped the floor as he stood. He tapped Big Tom playfully on the shoulder. "Come on, give us a smile. We're going places." Big Tom shook himself, a great bull of a man tearing loose the jaws of an emotion that troubled him. He forced a bloodless smile. "Yeah, up." "In a manner of speaking," said Smokie Joe.
"I can't believe this," said Big Tom Mullens, shoving the account book across the scarred table.
"You think I'm cheating you?"asked Smokie Joe without rancor."I'm not. And Nick and Angelo will keep their part of the bargain."
"It's not that I think you're dragging me down," Mullens admitted, frowning perplexedly at the slim figure. Smokie Joe had proven as perfect an accountant as he had been an operations man before Lod's-death. "It's-well, Hell, Joe; I don't see how Nick could bring in thismuch, starting from scratch with no street organization. And Angelo running a cat-house in a college town-Christ, he could sell ice to Eskimos."
Joe laughed in a satisfied way, a father preparing to explain to his son how he has gotten the stalled lawnmower to work."There's no secret about Nick," he said. "Sure, people push skag for money; but the best pushers are the ones who've just been turned on to it themselves. They're riding the crest, they're happy, and they want all their friends to be up there with them. God's a white powder to them, and they've got just as much enthusiasm as Paul the Apostle did."
Smokie Joe's laughter as he stood was suddenly a terrible thing. He faced the window for a rippling but unshaded view through the Lexan panels."And these kids, they're so smart. They 'know' they can't get hooked if they only snort the stuff, it doesn't put enough in their bloodstream. Only they don't know that what we sell is 97% pure heroin-not until it's too late for them to care."
Big Tom pressed his temples. The wealth that had trickled, then poured in over the past months had not improved his appearance. His suits were tailored silk, but his belly had begun to slop over his belt and sweat quickly marked whatever he wore. Perhaps his hair had not really thinned and it was only the heightened ruddiness of his face that made it seem so. "What about Angelo, then?" he asked.
Smokie Joe turned. "You sell a customer what no one will give him," he said quietly."I think a tour will do better than any words I could use to explain. Come on, let's take a ride down to Third Street."
"At three in the afternoon?"
Joe cocked a thin line of eyebrow."At ten in the morning, Big Tom. Even bankers have started staying open the hours customers want-and we're selling what they can't get free, remember?"
The drive was short and without further discussion. Big Tom's headquarters were in the old industrial section, near the railroad station and the car shops. Angelo had set up in a huge frame house, a Victorian leftover on the outskirts of the business district. The previous owner had once refused to sell, Mullens remembered, preferring to hold the property against future rezoning to commercial or apartment use. Until now, Big Tom had not wondered why the old fellow had decided to sell to Angelo.
Smokie Joe swung the car through the alley entrance to the fenced courtyard behind the house. There were already three cars within: a Buick, a Chrysler, and a rusted gray Nash. "The staff doesn't park here," Joe said. "Of course the girls don't leave at all."
The door opened before either of the visitors rang. Angelo gave Smokie Joe a brief nod that could have been either recognition or obeisance."Good you could come, Mr. Mullens," he said."I think you'll be impressed by our operation-your operation, that is."
Within, the house appeared to have been little modified from its original design. Down the rear stairs came a pair of laughing men, a huge black with boots, a loincloth, and a whip; and a middle-aged white man who used the brim of his hat to shield his face when he saw Big Tom. Mullens had already recognized Judge Firbairn.
Firbairn scurried out the door. The black nodded to Angelo, eyed Joe and Mullens with mild interest before he swaggered down the front hall and into a room to the side. Something had dripped from his quirt onto Big Tom's wrist. It seemed to be blood.
"That's Prince Rupert," Angelo volunteered. "Some of our customers prefer watching to doing. Rupert does real nice for them. And we use him for other things too, of course."
"Why does he pad his crotch that way?" Big Tom asked, disgusted but unwilling to admit it.
"It's not padded," Smokie Joe cut in, heading his employer down the high-ceilinged hall. "He has lymphogranuloma, and the scarring in his case has led to elephantiasis."
"Jesus God!" Mullens grunted. "I don't know how you could pay a woman enough for that."
"We couldn't," agreed Angelo with a smile. He unlocked the first doorway to the left. "Not money, at least. All the girls are strung out. So long as they get their four jolts a day, they don't care-they don't evenknow- who does what to them."
He threw open the door. Big Tom gagged as he took in the bed, the extensive props, and the mewling woman who lay in the midst of them. He pulled the door closed himself. "She's only eighteen!" he said.
Angelo spread his palms. "They age quicker than you'd think," he replied. "Then we got to sell them south or to Asia."
"They come to us, Big Tom," said Smokie Joe. His eyes were as intense as diamond needles. "Remember that. Everyone of the masks, uses the words, for everything that's done to her. If they change their minds later, that's too bad."
Mullens shook nausea from his mind."How in Hell are you running this? No fix on earth would cover up a deal like-" He waved his hands to save words he did not want to speak.
"Think Judge Firbairn would sign a search warrant for this place?" Smokie Joe gibed.
"There's other judges in the district. They haven't all been here."
"You'd be surprised," said Angelo. "And even some who don't…
"
His voice trailed off but Smokie Joe had already opened the door of a converted broom closet and unlocked a drawer of the filing cabinet within. "Suppose you were about to launch a push against-well, you'd call them 'the forces of crime and decay' when you held your press conferences, I suppose. Then your daughter got drunk enough to take a dare from some girlfriends-girls she'd grown up with, though maybe if you'd paid more attention you wouldn't have cared for some of the company they'd been keeping recently. Took a dare and got in a little deeper than she expected.
"So the next morning," Smokie Joe continued, snaking out a packet of photographs, "a messenger brings you a roll of Super-8 movie film. What do you do then, Mayor Lawrence?"
Big Tom Mullens riffed through the photographs. "Jesus Christ, youdid get Betty Jane Lawrence! Jesus Christ! She goes to school with my son, he'sdated her!"
"Still think Prince Rupert wears padding?" Angelo asked.
"That's-God, I want to puke," Big Tom groaned, handing the stills back to his smiling lieutenant. "His cock, it looks like it'srotting."
"Well, LGV is an incurable disease, you know," Smokie Joe agreed. "Not so very bad for a while, if you have the personality Prince Rupert does. And if you have an employer who gives you some fringe benefits.
"Want to see more?"he asked, waving at the scores of file folders. When Big Tom shook his head sickly, Joe slammed the drawer and continued, "Between payoffs and this kind of pressure, Angelo here isn't in any danger. Nick's operation is a little different, though, since the heat on him is mostly state and we don't have the same kind of locks on that."
"What's the matter?" Big Tom asked, turning toward the outside door as if it were the gate of his prison. "Couldn't you get a picture of the whole Drug Enforcement Division having a circle jerk?"
"Oh, anything is possible," Smokie Joe said agreeably, following the big racketeer down the hall. "We'll have better luck if we give the state boys something to go after besides us, though. Shall Nick arrange a little diversion for them, Big Tom?"
"Arrange whatever you want," Mullens said. "I'm not sure I give a goddamn about anything. Except that I don't want to see you any more today, and I don't want to see Angeloever."
He slammed the door behind him, within inches of Smokie Joe's smile. From the front of the house came a scream, then another and another in rhythmic pulses. The smile grew broader.
Big Tom Mullens slapped folded newspaper down in front of Smokie Joe who waited for him with a stack of account books. "I'm getting goddam sick and tired of people playing goddam games with me," he snarled. "I get a call from Shiloh Academy saying Danny hasn't showed up for classes in a month and a half. I get here and Nick hands me this paper, asking how I like the job he did for me. What job?"
Joe calmly unfolded the paper."It's not unusual for boys your son's age to drop out of school, you know," he said.
"I'm not spending eight fucking grand a year for that kid to drop out!"Big Tom said."He's getting chances I never had to really make it by going straight, mixing with all the kids whose folks had money without having to scramble for it. If Danny thinks he's going to throw that away, I'll blow his fucking head off!"
"The money doesn't matter. Big Tom," said Smokie Joe. "You've got more money now than you could have dreamed of a year ago." He smoothed the front page and rotated it back to Mullens. "Nick probably means the headline," he said.
Big Tom mimed the words with his lips, then read aloud, " 'LSD Poisons Bloomington Reservoir; Hippie Terror-Plot Slays Scores; City Paralyzed.' What the Hell?"
"It's the diversion you told us to make," Smokie Joe explained with a smile. "Acid goes through the treatment plant without being filtered out. We backed it up with a letter to theDaily News saying that unless marijuana was legalized and the army was disbanded in three days, we'd do the same to every other city in the country. So now the drug boys-and just about everybody else-are not only in Bloomington and out of our hair, they've just about dropped hard drugs statewide to hassle hippies about pot. Slick, isn't it?"
Big Tom's mouth was open but no sounds were coming from it. His palms were flat on the table to support his weight, but his forearms were trembling.
The door opened. Big Tom spun around."Danny!" he cried. Then, "Hey, what in Hell happened to you?"
The boy wore a greasy sport coat and a pair of coordinated slacks from which most of the right cuff had been torn. While his father had gone to flesh in the past year, Danny was now almost as cadaverous as Angelo. He looked down at himself in mild surprise. "Hadn't paid much attention to how I look," he said. "Not since I went to the doctor." His hand clenched a sheet of slick paper which he thrust at his father. "Does this mean anything to you?" he demanded.
Big Tom scowled at the sheet, a page torn from a medical text. "I can't even read this crap," he said. "No, it don't mean anything."
"Then maybe this does."The tone would have snapped Big Tom's head around even if the movement of Danny's hand from beneath his coat had not. Smokie Joe was watching the boy with an expression of bored resignation, that remained unchanged at the sight of a. 45 automatic wavering in the thin fist.
"The men have business to take care of, boy," Smokie Joe drawled. His fingers drummed absently among the account books. "Why don't you take your little play toy out and close the door behind you?"
"Youbastard," the boy said, swinging the pistol full on the slim, seated figure.
"You're the real cause, aren't you? I ought to use this on you."
"Sure, kid," Smokie Joe agreed, tilting his chair back a little, "but you don't have the guts. You probably don't even have the guts to use it on yourself."
"Don't I?" Danny asked. He looked at the baffled rage in his father's eyes, then back to Smokie Joe's cold scorn. The pistol seemed to socket itself in his right ear of its own volition.
"Wait, Danny!" Big Tom cried. He threw his hands out as the gun blasted. The windows shuddered. Danny's eyeballs bulged and the ruin of his head squished sideways with the shot before his body slumped to the floor.
Big Tom more stumbled than knelt beside his son. Smokie Joe scooped up the torn page from where it had fallen. "Sure," he said, "he probably tried curing it himself with what his roommate had leftover from a dose of clap last year. When the doctor told him what he had and what his chances were of getting rid of it now, Danny wouldn't want to believe him-who would?-and picked up a book to check it out.'Lymphogranuloma venereum is a disease of viral origin, usually transmitted by sexual intercourse.' Well, the only important thing about LGV is that it's like freckles-it won't kill you, but you'll carry it till you die."
Mullens was squeezing his son's flaccid hands. "Normally just blacks get it," Smokie Joe went on. He squatted beside the wax-faced racketeer. "That isn't… shall we say, a law of God? Give her a chance and a white girl can catch it. And given a chance, she can pass it on to…" Joe's hand reached past Mullens to unhook Danny's belt."Funny thing-you wouldn't have expected Betty Jane to have been interested in a man for along time after Prince Rupert was done with her. Maybe she was too stoned to care, or maybe Danny-boy used a pretty-direct-approach. There's no real harm done by screwing a girl, is there?" He jerked down Danny's slacks.
The boy wore no underpants. His penis was distorted by three knotted sores slimed with yellow pus.
Big Tom choked and staggered upright. His right hand had wrapped itself around the butt of the automatic. Smokie Joe raised an eyebrow at it. "That's a mistake, Big Tom. Don't you hear that siren? When the police arrive, they're going to think you shot your own son. Better let me take care of it-just tell me to and I'll fix it so you won't be bothered. You don't carehow I take care of it, do you?" He stretched out his hand toward the pistol.
"I'll see you in Hell first!" Big Tom grated.
"Sure, Big Tom," said Smokie Joe. "If that's how you want it."
Big Tom crashed out the six shots still in the pistol's magazine. Amid the muzzle blasts rolled the peals of Smokie Joe's Satanic laughter.
Awakening
Many of the SF writers of the 1930s and '40s were fascinated by Charles Fort's collections of unexplained phenomena. My friend Manly Wade Wellman told me that F. Orlin Tremaine, the editor of Astounding from 1933 till John W. Campbell took over at the end of 1938, had bought the rights to Fort's collection Lo! to mine for story ideas. I'm not sure that's true, but Tremaine certainly did serialize the book. I didn't see a pulp magazine until one of my high school teachers loaned me a couple issues of Weird Tales, but as a teenager I read lots of SF from the period in anthologies.
Fort's technique was to go through scientific journals and note oddities which he then retailed in four volumes beginning with The Book of the Damned. He threw out a number of speculations on what caused the data he reported: "I think we're property,'' or "Perhaps somebody is collecting Ambroses,'' which are familiar even to people who don't have the faintest notion of where the phrases come from. Personally, I'm convinced that Fort was joking-that is, that he believed the items were as true as anything else you'd find reported in, say, Nature, but that he understood the causes of the phenomena he reported were unknowable on the available data.
Then again, maybe he was a humorless wacko who believed in wild conspiracies. Goodness knows, a lot of the people who've followed in his footsteps fit that category.
SF stories led me to Charles Fort, but then I read him for his own sake. As for what I myself believe: I believe that the world is a very strange place, certainly stranger than I can explain.
I haven't used much Fortean material in my fiction because I find attempting to explain the phenomena leads to very silly results. This is as true of fiction like Donald Wandrei's "Something from Above" as it is of Philip Klass' "scientific" explanations of all UFOs as plasma effects (a notion that plasma physicists find ludicrous). Once in a while I tried, though. "Awakening" is an example.
I'm not sure that I'd bother to include this little mood piece in Balefires were it not for one thing: this is the only story I sold while I was in Viet Nam. I wrote it in longhand and typed up a second draft on the orderly room typewriter one Sunday morning in Di An. While I sat typing the story, there was a bang behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and watched the ammo dump destroy itself in a series of increasingly loud explosions. Never a dull moment…
I sent my typescript to my wife Jo, at home in Chapel Hill. She retyped it and mailed it to Mr. August Derleth, the proprietor of Arkham House, who'd bought two previous stories from me. He took "Awakening" for $25. That's one of the few good things that happened to me in Southeast Asia.
They remained some time in silence in the shadowed parlor, alternately sipping their tea and staring idly at the dim trees to be seen beyond the gauze curtains. At last Mab cleared her throat, a little coughing sound. The man looked up. "Mab?" "Frank, I think it's time we try. We'll never see Missy's equal, you know."
Frank set down his cup and saucer on the old walnut table. He ran his left hand through the mane of iron-gray hair he cultivated, almost all that was left of the splendid man he had looked in his youth. "I suppose you're right," he finally admitted."My… aspirations aren't what they were, I suppose. And Mab, I'm very much afraid the girl isn't ready yet. She still doesn't think of herself as one of us."
"Missy has had a year in this house, Frank."
"She had twelve in the alley and the orphanage, learning that witches are hags that live in dark corners, learning to laugh when one is pushed into the oven. Her first reaction… well, Missy isn't a subtle child."
Mab, matronly in a print of pastel roses, ducked disapproval. "Nor is she stupid. The time Missy spent here was more than enough for her to realize what she is, and what we are. It's our duty as her elders to keep her from wasting herself."
Frank bit absently on the setting of his ring."She can't be forced-no, I don't mean physical force, of course not. But we can't make her believe what she doesn't want to believe; what she's been conditioned not to believe. It won't help even to prove to her that she has the Power. That would only mean to her that she herself is evil, and she'd hate you for it. At best she'd not join us; at worst, with her Power…"
Mab smiled."Now Frank, it's the girl's strength that worries you. But it's time and past time that I stepped down. I was never a very good Maid-now I know what you want to say, I was very well trained. You taught me everything that could be taught; you were wonderfully patient. But I never had the Power; that can't be learned."
"Yet she can't even read Latin," said Frank, sadly shaking his head.
"No," agreed Mab in a firm tone, "and perhaps she never will. Our Missy isn't a scholar. But she has an understanding of things that you and I can hardly imagine."
She reached over to the table and rang a sharp ping from the bell.
"Madam?"
The girl in the doorway wore a maid's uniform with a cap and apron. Dark hair and large eyes accented her triangular face.
"Madam?" she repeated.
"Missy, Mr. Birney and I-"
"Oh, Mab," cut in Frank, lifting his corpulence from the overstuffed chair, "perhaps I'll leave you and Missy to discuss matters by yourselves."
"Frank, you'll wait, won't you?"
"In the hallway." Frank nodded to the two women and closed the hall door behind him.
"Well, Missy," Mab continued, "I-but do sit down, Dearest; this isn't business."
She waved to the seat Frank had vacated, but the girl took a slat-back chair farther from her mistress.
"You've been with me some time now, and you have gotten to know myself and the group of friends that meet here. We'd like you to join us tonight."
The girl fluttered her hands."Ma'am, that wouldn't be right, not me. I'm not your sort."
"But you are our sort," Mab insisted calmly. "The mirror in your room, for instance-"
Panic flashed across Missy's face and Mab quickly added, "Oh, don't worry, Dearest, that's why we put it there. It was an old glass and rather difficult to find, but we knew it was meant for you."
"I'll not do wrong things," the girl insisted sullenly.
There was a light squalling outside the kitchen door, a scratch of claws and a dark-tipped Siamese cat slipped into the parlor. It curled silently under the girl's chair but kept its eyes on Mab.
"We wouldn't have you do wrong, "Mab continued with a toss of her gray hair, "but everything proves that it's right for you to join us. Even the way animals treat you-it isn't only Kaimah, is it, Dearest?"
The girl said nothing, only squirmed a little on her seat.
"They aren't like that with me," Mab said, "but I don't really have the Power. But you do, Missy. To an amazing degree."
"No, Ma'am," Missy whispered. "I haven't nothing. I shan't have it."
Mab appeared not to have heard."Frank was disappointed when you ignored the books we left about, but I understand. Perhaps you'll want them after you've been with us awhile."
"Ma'am, Ma'am," breathed the girl, twisting her apron between narrow hands, "I don't want to be with you, I want to go…"
"Because we're witches?" Mab questioned gently. "There's nothing wrong in being a witch, Darling."
"I don't want to be a witch," cried Missy, slipping from her chair and moving behind it as if the wooden back were a shield. The cat retreated between her legs, not hissing, but stiff-legged and its backbone edged with a high comb of fur.
"But Dearest," pressed Mab inexorably, "you're already a witch-"
"Oh, no!"
"-the most powerful witch I have ever met."
"NO!" the girl screamed, and a gabbling cry burst from the older woman as the first blast of searing heat struck her. Mab half rose from her chair, cocooned in white flame that melted flesh and shrank her very bones in its hissing roar.
"Mab! Mab!" Frank shouted, bursting into the room.
There was no answer. The room was empty save for a shrunken mummy fallen back on the scorched upholstery of the chair. That, and the thick layer of soot that covered everything.
The open door to the kitchen quivered in the draft.
Denkirch
This is where I started. Everybody has to start somewhere, but I've got to admit that a lot of writers have done so more auspiciously.
In 1961 I borrowed a few issues of Weird Tales from my high school teacher. One had a box ad for Skull-Face and Others by Robert E. Howard, who'd written the Conan stories. I'd read Conan the Conqueror as half of an Ace Double and loved it. Even though the ad was over ten years old, I took a chance and wrote the publisher, Arkham House, to see if the book was still available.
Mr. August Derleth wrote back, saying Skull-Face was out of print but enclosed a catalog of available titles. I began buying Arkham House books, getting an introduction to pulp fantasy and horror as Mr. Derleth selected it. (Incidentally, a few years later he sold me a copy of Skull-Face, which wasn't quite as out of print to a good customer as it had been to a stranger.)
In the Summer of 1965 my fiancee Jo (since 1967 my wife Jo) and I drove from Dubuque to Sauk City to see Arkham House. We met Mr. Derleth and his children, saw Arkham House, Publishers (which he was running out of his house), and bought books.
One of those books had just come in; The Inhabitant of the Lake: a collection of horror stories by a young Briton, J. Ramsey Campbell. There was a flap photo of the author. Young was right-Ramsey looked no more than fifteen and in fact was only eighteen. He'd sold Mr. Derleth his first story two years earlier for an Arkham House anthology.
I was nineteen. The teacher who'd loaned me the Weird Tales, Mr. Eugene Olson, had sold fiction himself; indeed, the year after I graduated, he became a full-time writer under what's now his legal name, Brad Steiger. Because of Mr. Olson I knew it was possible to write professionally, and I'd told myself for a number of years that when I got old enough I was going to sell a story.
"Old enough" was obviously sixteen. I was well past that already.
I went home (with the pile of books I'd bought) and sent Mr. Derleth a letter asking whether he might be willing to buy a story if I wrote one good enough to publish. He grudgingly said yes.
I wrote what I thought was a story and sent it to him. It was 1,600 words long and titled "Post Mortem." (I was a Latin major and thought a Latin pun was a great idea for a title. Really.) Mr. Derleth sent the story back with the note that it was a good outline, now I should expand it into a story; and by the way, the title was terrible. I went busily to work and emerged with a piece about 4,000 words long and titled (as I best I can remember) "The Stars Are Hell."
Mr. Derleth sent it back again, saying that I was close. I just needed to take out the purple passages. I didn't know what a purple passage was, but I did my best. Since I was modeling the writing style on that of Mr. Derleth's own worst copies of bad H.P. Lovecraft prose, there was a lot of florid writing in the story. I sent it off again.
This time I got back a check for $35 and a note from Mr. Derleth saying that the story still wasn't right. He'd edit it himself; I should compare the published version with my carbon (this was in the days before copy machines were everywhere) to learn how not to write a story the next time.
I hadn't even known I was supposed to keep a carbon.
I don't think the edit was very extensive, but Mr. Derleth changed the title to the name of the central character. I don't like that style of title (which Mr. Derleth used frequently in his own work), but it was better than any of mine.
I recently reread "Denkirch" for the first time in forty years and realized it was a good pastiche of minor Weird Tales stories from about 1938. That's a positive comment on my craftsmanship, but it was a very silly thing to do in 1966.
So that was my first sale. You could call it a remarkable success story: I sold the first story I submitted to the first editor I sent it to. But I've heard of would-be writers being crushed by rejection letters. I was so devastated by my first acceptance that it was six months before I even tried to write another story.
Now I sleep only by day or when the sky is cloudy, and when the stars gleam bright in the heavens I walk little back streets, avoiding other people, for I do not care to be reminded of my humanity and my inevitable fate. My acquaintances think me odd, but they would not understand if I told them that on dear nights the stars speak to me, and that if I did not walk I would go mad. So I walk the lonely streets, and the echoing cadence of my stride helps to muffle the rhythmic whispers, but still my mind is forced back to Denkirch, who proved Man's unique place in the universe.
I met Denkirch at college when, at the end of our first semester, each of our roommates requested transfers and we found ourselves shifted together. Although he was a physics and electronics engineering major, and I was prelaw in history, we found we had a surprising amount in common. Our general outlooks were very similar, both of us vaunting pure knowledge and refusing to accept anything sacred or profane, as being beyond the grasp of human intelligence.
I was as bored by Denkirch's majors as he was contemptuous (albeit silently) of mine, but I had a tremendous respect for the work he was doing. Not only did he take staggering course loads by special permission so that he could complete both majors in four years, but he taught himself a vast assortment of foreign languages as well. These included Oriental and Oceanic dialects in addition to the normal European and classical languages, there were a few tongues of which I had never heard before. Once in particular I remember seeing an aged, oddly unpleasant-looking book bound in faded snakeskin lying on Denkirch's desk. When I asked him what it was, he had answered, "A treatise on certain antiquities, in R'lyehan."
I am a reasonably intelligent man, but Denkirch was beyond a doubt one of the most brilliant men of this or any age. He had a superb, balanced intellect-far less common than genius-and it was this that gave him the drive and the ability to turn our idle discussions into something very tangible.
Mostly we argued about the place of the individual man in the Universe, both from interest and because it was equally outside our dissimilar majors. We were both romantics, believing the universe was purposeful, but I argued that each man was only a steppingstone to that purpose, while Denkirch insisted that the individual was immortal. I based my argument on the extreme rarity of even possible spiritual manifestations and Denkirch took the other tack, pointing out the exceptions for which no other explanation was satisfactory. It was an inexhaustible topic since neither of us had concrete proof, but the question caught Denkirch's fancy and even in college he began to go deeper into the subject than I could follow.
After graduation I entered a Chicago law firm while Denkirch had no trouble getting an excellent teaching position at Cal Tech. We kept in touch, and in the mounting excitement of my friend's letters I saw that the material he was uncovering on his fancy was rapidly turning it into an obsession, After a few years he left Cal Tech for MIT, simply because it would bring him nearer to the great eastern libraries he wanted to consult and, when he stopped mentioning his project a little later, I realized that it was a result of success, not failure. He was on the brink of a great discovery but feared, like all scholars, to blurt out his suspicions until he was absolutely sure. Then one day he resigned his teaching post and moved to southern Illinois, and even without his letter I would have known that he was searching for privacy to put his theories into practice.
For six months I heard no more from Denkirch. Then a short letter came, asking me to join him and giving directions on how to reach him. I noticed that he was not actually living in any town but was several miles outside the nearest one, a tiny place called Merriam, of only three hundred souls.
It was foolish for me to leave then. I was a junior partner with great things ahead of me if I were successful in a major case to be tried within the month, but despite this I had no thought of refusal. Denkirch was my friend and to us who have few, that is no little thing, but even more convincing was the sense of overwhelming importance which clung to even that prosaic letter. It was not just that I knew the answer to a great philosophical question might be close at hand, it was more; and if I had known how much more, I would have hidden myself in a place so remote that I never again would have heard of Denkirch or he of me.
In the late afternoon of the next day I reached Merriam, which was just a straggle of houses on the highway, and then turned left on to a narrow, rutted gravel road marked by a big country-type mailbox with "Samuel Denkirch" stenciled on it. On the right side of the lane the ground was cut away in a high bank to a level above the top of the car and crowned with a wobbling barbed wire fence silhouetted against the low sun. The pasture to the left looked rocky and unpromising, an occasional clump of wild sumac standing out among the tall thistles and rank grass as a deep red blotch in the waning light and giving a frightful, blood-spattered appearance to an otherwise merely ugly landscape. The road was in as uncared-for a condition as the pasture and fences but had obviously been used much more recently. Heavy trucks seemed to have driven over it shortly after a rain, and the resultant ruts were nearly six inches deep except in places where a slab of rock underlay the sprinkling of gravel and jarred my teeth, even though I was proceeding in second gear.
Due to my slow progress the road seemed much longer than it probably was, and I began to wonder whether I had made the correct turn after all, despite the mailbox. It would have been quite impractical to try to turn around since the road itself was far too narrow and was hemmed in by the high bank and, on the left, a drainage ditch, but the feeling of portentousness that had been with me ever since I had received Denkirch's invitation was growing steadily and beginning to take on a distinctly sinister cast. The car's jouncings and scrapings were an almost welcome diversion from the formless depression that was settling over my mind, a depression not wholly to be explained by my worry that I had taken the wrong turn or even by the funereal scenery. However, just as I had decided to return to the highway even if I had to back out to avoid being lost at night amid a maze of unfamiliar country roads, I came to the top of a gently rising hill and saw what had to be Denkirch's house only a half mile beyond.
That it had to be my friend's house was quite clear from the forest of antennas sprouting from and around it. The area around the house had probably been thickly wooded before Denkirch had bought the farm; now almost a score of thick stumps ringed the worn but otherwise normal looking two-story house, the boles having been dragged into a great pile in a nearby field where, presumably, they could no longer interfere with the antennas which had usurped the grounds. Indeed, the antennas were all that kept the house from seeming as deserted as the pastures around it. The roof of the house sagged and the white paint had cracked and blistered in those places in which it had not peeled off completely. The barn and sheds had been pulled down or had simply collapsed by themselves, and the grass on the lawn was high and weed-choked,
The antennas, seeming to have a life of their own, presided over this slowly decaying ruin: a horizontal grid on the roof, a ten-foot dish just west of the house, and at least a score of poles and beams and coils mounted on stumps, chimney, roof, and sidewalls-some static and some in constant jerky motion, spinning or nodding like crows on a fence. But the lowering ruler of the scene was a great, copper-mesh cone whose wide mouth opened to the sky more than twenty feet above the ground. As I watched, it caught a last ray from the setting sun and, its color deepened like that of the sumac, loomed over the house like a monster cobra. For a moment I felt a twinge of inexplicable panic which, although it quickly passed, still further heightened my feeling of black foreboding.
I stopped in front of the house where, in fact, the road ended. It was a warm August evening, just at that time when normally everything seems to be at its most serene; but tonight there was a sinister difference. Perhaps it was the low hum of the antenna rotors, so out of place among the cicadas and lonely bird calls. Even the stars seemed evil, although they were unusually splendid against the dark blue evening sky. They glared back as I glanced at them, and I quickly looked down again to see Denkirch just opening the screen door of the porch.
"I was afraid you'd broken down on this miserable road," he said as we shook hands, and I too had been worried by the thought. But somehow the weeds and rocks were at least natural, while the antennas, especially the cone, had a very strange aura about them that increased my nervousness even more.
Denkirch apologized for the appearance of the house and the unburnt pile of trees."I've been meaning to get someone in to really clean up the place, but I just haven't gotten around to it," he said. "Besides, I have trouble getting any kind of help out here. I even have to pick up my own groceries in Merriam."
"Is the place supposed to be haunted?" I asked, gazing through the screen at the dark-muffled ruins of the farmyard.
"No, nothing like that. The farm just ran down as its last owner grew older, and by the time he died the buildings were even more worthless than the land, which never had been good. No," he repeated, "the problem is me and my gear. The townsfolk seem to be afraid of it. I suppose some ignorant fool has been spreading the story that I have everything here from an atomic pile to a death ray. But let's not stand here talking-come in and see the shop."
I watched Denkirch himself with as much interest as I did the tremendous mass of instrumentation and printed material which he showed me. He had changed a great deal since I had last seen him. He had been thin and active; now he was cadaverous and jumpy. Worse and yet more subtle was the change in his attitude toward his project, his deep interest having become a burning fanaticism that would carry through at any cost. All these things could be easily explained as normal results of overwork which would pass with the completion of the experiment, but deep within me I knew that Denkirch, too, felt the shadowy terror that slowly approached.
The conversion of the ramshackle farm into a modern experimental station must have been a tremendous job in itself. More fascinating to me than the instruments was the room filled with thousands of books, mostly technical handbooks and circuit diagrams, but a surprising number of very ancient manuscripts or facsimiles of manuscripts in languages I could not identify, much less read. These were the pre-scientific works dealing with spiritual escape from the temporal shell which Denkirch had considered most accurate and informative.
"There's a tendency among moderns who use the ancient texts at all, "he said, "to abide by them strictly, muttering the precise gibberish and using all manner of abominations in the ritual, usually something pertaining to a corpse. Now this is both foolish, since the true spells were a form of self-hypnosis, most unlikely to work identically on two different people, and dangerous as well-or at least liable to be disconcerting-because it just might work. These works tell of a great number of seers who went into trances but instead of awakening with wonderful stories of far-distant places, just didn't awaken at all. Still, their mishaps gave me the clue I needed and now I can proceed with electronic help where a direct attempt was so often final."
The other rooms were filled with equipment which, although impressive to me, did not hold the marvels that it doubtless would have had for another engineer. Quite a lot of the instrumentation was search radar, fairly basic and only unusual in its almost completely automatic functioning. It not only ran itself but could even check itself in case of failure, making an operator necessary only to replace the faulty parts. Denkirch had found that iron tended to distort some of his instruments, and the radar was to give warning if a plane were close overhead (the house was not far from the Chicago-St. Louis air route) so that he would not attempt to return then. At the time I did not understand just what Denkirch meant, but, as with other things, I soon learned.
Even with a similar high degree of automation, the remaining instruments-everything from a radio-telescope to devices for registering the precise rotational speed of the Earth at any given instant-seemed to be more than one man could reasonably handle, and I asked Denkirch why he did not have at least a lab assistant.
"I did," he said with a frown, "two of them, as a matter of fact. They had been students of mine at MIT and should have been perfect for the job, but I guess neither one of them liked the country. Two weeks after they had helped me to set up here they said that they couldn't take the atmosphere any longer and left." Then he shivered slightly, and when he spoke again his eyes shone with something of the fear that he must have been feeling for the last six months, perhaps even longer. "You know, Johnnie," he said, "I can't really blame them. I suppose it's the isolation of this god-forsaken place. Do you feel it too?"
I admitted I did feel somewhat uneasy, but as I spoke the blackness I had pushed to the back of my mind flooded over me again, an inky coldness of fear that was all the worse for being unreasonable. How even Denkirch's rigid will had kept him from insanity for all the time he must have been subjected to the same thing, I do not know.
Finally, having toured the whole of the upper floors, Denkirch led me down a steep flight of steps to what had been the cellar and was now, he said, the heart of his project. At the bottom he flipped a bank of light switches and I saw that a large diesel generator stood near the stairs, while the rest of the cellar was separated by a recent-looking partition with a curtained doorway towards which Denkirch motioned me. When I entered, shoving aside the curtains, a terribly familiar sheen of copper met me. Another cone, a duplicate of the one outside, hung from its apex within.
Taking a closer look as Denkirch entered behind me, I saw the considerable amount of labor that had been expended to mount the great antenna. Both upper floors had been pierced on account of its height and the well closed in, explaining why I had seen no indication of it upstairs. The delicate copper cobwebbing was streaked with the shadows of the aluminum framework by which it was supported, and at the point at which it was attached some twenty feet above my head a large crystal glittered in the fluorescent light. It was truly awe-inspiring, yet still a sense of active malignity hung over it.
Another disquieting object intruded on my awareness when I glanced down from the cone, for directly beneath it and completely covered by its wide opening was a normal single bed and mattress, but one equipped with wide canvas straps and with its legs bolted to the floor. On three sides of the bed and underneath it were instrument racks, and on one of them rested a large helmet to which were attached dozens of leads.
Denkirch then gave me my first real knowledge of what he intended to do and how he would accomplish it as he explained the various pieces of apparatus. He began by plugging a set of earphones into the panel at the head of the bed and telling me to put them on. As I did so, he seated himself at an instrument consol along one wall and set several switches on it. The lights dimmed slightly as the surrounding machinery began to hum, and then a faint crackling began to come through the earphones. After a minute or so individual words stood out from the buzz in the background, and then a sudden, constant stream of names and occupations poured out, one after another without pause or stop. Some were in languages that I knew and some I could not even guess at, but all were delivered in the same flat, expressionless monotone of a congregation reading a unison prayer. "Maria Varrones, dependiente… Daniel Mulvihill, solicitor… Hauptmann Gerhard Kleppe, Leibstandarte Adolph Hitler…"
"What is this?" I gasped as I took off the earphones. "They sound like talking corpses."
"The minds of the dead," Denkirch corrected me, "not their bodies. And they're not even dead in the usual sense, of course. I always told you that the human mind was too wonderful an instrument to be thrown away after one using, Johnnie. There's my proof, out among the stars."
Then he went on to tell me the whole story, the story of the masterpiece of the most talented man of our generation. First he read everything he could on earlier attempts to penetrate the afterlife; the Elijahs and Bridey Murphies, the Cagliostros and Buddhas, and many explorers more ancient and terrible than they, hinted at on little-known parchments and inscriptions which must in themselves have raised a dark shadow over Denkirch's mind. This prodigious labor was followed by yet a greater one, the correlation of this data and the elimination of the less promising areas of endeavor.
In the end Denkirch had come to startling yet well-buttressed conclusions regarding human minds and bodies. As he had believed from the start, the mind did have an eternal existence apart from that of any one body, but it became clear that at no time could the mind be totally free; in other words, if it left one body it would be forced to instantly enter another.
I did not then understand why my palms began to sweat at those words; now it is only too clear what my subconscious mind realized and my conscious did not, but I merely wiped my hands on my thighs as I listened.
The obvious inference to be drawn from the situation Denkirch had just explained was that minds were transferred from the dead to the newborn-reincarnation or transmigration of souls. This was seductively simple but could not be applied to the human race alone since births and deaths would almost never balance precisely. An excess of minds might possibly be accommodated by housing two or more in one body, and this was the probable explanation of the trance visions of some of the greater wizards. They had simply suppressed the original mind of another body and looked through its eyes for a time, and the body's normal owner shortly drove the intruder back. Still, the large surplus of births over deaths meant that at least some minds had to be created afresh with their bodies, and the great rarity of provable cases of reincarnation-in human bodies, at least-indicated that this was true in all but a handful of cases. Where then did the minds of most dead men go? To the stars, Denkirch decided, and set about to prove it.
His first attempts were based on radio-telescopes and were complete failures. Then he began to work from the opposite end, modifying an encephalograph, and with this relatively crude instrument he caught the first hints of those terrible whispers from the stars, and that night he held all the knowledge of this primal mystery that he later only reinforced. All, that is, but its underlying meaning.
Later improvements had followed, far simpler than that final result that hung above the bed on which I sat, but just as effective for listening to the minds of our ancestors. Denkirch had earlier noted that different historical periods were grouped in recognizable parts of the sky, although there was considerable overlapping. Meaningful names were rare, of course, but many occupations gave keys to determine their dating. For instance, an auto mechanic had to be fairly recent, and a private of the Iron Brigade was just as useful as Abraham Lincoln. In general the most recent names were clustered on or in the direction of Deneb in Orion, while those of the period around World War One could be expected to be heard when the antenna was directed toward the Pleiades, and so on. It seemed probable that with the death of each occupied body, the human mind marched one more step in a slow, majestic procession around the universe.
This knowledge, this proof of his contentions, was soon not enough for Denkirch. He had a list of names, but what he now wanted was first-hand knowledge of the universe.
I can still remember how Denkirch looked that night as he talked, unconsciously pacing the room and waving his arms, the glitter in his eyes far brighter than that the soft fluorescents could give them. "Johnnie, you used to tell me that death would be oblivion. Now I can prove to you that it's not oblivion, it's the universe in all its wonder and glory! Think of it, Johnnie-thundering nitrogen cataracts under a pale green sun. Night in the dazzling center of a globular cluster! What have you ever wanted to see? You will-just wait for it. And now with this"-he waved toward the great cone waiting silently above me-"we won't even have to wait."
With that last sentence-his declaration of triumph-my spirits, which had been caught up despite themselves by his wild enthusiasm, sagged again into blind despair. I knew there was something wrong. Not in the theories, for they had been confirmed by the instruments; not in the instruments, for Denkirch was far too logical even in his fanaticism to accept his results without duplicating them in numerous cross-checks; still, somewhere…
"Do you mean the cones are matter transmitters?" I asked as the full significance of Denkirch's words sank in.
"Well, not transmitters, at least," he answered, "and I only designed them to receive minds, but I dare say they'd work quite well for matter too, if it could somehow be sent to them. Basically, though, they're designed to do a job similar to that of my earlier passive receivers and they will do everything the earlier ones would, as you heard. They go just one step farther. Not throwing a body across the universe, but pulling a mind back, and that's all that's necessary."
As Denkirch went on to explain his masterpiece I felt the same awe at its magnitude of conception as I had when he recounted the steps leading up to it, but under the soft cushion of marvel lay the same rending claws of fear, and my stomach knotted as I listened.
The difference between the cones and their forerunners lay in their ability to actively snatch a mind back from wherever it had gone when it left its original body. Lack of this feature, Denkirch thought, had prematurely exiled many ancient mystics to far worlds. If they, by sheer force of will, directed their spirits to another already occupied body, they would quickly be forced back into their own again. If instead they freed their minds without giving them any basic direction, as was probably the more common occurrence, they would be pulled irresistibly to Deneb just as though their bodies had died, unable to return without the same spiritual discipline by means of which they had come and which the alien environment might well make impossible until after their terran bodies had slipped into a mindless death.
The cones, keyed to Denkirch's mind when it was released from his body (also an electronic process, since Denkirch was a scientist rather than a mystic), would pull it back from Deneb when they were activated. Between the time his mind was severed from his brain by what he described as an interference field and the time I turned on the cones, Denkirch would have as much freedom on some strange planet as his new-born body would give him; freedom to run or burrow or fly or perhaps just to sit and absorb the newness of his surroundings.
At this point he stopped pacing and returned to the control consol, motioning me to join him. Most of its eight-foot length was covered with dials, but to one end a helmet much like the one on the bed was connected. There were only two other things built into the three feet of the consol nearest the helmet, a large three-position switch and a small red indicator light similar to the generator lights of most new cars.
"You'll wear this helmet," Denkirch said. "With it on you'll be in perfect contact with all my senses as long as the switch is in the second position. That is, as long as I'm on Deneb everything I experience in any way will be as clear to you as if it were you who were undergoing it. The only difference is that you won't be able to control the new body, as I will. In ten minutes or so-you'll be able to use your own eyes when they're open, though things may look like a double exposure-make sure the red light isn't on and pull the switch to the third position to turn on the cones. The light is connected to the radar, and if it's on, a plane is nearly overhead. Just wait till it blinks out before pulling the switch."
Then, always a scientist, his mind picked up the puzzling thread it had brushed and he asked a simple, musing question that caused me to break out into a sweat again:"I wonder why I can only pick up the identities of the dead? You'd think that either all the surface thoughts would come through, or none at all. Surely members of other races don't spend all their time repeating their human names, do they?"
But this seemed only a minor matter, soon to be clarified along with much greater mysteries, and Denkirch returned to the business at hand.
"All you have to do," he repeated, "is put your helmet on, move the switch to the second jog to free my mind, and then to the third in ten minutes to bring me back."
I waited a moment, locking my hands across my knees to keep them from shaking, and asked the question whose answer I already feared: "When do you plan to try it out?"
"When?"he echoed, surprised. "Why tonight, of course. The sky is clear, the static level is low-what more could we ask?"
For the next forty-five minutes I waited in silent resignation as Denkirch gave his equipment a final check, until at last he stepped back, and regarded it for a moment, arms akimbo, and said, "Well, I guess all that remains is to turn it on and let it warm up."
He touched a switch on the far end of the consol and the room shook as the nearby generator picked up speed. The shaking died away again to a low purr after a few minutes and Denkirch explained, "That was just the capacitors charging. The cones will soak up a lot of power when they kick in. There's a light switch above the consol that you ought to flip before you turn on the apparatus. It turns off everything but the necessary instruments, to keep the load down when you turn on the cones. The dial lights will be enough for you to see by when your eyes adjust, and besides, most of what you'll see will be through my eyes."
With that Denkirch sat down on the bed, slipped on the helmet there, and lay down full length with his arms at his sides."Would you strap me in, Johnnie?" he said with his words somewhat muffled by the chinstrap of the helmet. "I doubt that it makes much difference, but there is a slim chance that my body might move a little after my mind is disconnected, and I wouldn't want to damage my helmet and keep you from seeing what is going on, you know."
The clasp clicked shut and I walked from the bed to the consul trying to think of words to explain to Denkirch what I feared. But it wasn't a fear that could be explained; it was too basic for that.
The helmet leads were too short for me to reach the light switch with the helmet on, so I turned out the lights and then sat down to wait until I could see again before attempting to put the cumbersome thing on… perhaps more, and in a way that minute was the most horrible thing I underwent that night. It was as if I had awakened an instant before my alarm went off in the morning, still comfortably composed in bed but knowing the strident clamor would burst out at any moment. This and more, for it was the ultimate blissful dream that was about to be shattered, and my subconscious knew it though it could not speak.
Denkirch called out from the darkness behind me, "Are you ready?"
The hours of fear I had been feeling finally broke through my dignity and I cried,^" Denny, this is wrong! For God's sake forget about this and just publish the rest of your findings. Those alone are enough to make you as rich and famous as you could want."
^" No," he answered, "I already am as rich and famous as I want to be. I just want truth. I'm not taking a wild risk, but even if I were it would be worth it for the chance of advancing human understanding as much as this will. Pull the switch, Johnnie."
Just as he finished, the red aircraft-warning light winked on in front of me.
"There's a plane overhead," I said eagerly, certain now of at least a short delay. If we had delayed… But it might have made no difference.
"That doesn't matter for the first stage and it will be gone before I come back. Pull the switch."
And, God help me, I did. But there is no god, is there? No god, no heaven, only the hells that glitter down on us every clear night. It was obvious as soon as I closed the switch that Denkirch had been perfectly correct. What neither of us had realized until then was how completely powerless the terran ego would be in the new body. I had not even begun to move my hand before it yanked down the switch almost of its own accord and I sat, quivering in the darkness with my own and Denkirch's screams still echoing through my mind.
Can you imagine-can you begin to imagine!-what it is to be totally alien? Your body, your world, even your mind except for that tiny, impotent speck of ego that screams, "This is not I," and screams the louder for knowing that it is and it will be forever, body after body, eon after eon, until space and time are no more! And that is why I no longer sleep on cloudless nights, for the stars in their myriads greet me in my dreams whispering, "Soon you will be with us, every one of us," and a high, thin scream from the Pleiades tells me where Denkirch is now.
An unlikely story, I know, and I myself might have thought it a dream had I not turned and seen in the green witchlight of the glowing dials the last earthly remains of Samuel Denkirch. Then I hurled my helmet into the consol and fled from the cellar that blazed behind me as sputtering arcs from the shattered instruments ignited the frame walls; nor do I remember anything afterwards but my own screams until a highway patrol car stopped me in Indiana. Perhaps the return itself had been fatal, but I rather think it was the atmosphere; for Denkirch had returned to Earth as the tentacled abomination he had become on Deneb…
The False Prophet
Latin has been my soul's anchor ever since my second semester of college. I don't know why that should be, but I can tell you how it happened.
I took two years of Latin in high school because it was that or Spanish. Neither option appealed to me, but I had to take some foreign language. My grades were adequate but nobody was going to mistake me for a Latin scholar, and I don't recall getting any particular pleasure from the classes.
My plan in college (the University of Iowa) was to major in chemistry, go to law school, and become a patent attorney. Chemistry required German, so I started German with the expectation that I'd never read another line of Latin.
I pretty quickly realized that I wasn't cut out to be a chem major (or, I suspected, a patent attorney), so I switched to history. I continued with German (which I didn't actively dislike), because I didn't believe that I could ever get back into Latin after a year away from the language.
That's when things get kind of odd. College was a complete disruption of my life. Everything had changed. I don't mean everything was bad-Iowa's huge library in particular was a wonderful resource for somebody like me who can get interested in a wide range of subjects-but everything was different. I found myself thinking of Latin as the one part I might reclaim of the, well, youth which I'd surrendered when I left home.
I borrowed an old copy of the Latin book I'd used in high school and studied it on my own. Studied it for the first time, really: in high school I'd shown a flair for sight translations but I hadn't bothered much about grammar. I started regular course work in my third semester and took about all the Latin courses offered at Iowa before I graduated. (I wound up with thirty semester hours and asked if I could call Latin a double major with my history. The administration agreed.)
I entered Duke Law School in 1967. That was stressful too; I took Latin courses in the main university to settle me. (They'd never had anybody do that before, but there were no rules against it.)
When I was drafted out of law school I couldn't take courses, but I carried my Oxford Classical Text of Horace through basic training and as much of Southeast Asia as I saw. I continue to read Latin for pleasure. I also read extensively on classical subjects, because they interest me and I've got a good formal grounding from my undergraduate days.
Naturally I've used a lot of classical backgrounds in my fiction, SF as well as fantasy and horror. I wrote "The False Prophet" to fill out a collection of previously written stories in a classical milieu.
Something I've come to realize is that many readers think they know things about ancient Rome. When they read a contrary statement in a story of mine, some assume I've made a stupid mistake. Well, I do make stupid mistakes (for example, the time I nearly severed a tendon while sharpening a knife), but when the subject is Roman history or culture, the smart money is going to bet on me.
A universal case is that educated people don't want to believe that Roman shields were made of plywood. I had a stranger call me from California to tell me that plywood hadn't been invented until the nineteenth century. Roman shields were made of three plies of (generally) birch, glued together. The grain on the front and back layers ran crosswise, but it was vertical on the central ply. Archeologists call the material plywood (What on Earth else would they call it?); the educated man in the street finds that truth ridiculous.
I once complained that I should feel lucky that I don't get similar objections when I mention that most Roman buildings were concrete. The next day I got a query from an editor who wanted to know whether my mention of "Roman concrete" was a mistake.
A similar problem involves readers who believe that colloquial Latin should be translated into something closer to William Morris than to normal English. There's a place for high style, but it doesn't get much use among soldiers or ordinary people in general, now or two thousand years ago. My dialogue (like that of Martial, Catullus, Petronius, and a very long list of other Latin writers) tends to be colloquial in form.
A lot of reading and research went into these stories; but my heart went into them too.
The big young man, grinning at Dama through the doorway of the City Prefect's private office, had the look of a killer. Dama knew the fellow's name, Lucius Vettius-and knew that he was an officer in the imperial guard, though at the moment he wore a civilian toga. Dama smiled back. "The virtuous Marcus Licinius Dama!" bellowed the nomenclator in a strong Syrian accent. Why couldn't Gaius Rutilius Rutilianus-who was, by Mithra, City Prefect of Rome-buy servants who at least pronounced Latin properly?
"He didn't mention that you're only a merchant!" Menelaus whispered to
Dama in amazement. "No, he didn't," Dama agreed without amplifying his response. The nomenclator was wearing a new tunic. So was the doorkeeper who'd let
Dama and his older companion into Rutilianus's reception room with a crowd of over a hundred other favor-seekers. The tunics were best-quality Egyptian linen and represented a hefty outlay Even to Dama, who imported them along with the silks which were his primary stock in trade. "His companion," cried the nomenclator, "the learned Faustus Pompeius Menelaus!" The nomenclator paused. "Known as The Wise.'' Menelaus suddenly looked ten years younger. He straightened to his full height and fluffed his long gray beard.
Though Dama said nothing as the pair of them stepped into Rutilianus's private office, the nomenclator had earned himself a bonus by the degree to which his ad-libbed comment had brightened the old man's face.
Menelaus and Dama's father had remained friends throughout the latter's life. Dama stopped visiting his parent when disease and pain so wracked the older man that every conversation became a litany of insult and complaint; but Menelaus continued to come, to read aloud and to bear bitter insults because to do so was a philosopher's duty-and a friend's.
"Well, he sure looks the part, doesn't he?" quipped Caelius, one of the four civilians standing around the Prefect's couch. "Got any owls nesting in that beard, old man?"
"Looking the part's easy enough," countered Vulco."If you want a philosopher ofreal learning, though, you'll hire Pactolides."
"I think it's unchristian to be hiringany sort of pagan philosopher," said Macer. "Severiana won't like it a bit."
"My wife doesn't make the decisions inthis house," the Prefect said so forcefully that everyone listening knew that Rutilianus was as much voicing a wish as stating a fact.
The Prefect shifted his heavy body on the couch and scratched himself. Though the morning air was comfortable by most standards, Rutilianus was sweating despite having dispensed with the formality of his toga while handling this private interview.
The men were the Prefect's friends, advisors, and employees-and wore all those separate masks at the same time. Except for Vettius (who was about Dama's age), they'd accompanied Rutilianus during his governorships in Spain and North Africa. They carried out important commissions, gave confidential advice-and picked up the bits and scraps which form the perquisites of those having the ear of high office.
"Anyway," offered Sosius, "I don't think that there's anything sinful about hearing advice on living a good life, even if it does come from a pagan."
For what Dama had paid Sosius, he'd expected more enthusiastic support. Pactolides was getting much better value for his bribe to Vulco.
"Well, let's hear what he says for himself," the Prefect said, still peevish at the mention of his wife. He nodded toward Menelaus. "Youcan speak, can't you?" he demanded. "Not much use in having a personal philosopher who can't, is there?"
"Pactolides can speak like an angel," muttered Vulco. "Voice like a choirboy, that man has…"
Dama prompted his friend with a tap on the shoulder. Menelaus stepped forward and bowed. "If ever there was a man who was rightly afraid when called to speak in your presence, noble Rutilianus," the old philosopher boomed, "it is I; and I sense-" he made a light, sweeping bow to the Prefect's companions "-that those who participate in your counsels are well able to see my distress."
Menelaus was a different man as soon as he began his set oration-confident, commanding; his tones and volume pitched to blast through the chatter filling a rain-crowded basilica when he addressed his students in one corner. Dama had worried that the old man's desperate need for a job would cause him to freeze up when the opportunity was offered. He should have known better.
"-for my heart is filled with the awareness of the way you, armed like Mars himself, preserved the liberty of this Republic; and now, wearing the toga, increase its civil glory. For-"
The soldier, Vettius, crooked a finger toward Dama and nodded in the direction of the garden behind the office.
Rutilianus's other councilors looked bored-Vulco was yawning ostentatiously-but the Prefect himself listened to the panegyric with pleasure. He nodded with unconscious agreement while Menelaus continued, "-while all those who have borne the burden of your exalted prefecture are to be praised, to you especially is honor due."
Vettius, waiting at the door into the garden, crooked his finger again. Dama pursed his lips and followed, walking with small steps to disturb the gathering as little as possible-though Menelaus in full cry couldn't have been put off his stride by someone shoutingFire! and the Prefect was rapt at the mellifluous description of his virtues.
The garden behind Rutilianus's house had a covered walk on three sides, providing shade at all times of the day. The open area was large enough to hold a dozen fruit trees as well as a small grape arbor and a variety of roses, exotic peonies, and other flowers.
Military equipment was stacked beside the door: a bronze helmet and body armor modeled with idealized muscles over which a pair of naiads cavorted; a swordbelt supporting the sheathed dagger and long, straight-bladed spatha of a cavalryman; and a large, circular shield in its canvas cover.
Vettius followed Dama's eyes toward the gear and volunteered, "I'm army- seconded to the City Prefect for the time being."
There were two ways for Dama to handle his response. He made the snap decision that concealing his knowledge from this big, hard-eyed soldier couldn't bring any dividends equal to getting the man's respect from the start.
"Yes," he said. "A decurion in the squadron of Domestic Horse."
Vettius was surprised enough to glance sideways to make sure that canvas still covered the gilt spikes and hearts against the blue background of his shieldface. "Right, that's me," he agreed mildly. "The Prefect's bodyguard, more or less. The name's Lucius Vettius-as I suppose you knew."
There was no question in the final clause, but Dama nodded his agreement anyway. He'd done his homework-as he always did his homework before a major sale.
This business, because it was personal and not merely a matter of money, was the most major sale of his life…
"Let me hope," rolled Menelaus's voice through the open door and window of the office, "that my words today can be touched by a fraction of the felicity with which all Rome greeted the news that you had been appointed her helmsman."
"I was wondering," Vettius said, "just how much you'd paid Sosius?"
Dama prodded the inside of his cheek with his tongue.
"The reason I'm wondering," the soldier continued, "is that he's taking money from Pactolides too." He laughed. "Vulco's an unusually virtuous councilor, you know."
Dama grimaced bitterly. "Yeah," he agreed. "Vulco stays bought."
"My words are driven out under the compulsion of the virtue and benignity which I see before me…" Menelaus continued in an orotund voice.
"I hadn't thought," continued Dama, choosing his words carefully, "that a decurion was worth bribing. Until now that I've met you."
"I'd have taken your money," Vettius said with the same cold smile as before. "But it wouldn't've gained you anything. What I'd really like from you, Citizen Dama…"
Dama nodded his head upward in agreement. "Go ahead," he said.
If not money, then a woman? Aparticular woman to whom a silk merchant might have access…?
"… is information." The flat certainty with which the words came out of Vettius's mouth emphasized the size and strength of the man speaking. He had black hair and spoke with a slight tang of the Illyrian frontier.
"Go ahead," Dama repeated with outward calm.
From the office came "… though I fear that by mentioning any particular excellence first, I will seem to devalue…"
"I can see why the old man wants to be Rutilianus's tame philosopher," Vettius said. "It's getting harder and harder to scrape up enough pupils freelance to keep him in bread, onions, and a sop of wine…"
Dama nodded.
"Thing is, I'm not quite clear whatyour part in the business might be, Citizen."
This time the soldier's smile made Dama measure in his mind the distance between him and the hilt of the sword resting against the wall. Too far, almost certainly.
And unnecessary. Almost certainly.
"Menelaus was a friend of my father's," Dama said. "A good friend. Toward the last, my father's only friend. Menelaus is too proud to take charity from me directly-but he was glad to have me stand beside him while he sought this position in the Prefect's household."
Vettius chuckled. "Stand beside him," he repeated ironically. "With a purse full of silver you hand out to anybody who might ease your buddy's road."
"… speak of the River Tagus, red with the blood of the bandits you as Governor slaughtered there?"
"He doesn't know that," snapped Dama.
"But you do, merchant," the soldier said."You take your family duties pretty seriously, don't you?"
"Yeah, I do," agreed Dama as simply as if he didn't know he was being mocked… and perhaps he was not being mocked. "Menelaus is my friend as well as my duty, but-I take all my duties seriously."
The big man smiled; this time, for a change, it gave his face a pleasant cast. "Yeah," he said. "So do I."
"I can see that," Dama agreed, feeling his body relax for the first time since his interview with this big, deadly man began. "And it's your duty to guard Rutilianus."
"More a matter of keeping things from hitting the Prefect from somewhere he's not looking," Vettius said with a shrug."So I like to know the people who're getting close to him."
He grinned. "Usually I don't much like what I learn. Usually."
Dama nodded toward the office, where Menelaus's measured periods had broken up into the general babble of all those in the room."I think we'd better get back," he said. "I'm glad to have met you, Lucius Vettius."
And meant it.
The Prefect called, "Ah, Vettius," craning his neck to see over his shoulder as Dama and the soldier reentered the room. "We rather like Menelaus here, don't we, gentlemen?"
Yes yes/Well-spoken indeed/Seems solid for a pagan "Well, being able to spout a set speech doesn't make him learned, sir," crabbed Vulco.
He fixed Menelaus with a glare meant to be steely. Vulco's head was offset so that only one eye bore, making him look rather like an angry crow.
"Tell me, sirrah," he demanded, "who was it that Thersites fed his sons to? Quick, now-no running around to sort through your books."
The philosopher blinked in confusion. Dama thought for a moment that his friend had been caught out, but Menelaus said, "Good sir, Atreus it was who murdered the sons of his brother Thyestes and cooked them for their father."
Dama suppressed a laugh. Menelaus had paused in order to find a way to answer the question without making his questioner looktoo much of a fool.
Vulco blinked. "Well, that seems all right," he muttered, fixing his eyes on his hands and seeming to examine his manicure.
"Yes, well," Rutilianus agreed. "But you, Lucius Vettius. What information doyou have for us?"
Everyone else in the room looked at the tall soldier: Menelaus in surprise, the Prefect and his companions with a partially concealed avidity for scandal; Dama with a professionally blank expression, waiting to hear what was said before he decided how to deal with anything that needed to be countered.
Vettius glanced at Dama. "I'd suggested to His Excellency," he said, "that he let me see what I could learn about the learned Menelaus."
"Of course," Rutilianus agreed, raising his eyebrows. "After all, we need to be sure of the man who's going to be responsible for the moral training of my children."
His companions bobbed and muttered approval.
Vettius took a bi-fold notebook of waxed boards from the wallet in the bosom of his toga, but he didn't bother to open the document before he said, "Menelaus comes from Caesarea in Cappadocia where his father was one of the city councilors."
Like Dama's father.
"Was schooled in Gaza, then Athens. Returned home and taught there for most of his life. Moved to Rome about five years ago. Gives lessons in oratory and philosophy-"
"Epicurean philosophy," the subject of the discussion broke in, before Dama could shush him.
"Epicurean philosophy," Vettius continued, giving Dama-rather than Menelaus-a grin that was not entirely friendly. "In the Forum of Trajan; to about a dozen pupils at any one time. Doesn't get along particularly well with the other teachers who've set up in the same area. For the past three months, he's been attacking one Pyrrhus the Prophet in his lectures, but the two haven't met face to face."
Dama was ready this time. His finger tapped Menelaus's shoulder firmly, even as the older man opened his mouth to violently-and needlessly-state his opinion of Pyrrhus.
"Well, weknow he's a philosopher!" Caelius said. "What about his personal life?"
"He doesn't have much personal life," Vettius said. He betrayed his annoyance with a thinning of tone so slight that only Dama, of those in the office, heard and understood it. "When he's a little ahead, he buys used books. When he's behind-"
Menelaus winced and examined the floor.
"-which is usually, and now, he pawns them. Stays out of wineshops. Every few months or so he visits a whore named Drome who works the alleys behind the Beef Market.
"These aren't," Vettius added dryly, "expensive transactions."
Dama looked at the philosopher in amazement. Menelaus met his gaze sidelong and muttered, "Ah, Dama, I-thought that when I grew older, some impediments to a calm mind would cease to intrude on my life. But I'm not as old as that yet. I'm ashamed to admit."
Macer opened his mouth as if about to say something. Lucius Vettius turned toward the man and-tapped his notebook, Dama thought, with the index finger of his left hand.
Dama thought the soldier's gesture might be only an idle tic; but Macer understood something by it. The councilor's eyes bulged, and his mouth shut with an audible clop.
"Last year," Vettius continued calmly, "Menelaus moved out of his garret apartment at night, stiffing his landlord for the eight-days' rent."
"Sir!" the philosopher blurted in outrage despite Dama's restraining hand. "When I moved there in the spring, I was told the roof tiles would be replaced in a few days. Nothing had been done by winter-and my books were drenched by the first heavy rains!"
"The pair of Moors sharing the room now-" said Vettius.
"If you want to believe-" Vulco began.
"-say the landlord told them when they moved in that the roof tiles would be replaced in a few days," Vettius continued, slicing across the interruption like a sword cutting rope. "That was three months ago."
He turned to the philosopher and said coldly, "Do you have anything to add tothat, Faustus Menelaus?"
Menelaus blinked.
Dama bowed low to the soldier and said, "My companion and I beg your pardon, sir. He did not realize that the life of an exceptionally decent and honorable man might contain, on close examination… incidents which look regrettable out of context."
"Well, still…" Rutilianus said, frowning as he shifted on his couch. "What do you fellows think?"
All four of his civilian companions opened their mouths to speak. Macer was fractionally ahead of the others, blurting, "Well, Severiana certainly won't be pleased if an opponent of Pyrrhus the Prophet enters your household!"
"Didn't I tell you to leave my wife out of this?" Rutilianus snarled.
Macer quailed as though he'd been slapped. The other civilians froze, unwilling to offer what might not be the words the aroused Prefect wanted to hear.
Vettius looked at them with cool amusement, then back to Rutilianus. "If I may speak, sir?" he said.
"Of course, of course, Lucius," Rutilianus said, wiping his forehead with a napkin. "What do you think I should do?"
Dama squeezed Menelaus's shoulder very firmly, lest the old philosopher interrupt again-which Dama was quite sure would mean disaster. The soldier wasn't the sort of man whose warnings, voiced or implied, were to be ignored without cost.
"I can't speak to the fellow's philosophy," Vettius said.
He paused a half-beat, to see if Menelaus would break in on him; and smiled when the philosopher held his peace. "But for his life-Citizen Dama stated the situation correctly. The learned Menelaus is an exceptionally decent and honorable man, fit to enter your household, sir-"
Vulco started to say something. Before the words came out, the soldier had turned and added, in a voice utterly without emotion, "-or your council. From a moral standpoint."
Vulco blanched into silence.
Dama expressionlessly watched the-almost-exchange. This Vettius could go far in the imperial bureaucracy, with his ability to gather information and his ruthless willingness to use what he had. But the way the soldier moved, his timing-thrusting before his target was expecting it, ending a controversy before it became two-sided-those were a swordsman's virtues, not a bureaucrat's.
Dama's right palm tingled, remembering the feel of a swordhilt. In five years, he'd turned his father's modest legacy into real wealth by a willingness to go where the profits were as high as the risks. He knew swordsmen, knew killers…
"Even with the…?" the Prefect was saying. His eyes looked inward for a moment. "But yes, I can see that anyone's life examined closely might look-"
Rutilianus broke off abruptly as if in fear that his musings were about to enter territory he didn't care to explore.
"Well, anyway, Menelaus," he resumed, "I think we'll give you-"
"Gaius, dearie," called a silk-clad youth past the scowling nomenclator, "there's somebody here you justhave to see."
Rutilianus looked up with a frown that softened when he saw the youth-the boy, really-who was speaking. "I'm busy, now, Ganymede. Can't it wait…?"
"Not an eentsy minute," Ganymede said firmly, lifting his pert nose so that he looked down at the Prefect past chubby cheeks.
"Oh, send him in, then," Rutilianus agreed with a sigh.
The nomenclator, his voice pitched a half-step up with scandal and outrage, announced, "The honorable Gnaeus Aelius Acer…"he paused "… emissary of Pyrrhus the Prophet."
"Thatcharlatan!" Menelaus snapped.
"It ill behooves a pagan to criticize a Christian, you!" Macer retorted.
"Pyrrhus is no Christian!" said Menelaus. "That's as much a sham as his claim to know the future and-"
Dama laid a finger across his friend's lips.
A young man whose dress and bearing marked his good family was being ushered in by the nomenclator.
Rutilianus glanced from the newcomer to Menelaus and remarked in a distant tone, "A word of advice, good philosopher: my wife believes Pyrrhus to be a Christian. A belief in which I choose to concur."
He turned to the newcomer and said, "Greetings, Gnaeus Acer. It's been too long since you or your father have graced us with your company."
Instead of responding with a moment of small talk, Acer said, "Pyrrhus to Gaius Rutilianus, greetings. There is-"
There was a glaze over the young man's eyes and his voice seemed leaden. He did not look at the Prefect as his tongue broke into singsong to continue:
"-one before you
"With whose beard he cloaks for boys his lust.
"Cast him from you hastily
"And spurn him in the dust."
Pyrrhus's messenger fell silent. "I think there's a mistake-" Dama began while his mind raced, searching for a diplomatic way to deny the absurd accusation.
Menelaus was neither interested in nor capable of diplomacy. "That's doggerel," he said, speaking directly to the Prefect. "And it's twaddle. I've never touched a boy carnally in my life."
After a pause just too short for anyone else to interject a comment, the philosopher added, "I can't claim that as a virtue. Because frankly, I've never been tempted in that direction."
"Vettius?" the Prefect asked, his eyes narrowing with supposition.
The soldier shrugged. "I can't prove an absence," he said-his tone denying the possibility implicit in the words."But if the learned Menelaus had tastes in that direction, some neighbor or slave would surely have mentioned it."
"In his wallet-" Acer broke in unexpectedly.
"-the debaucher keeps
"A letter to the boy with whom he sleeps."
"That," shouted Menelaus, "is a lie as false and black as the heart of the charlatan whose words this poor deluded lad is speaking!"
Vettius reached toward the bosom of the philosopher's toga.
Menelaus raised a hand to fend off what he saw as an assault on his sense of propriety. Dama caught the philosopher's arm and said, "Let him search you now. That will demonstrate the lie to all these gentlemen."
Vettius removed a cracked leather purse whose corners had been restitched so often that its capacity was reduced by a third. He thumbed up the flap-the tie-strings had rotted off a decade before-and emptied it, item by item, into his left palm.
A stylus. A pair of onions.
"I, ah," Menelaus muttered, "keep my lunch…"
Dama patted him to silence.
A half-crust of bread, chewed rather than torn from a larger piece. The lips of Rutilianus and his companions curled.
A tablet, closed so that the two boards protected the writing on their waxed inner sides. All eyes turned to the philosopher.
All eyes save those of Gnaeus Acer, who stood as quietly as a resting sheep.
"My notebook," explained Menelaus."I jot down ideas for my lectures. And sometimes appointments."
Vettius dumped back the remainder of the wallet's contents and opened the tablet.
"It's in Greek," he commented. He shifted so that light from the garden door threw shadows across the marks scored into the wax and made them legible.
"Yes, I take my notes-" the philosopher began.
" 'Menelaus to his beloved Kurnos,' " Vettius said, translating the lines rather than reading them in their original. " 'Kurnos, don't drive me under the yoke against my will-don't goad my love too much.'
"
"What!" said Dama.
"Oh…!" murmured several of the others in the room.
" 'I won't invite you to the party,' " the soldier continued, raising his voice to a level sufficient to bark commands across the battlefield," 'nor forbid you. When you're present, I'm distressed-but when you go away, I still love you.' "
"Why, that's not my notebook!" Menelaus cried. "Nor my words. Why, it's just a quotation from the ancient poet Theognis!"
Dama started to extend a hand to the notebook. He caught himself before he thought the gesture was visible, but the soldier had seen and understood. Vettius handed the tablet to Dama open.
Pyrrhus's messenger should have been smiling-should have shownsome expression. Gnaeus Acer's face remained as soft and bland as butter. He turned to leave the office as emotionlessly as he'd arrived.
Menelaus reached for Acer's arm. Dama blocked the older man with his body. "Control yourself!" he snarled under his breath.
The message on the tablet couldn't have been written by the old philosopher… but the forgery was very good.
Too good for Dama to see any difference between Menelaus's hand and that of the forger.
"Lies don't change the truth!"Menelaus shouted to the back of Gnaeus Acer. "Tell your master! The truth will find him yet!"
"Citizen Menelaus," the Prefect said through pursed lips, "you'd better-" his mind flashed him a series of pictures: Menelaus brawling with Pyrrhus's messenger in the waiting room "-step into the garden for a moment while we discuss matters. And your friend-"
"Sir," Vettius interjected, "I think it might be desirable to have Citizen Dama present to hear the discussions."
"We don't owe an explanation to some itinerant pederast, surely?" said Caelius.
Rutilianus looked at him."No," he said."I don't owe anyone an explanation, Caelius. But my friend Lucius is correct that sometimes giving an explanation can save later awkwardness-even in matters as trivial as these."
For the first time, Dama could see that Rutilianus had reached high office for better reason than the fact that he had the right ancestors.
A momentary tremor shook Menelaus's body. The philosopher straightened, calm but looking older than Dama had ever seen him before.
He bowed to the Prefect and said, "Noble Rutilianus, your graciousness will overlook my outburst; but I assure you I will never forgive my own conduct, which was so unworthy of a philosopher and a guest in your house."
Menelaus strode out the door to the garden, holding his head high as though he were unaware of Caelius's giggles and the smug certainty in the eyes of Vulco.
"Citizen Dama, do you have anything to add?" the Prefect said-a judge now, rather than the head of a wealthy household.
"There is no possibility that the accusation is true," Dama said, choosing his words and knowing that there were no words in any language that would achieve his aim. "I say that as a man who has known Menelaus since I was old enough to have memory."
"And the letter he'd written?" Macer demanded. "I supposethat's innocent?"
Dama looked at his accuser. "I can't explain the letter," he said. "Except to point out that Pyrrhus knew about it, even though Menelaus himself obviously had no idea what was written on the tablet."
Caelius snickered again.
"Lucius Vettius, what do you say?" Rutilianus asked from his couch. He wiped his face with a napkin, dabbing precisely instead of sweeping the cloth promiscuously over his skin.
"In my opinion," the soldier said, "the old man didn't know what was on the tablet. And he isn't interested in boys. In my opinion."
"So you would recommend that I employ the learned Menelaus to teach my sons proper morality?" Rutilianus said.
For a moment, Dama thought-hoped-prayed The big soldier looked at Dama, not the Prefect, and said, "No, I can't recommend that. There're scores of philosophers in Rome who'd be glad of the position. There's no reason at all for you to take a needless risk."
And of course, Vettius was quite right. A merchant like Dama could well appreciate the balance of risk against return.
Pyrrhus the Prophet understood the principles also.
"Yes, too bad," Rutilianus said. "Well-spoken old fellow, too. But-" his eyes traced past the nomenclator as if hoping for another glimpse of the boy Ganymede "-some of those perverts are just too good at concealing it. Can't take the risk, can we?"
He looked around the room as his smiling civilian advisors chorused agreement. Vettius watched Dama with an expression of regret, but he had no reason to be ashamed of what he'd said. Even Dama agreed with the assessment.
The wheezing gasp from the garden was loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, but only Vettius and Dama understood what it meant.
Sosius was between Vettius and the garden door for an instant. The soldier stiff-armed him into a wall, because that was faster than words and there wasn't a lot of time when Vettius and Dama crashed into the garden together. The merchant had picked up a half step by not having to clear his own path.
– men were dying.
It looked for a moment as though the old philosopher was trying to lean his forehead against the wall of the house. He'd rested the pommel of Vettius's sword at an angle against the stucco and was thrusting his body against it. The gasp had come when Menelaus vomited blood and toppled sideways before Dama could catch him.
– the swordpoint broke the resisting skin beneath Menelaus's breastbone and slid swiftly upward through the old man's lungs, stomach, and heart.
Vettius grabbed Menelaus's limp wrist to prevent the man from flopping on his back. The swordpoint stuck a finger's breadth out from between Menelaus's shoulder blades. It would grate on the stone if he were allowed to lie naturally.
Dama reached beneath the old man's neck and took the weight of his torso. Vettius glanced across at him, then eased back-putting his own big form between the scene and the excited civilians spilling from the office to gape at it.
"You didn't have to do that, old friend," Dama whispered."There were other households…"
But no households who wouldn't have heard the story of what had happened here-or a similar story, similarly told by an emissary of Pyrrhus the Prophet. Menelaus had known that… and Menelaus hadn't been willing to accept open charity from his friend.
The old man did not speak. A trail of sluggish blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes blinked once in the sunlight, twice Then they stayed open and began to glaze.
Dama gripped the spatha's hilt. One edge of the blade was embedded in Menelaus's vertebrae. He levered the weapon, hearing bone crack as the steel came free.
"Get back!" the merchant snarled to whoever it was whose motion blurred closer through the film of tears. He drew the blade out, feeling his friend's body spasm beneath his supporting arm.
He smelled the wastes that the corpse voided after mind and soul were gone. Menelaus wore a new toga. Dama'd provided it "as a loan for the interview with Rutilianus."
Dama stood up. He caught a fold of his own garment in his left hand and scrubbed the steel with it, trusting the thickness of the wool to protect his flesh from the edge that had just killed the man he had known and respected as long as he had memory.
Known and respected and loved.
And when the blade was clean, he handed the sword, pommel-first, to Lucius Vettius.
There were seats and tables in the side-room of the tavern, but Vettius found the merchant hunched over the masonry bar in the front. The bartender, ladling soup from one of the kettles cemented into the counter, watched hopefully when the soldier surveyed the room from the doorway, then strode over to Dama.
The little fella had been there for a couple hours. Not making trouble. Not even drinkingthat heavy…
But there was a look in his eyes that the bartender had seen in other quiet men at the start of a real bad night.
"I thought you might've gone home," Vettius said as he leaned his broad left palm on the bar between his torso and Dama's.
"I didn't," the merchant said. "Go away."
He swigged down the last of his wine and thrust the bronze cup, chained to the counter, toward the bartender. "Another."
The tavern was namedAt the Sign of Venus. While he waited for the bartender to fill the cup-and while he pointedly ignored Dama's curt demand tohim -Vettius examined the statue on the street-end of the counter.
The two-foot-high terracotta piece had given the place its name. It showed Venus tying her sandal, while her free hand rested on the head of Priapus's cock to balance her. Priapus's body had been left the natural russet color of the coarse pottery, but Venus was painted white, with blue for her jewelry and the string bra and briefs she wore. The color was worn off her right breast, the one nearer the street.
Dama took a drink from the refilled cup. "Menelaus had been staying with me the past few days," he said into the wine. "So I didn't go back to my apartment."
The bartender was keeping down at the other end of the counter, which was just as it should be. "One for me," Vettius called. The man nodded and ladled wine into another cup, then mixed it with twice the volume of heated water before handing it to the soldier.
"Sorry about your friend," Vettius said in what could have been mistaken for a light tone.
"Sorry about your sword," Dama muttered, then took a long drink from his cup.
The soldier shrugged."It's had blood on it before," he said. After a moment, he added, "Any ideas about how Pyrrhus switched the notebook in your friend's purse?"
Like everyone else in the tavern, the two men wore only tunics and sandals. For centuries, togas had been relegated to formal wear: for court appearances, say; or for dancing attendance on a wealthy patron like Gaius Rutilius Rutilianus.
Dama must have sent his toga home with the slaves who'd accompanied him and Menelaus to the interview. The garment would have to be washed before it could be worn again, of course…
"It wouldn't have been hard," the merchant said, putting his cup down and meeting Vettius's eyes for the first time since walking behind his friend's corpse past the gawping servants and favor-seekers in the reception hall."In the street, easily enough. Or perhaps a servant."
He looked down at the wine, then drank again. "A servant of mine, that would probably make it."
Vettius drank also. "You know," he said, as if idly, "I don't much like being made a fool of with the Prefect."
"You'restill alive," Dama snapped.
Vettius looked at the smaller man without expression. The bartender, who'd seenthat sort of look before also, signaled urgently toward a pair of husky waiters; but the soldier said only, "Yeah. We are alive, aren't we?"
Dama met the soldier's eyes. "Sorry," he said. "That was out of line."
"Been a rough day for a lot of people," said Vettius with a dismissive shrug. "For… just about everybody except Pyrrhus, I'd say. Know anything about that gentleman?"
The merchant chuckled. "I know what I've heard from Menelaus," he said. "Mostly that Pyrrhus isn't a gentleman. He's a priest from somewhere in the East-I've heard Edessa, but I've heard other places. Came here to Rome, found an old temple that was falling down and made it his church."
Dama sipped wine and rolled it around his mouth as if trying to clear away the taste of something. Maybe he was. He'd felt no twinge at mentioning Menelaus's name, even though his friend's body was still in the process of being laid out.
Menelaus had always wanted to be cremated. He said that the newer fashion of inhumation came from-he'd glance around, to make sure he wasn't being overheard by those who might take violent offense-mystical nonsense about resurrection of the body.
Vettius looked past Dama toward the bartender."You there," he called, fishing silver from his wallet. "Sausage rolls for me and my friend."
To the merchant he added, as blandly as though theywere old friends, "There's something about a snake?"
"Yes…"Dama said, marshalling his recollections."He claims to have one of the bronze serpents that Christ set up in the wilderness to drive away a plague. Something like that. He claims it talks, gives prophecies."
"Does it?"
Dama snorted."I can make a snake talk-to fools-if there's enough money in it. And there's money in this one, believe me."
He bit into a steaming sausage roll. It was juicy; good materials well-prepared, and the wine was better than decent as well. It was a nice tavern, a reasonable place to stop.
Besides being the place nearest to the Prefect's doorway where Dama could get a drink.
He poured a little wine onto the terrazzo floor. The drops felt cool when they splashed his sandaled feet. Vettius cocked an eyebrow at him.
"An offering to a friend," Dama said curtly.
"One kind of offering," the soldier answered. "Not necessarily the kind that does the most good."
Dama had been thinking the same thing. That was why he didn't mind talking about his friend after all…
For a moment, the two men eyed one another coldly. Then Vettius went on, "Happen to know where this temple Pyrrhus lives in might be?"
Dama hadn't mentioned that Pyrrhus livedin his church. It didn't surprise him that the soldier already knew, nor that Lucius Vettius probably knew other things about the Prophet.
"As it happens," the merchant said aloud, "I do. It's in the Ninth District, pretty near the Portico of Pompey. And-"
He popped the remainder of his sausage roll into his mouth and chewed it slowly while Vettius waited for the conclusion of the sentence.
An open investigation of Pyrrhus would guarantee the soldier an immediate posting to whichever frontier looked most miserable on the day Rutilianus's wife learned what he was doing to her darling.
You know, I don't much like being made a fool of with the Prefect.
Vettius wasn't going to get support through his normal channels; but it might be that he could find someone useful who took a personal interest in the matter…
Dama washed down the roll with the last of his wine. "And since it's a Sunday," he resumed, "they'll be having an open ceremony." He squinted past Venus and the smirking Priapus to observe the sun's angle. "We'll have plenty of time to get there, I should think."
He brought a silver coin from his purse, checked the weight of it with his finger, and added a bronze piece before slapping the money onto the counter."To cover the wine," Dama called to the bartender. "Mine and my friend's both."
The two men shouldered their way into the crowded street, moving together as though they were a practiced team.
They heard the drum even before they turned the corner and saw the edges of a crowd which Vettius's trained eye estimated to contain over a thousand souls. Dusk would linger for another half-hour, but torches were already flaring in the hands of attendants on the raised base of a small temple flanked by three-story apartment buildings.
"Are we late?" the soldier asked.
Dama dipped his chin in negation. "They want places near the front, and a lot of them can't afford to buy their way up."
His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the expensively dyed cloaks and the jewelry winking in ears and coiffures of matrons waiting close to the temple-the church-steps. "On the other hand," he added, "a lot of themcan afford to pay."
The crowd completely blocked the street, but that didn't appear to concern either the civic authorities or the local inhabitants. Vettius followed the merchant's eyes and muttered, "Pyrrhus himself owns the building across the street. He uses it to house his staff and put up wealthy pilgrims."
A flutist, playing a counterpoint on the double tubes of his instrument, joined the drummer and torch-bearers on the porch. Two of the attendants at the back of the crowd, identifiable by their bleached tunics and batons of tough rootwood, moved purposefully toward Vettius and Dama.
The merchant had two silver denarii folded in his palm. "We've come to worship with the holy Pyrrhus," he explained, moving his hand over that of one of the attendants. The exchange was expert, a maneuver both parties had practiced often in the past.
"Yes," said the attendant. "If you have a request for guidance from the holy Pyrrhus, give it on a sealed tablet to the servants at the front."
Dama nodded and reached for another coin. "Not now," said the attendant. "You will be granted an opportunity to make a gift directly to the divinity."
"Ah…" said Vettius. "I don't have a tablet of my own. Could-"
The other attendant, the silent one, was already handing Vettius an ordinary tablet of waxed boards. He carried a dozen similar ones in a large scrip.
"Come," said-ordered-the first attendant. His baton, a dangerous weapon as well as a staff of office, thrust through the crowd like the bronze ram of a warship cleaving choppy waves.
There were loud complaints from earlier-and poorer-worshippers, but no one attempted physical opposition to the Prophet's servant. Vettius gripped Dama's shoulder from behind as they followed, lest the pressure of the crowd separate them beyond any cure short of open violence.
"Pyrrhus's boys aren't very talkative,'' Vettius whispered in the smaller man's ear. "Drugs, perhaps?"
Dama shrugged. Though the attendant before them had a cultured accent, he was as devoid of small-talk and emotion as the messenger who brought deadly lies about Menelaus to the Prefect. Drugs were a possible cause; but the merchant already knew a number of men-and a greater number of women-for whom religious ecstasy of one sort or another had utterly displaced all other passions.
Pyrrhus's converted temple was unimposing. A building, twenty feet wide and possibly thirty feet high to the roof-peak, stood on a stepped base of coarse volcanic rock. Two pillars, and pilasters formed by extensions of the sidewalls, supported the pediment. That triangular area was ornamented with a painting on boards showing a human-faced serpent twined around a tau cross.
The temple had originally been dedicated to Asklepios, the healing god who'd lived part of his life as a snake. The current decoration was quite in keeping with the building's pagan use.
There were six attendants on the temple porch now. The newcomers-one of them was Gnaeus Acer-clashed bronze rattles at a consistent rhythm; not the same rhythm for both men, nor in either case quite the rhythm that the staring-eyed drummer stroked from his own instrument.
The guide slid Vettius and Dama to within a row of the front of the crowd. Most of the worshipers still ahead of them were wealthy matrons, but a few were country folk. Vettius thought he also saw the flash of a toga carrying a senator's broad russet stripe. More attendants, some of them carrying horn-lensed lanterns rather than batons, formed a line at the base of the steps.
Dama had paid silver for a second-rank location. The first rank almost certainly went for gold.
The merchant had opened a blank notebook and was hunching to write within the strait confines of the crowd. The tablet Vettius had been given looked normal enough at a glance: a pair of four-by five-inch boards hinged so that they could cover one another. One of the boards was waxed within a raised margin of wood that, when the tablet was closed, protected words written on the soft surface. A cord attached to the back could be tied or sealed to the front board to hold the tablet shut.
Dama finished what he was doing, grinned, and took the tablet from Vettius. "Shield me," he whispered.
Vettius obediently shifted his body, though the two of them were probably the only members of the crowd who weren't focused entirely on their own affairs.
Dama had been scribbling with a bone stylus. Now, using the stylus tip, he pressed on what seemed to be a tiny knot through the wooden edge of the tablet supplied to Vettius. The knot slipped out into his waiting palm. A quick tug started the waxed wooden back sliding away from the margin of what had seemed a solid piece.
"Pyrrhus the Prophet has strange powers indeed," Vettius said as he fitted the tablet back together again. "Let me borrow your stylus."
He wrote quickly, cutting the wax with large, square letters; not a calligrapher's hand, but one which could write battlefield orders that were perfectly clear.
"What are you asking?" Dama whispered.
"Whether Amasius will die so that I get promoted to Legate of the Domestic Horse," the soldier replied. He slapped that tablet closed. "I suppose the attendants seal these for us?"
"Ah…" said Dama with a worried expression. "That might not be a tactful question to have asked… ah, if the information gets into the wrong hands, you know."
"Sure wouldn't be," Vettius agreed, "if I'd signed 'Decurion Vettius' instead of 'Section Leader Lycorides.' "
He chuckled. "You know," he added, "Lycorides is about dumb enough not to figure how a question like that opens you up to blackmail."
He grinned at the pediment of the church and said, "Pyrrhus would figure it out, though. Wouldn't he?"
Dama watched a heavy-set woman in the front rank wave her ivory tablet at an attendant. She wore a heavy cross on a gold chain, and the silk band which bound her hair was embroidered with the Chi-Rho symbol. Menelaus may not have thought Pyrrhus was a Christian; but, as the Prefect had retorted, there were Christians who felt otherwise.
"Hercules!"Vettius swore under his breath."That's Severiana-the Prefect's wife!"
He snorted. "And Ganymede. That boy gets around."
"Want to duck back now and let me cover?" the merchant offered.
Vettius grimaced. "They won't recognize me," he said in the tone of one praying as well as assessing the situation.
An attendant leaned toward Dama, past the veiled matron and her daughter in the front rank who were reciting prayers aloud in Massiliot Greek.
"If you have petitions for advice from the Prophet," the man said, "hand them in now."
As the attendant spoke, he rolled a lump of wax between his thumb and forefinger, holding it over the peak of the lantern he carried in his other hand. Prayers chirped to a halt as the women edged back from the lantern's hissing metal frame.
Dama held out his closed notebook with the cord looped over the front board. The attendant covered the loop with wax, into which Dama then firmly pressed his carnelian seal ring. The process of sealing Vettius's tablet was identical, except that the soldier wore a signet of gilt bronze.
"What're you asking?"Vettius whispered under cover of the music from the porch and the prayers which the women resumed as soon as the attendant made his way into the church with the tablets.
"I'm asking about the health of my wife and three children back in Gades."
"You're not from Spain, are you?" the soldier asked-reflexively checking the file of data in his mind.
"Never been there," Dama agreed. "Never married, either."
The door of the church opened to pass an attendant with small cymbals. He raised them but didn't move until the door shut behind him.
The music stopped. The crowd's murmuring stilled to a collective intake of breath.
The cymbals crashed together. A tall, lean man stood on the porch in front of the attendants.
"Mithra!" the merchant blurted-too quietly to be overheard, but still a stupid thing to say here.
Dama understood about talking snakes and ways to read sealed tablets; but he didn't have the faintest notion of how Pyrrhus had appeared out of thin air that way.
"I welcome you," Pyrrhus cried in a voice that pierced without seeming especially loud, "in the name of Christ and of Glaukon, the Servant of God."
Vettius narrowed his eyes.
Dama, though he was uncertain whether the soldier's ignorance was real or just pretense, leaned even closer than the press demanded and whispered, "That's the name of his snake. The bronze one."
"Welcome Pyrrhus!" the crowd boomed. "Prophet of God!"
A doublecrack! startled both men but disturbed few if any of the other worshipers. The torch-bearing attendants had uncoiled short whips with poppers. They lashed the air to put an emphatic period to the sequence of statement and response.
Pyrrhus spread his arms as though thrusting open a double door. "May all enemies of God and his servants be far from these proceedings," he cried.
"May all enemies of Pyrrhus and Glaukon be far from these proceedings!" responded the crowd.
Crack crack!
"God bless the Emperors and their servants on Earth," Pyrrhus said. Pyrrhusordered, it seemed to Vettius; though the object of the order was a deity.
"Not taking any chances with a treason trial, is he?" the soldier muttered.
"God bless Pyrrhus and Glaukon, his servants!" responded the crowd joyously.
The merchant nodded. Those around them were too lost in the quivering ambiance of the event to notice the carping. "What I want to know," he whispered back, "is how long does this go on?"
"Pyrrhus! Liar!" a man screamed from near the front of the gathering. The crowd recoiled as though the cry were a stone flung in their midst.
"Two months ago, you told me my brother'd been drowned in a shipwreck!" the man shouted into the pause his accusation blew in the proceedings.
The accuser was short and already balding, despite being within a few years of Vettius's twenty-five; but his features were probably handsome enough at times when rage didn't distort them.
"Blasphemer!" somebody cried; but most of the crowd poised, waiting for Pyrrhus to respond. The attendants were as motionless as statues.
"His ship was driven ashore in Malta, but he's fine!" the man continued desperately. "He's home again, and I've married hiswidow! What am I supposed to do, you lying bastard!"
Pyrrhus brought his hands together. Dama expected a clap of sound, but there was none, only the Prophet's piercing voice crying, "Evil are they who evil speak of God! Cast them from your midst with stone and rod!"
What "You've ruined my-" the man began.
– doggerel, Dama thought, and then a portly matron next to the accuser slashed a line of blood across his forehead with the pin of the gold-and-garnet clasp fastening her cloak. The victim screamed and stumbled back, into the clumsy punch of a frail-looking man twice his age.
The crowd gave a collective snarl like that of dogs ringing a boar, then surged forward together.
The paving stones were solidly set in concrete, but several of the infuriated worshipers found chunks of building material of a size to swing and hurl. Those crude weapons were more danger to the rest of the crowd than to the intended victim-knocked onto all fours and crawling past embroidered sandals, cleated boots, and bare soles, all kicking at him with murderous intent.
Vettius started to move toward the core of violence with a purposeful look in his eye. The merchant, to whom public order was a benefit rather than a duty, gripped the bigger man's arm. Vettius jerked his arm loose.
Tried to jerk his arm loose. Dama's small frame belied his strength; but much more surprising was his willingness to oppose the soldier whom he knew was still much stronger-as well as being on the edge of a killing rage.
The shock brought Vettius back to present awareness. The accuser would probably survive the inept battering; and one man-even a man as strong and determined as Lucius Vettius-could do little to change the present odds.
The mob jostled them as if they were rocks in a surf of anger. "Two months ago," Dama said, with his lips close to the soldier's ear, "he'd have been one of those kicking. That's not why we're here."
The victim reached the back of the crowd and staggered to his feet again. A few eager fanatics followed some way into the darkness; but Pyrrhus spread his arms on the porch of the church, calming the crowd the way a teacher can appear and quiet a schoolroom.
Whips cracked the worshipers to attention.
"Brothers and sisters in God," the Prophet called, clearly audible despite the panting and foot-shuffling that filled the street even after the murderous cries had abated."Pray now for the Republic and the Emperors. May they seek proper guidance in the time of testing that is on them!"
"What's that mean?" Dama whispered.
The soldier shrugged. "There's nothing specialI know about," he muttered. "Of course, it's the sort of thing you could say anytime in the past couple centuries and be more right than wrong."
Pyrrhus's long prayer gave no more information as to the nature of the "testing" than had been offered at the start, but the sentences rambled through shadowy threats and prophetic thickets barbed with words in unknown languages. On occasion-random occasions, it seemed to Vettius-the Prophet lowered his arms and the crowd shouted, "Amen!" After the first time, the soldier and merchant joined in with feigned enthusiasm.
Despite his intention to listen carefully-and his absolute need to stay awake if he were to survive the night-Vettius was startled out of a fog when Pyrrhus cried, "Depart now, in the love of God and his servants Pyrrhus and Glaukon!"
"God bless Pyrrhus, the servant of God!" boomed the crowd, as though the meaningless, meandering prayer had brought the worshipers to some sort of joyous epiphany.
Whips cracked. The musicians behind Pyrrhus clashed out a concentus like that with which they had heralded the Prophet's appearance Pyrrhus was gone, as suddenly and inexplicably as he'd appeared.
The crowd shook itself around the blinking amazement of Vettius and Dama. "I don't see…" the merchant muttered. The torches trailed sparks and pitchy smoke up past the pediment, but there was no fog or haze sufficient to hide a man vanishing from a few feet away.
"Is this all-" Vettius began.
"Patience," said Dama.
The attendants-who hadn't moved during the near riot-formed a double line up the stepped base of the building to where the drummer opened the door. Worshipers from the front of the crowd, those who'd paid for their places and could afford to pay more for a personal prophecy, advanced between the guiding lines.
Vettius's face twisted in a moue as he and Dama joined the line. He shouldn't have to be counseled in patience by a silk merchant…
The private worshipers passed one by one through the door, watched by the attendants. A man a couple places in front of Vettius wore an expensive brocade cloak, but his cheeks were scarred and one ear had been chewed down to a nub. As he stepped forward, one of the attendants put out a hand in bar and said, "No weapons. You have a-"
"Hey!" the man snarled. "You leave me-"
The attendant on the other side reached under the cloak and plucked out a dagger with a wicked point and a long, double-edged blade.
The pair of women nearest the incident squealed in horror, while Vettius poised to react if necessary. The man grabbed the hand of the attendant holding his dagger and said, "Hey! That's for personal reasons, see?"
The first attendant clubbed the loaded butt of his whip across the back of the man's neck. The fellow slumped like an empty wineskin. Two of the musicians laid down their instruments and dragged him toward the side of the building. Twittering, the women stepped past where he'd fallen.
Vettius glanced at Dama.
"I'm clean," the merchant murmured past the ghost of a humorless smile. He knew, as Vettius did, that the man being dragged away was as likely dead as merely unconscious.
That, along with what happened to the fellow who'd married his brother's wife, provided the night's second demonstration of how Pyrrhus kept himself safe. The Prophet might sound like a dimwitted charlatan, and his attendants might look as though they were sleepwalking most of the time; but he and they were ruthlessly competent where it counted.
As he passed inside the church, Dama glanced at the door leaves. He hoped to see some sign-a false panel; a sheet of mirror-polished metal; something -to suggest the illusion by which Pyrrhus came and left the porch. The outer surface of the wooden leaves had been covered with vermillion leather, but the inside showed the cracks and warping of age.
These were the same doors that had been in place when the building was an abandoned temple. There were no tricks in them.
A crosswall divided the interior of the church into two square rooms. The broad doorway between them was open, but the select group of worshipers halted in the first, the anteroom.
Crosswise in the center of the inner room, Pyrrhus the Prophet lay on a stone dais as though he were a corpse prepared for burial. His head rested on a raised portion of the stone, crudely carved to the shape of an open-jawed snake.
Behind the Prophet, against the back wall where the cult statue of Asklepios once stood, was a tau cross around which twined a metal-scaled serpent. The creature's humanoid head draped artistically over the crossbar.
Pairs of triple-wick lamps rested on stands in both rooms, but their light was muted to shadow by the high, black beams supporting the roof. A row of louvered clerestory windows had been added just beneath the eaves when the building was refurbished, but even during daylight they would have affected ventilation more than lighting.
Vettius estimated that forty or fifty people were allowed to enter before attendants closed the doors again and barred them. The anteroom was comfortably large enough to hold that number, but the worshipers-he and Dama as surely as the rest-all crowded toward the center where they could look through the doorway into the sanctum.
Bronze scales jingled a soft susurrus as the serpent lifted its head from the bar. "God bless Pyrrhus his servant!" rasped the creature in a voice like a wind-swung gate.
Vettius grabbed for the sword he wasn't carrying tonight. He noticed with surprise that Dama's arm had curved in a similar motion. Not the sort of reflex he'd have expected in a merchant… but Vettius had already decided that the little Cappadocian wasn't the sort of merchant one usually met.
"God bless Glaukon and Pyrrhus, his servants," responded the crowd, the words muzzed by a harshly echoing space intended for visual rather than acoustic worship.
"Mithra!" Dama said silently, a hand covering his lips as they mimed the pagan syllables.
He knew the serpent was moved by threads invisible in the gloom. He knew one of Pyrrhus's confederates spoke the greeting through a hole in the back wall which the bronze simulacrum covered.
But the serpent's creaking, rasping voice frightened him like nothing had since Like nothing ever had before.
Goods of various types were disposed around the walls of the anteroom. Sealed amphoras-sharp-ended jars that might contain anything from wine to pickled fish-leaned in clusters against three of the four corners. From wooden racks along the sidewalk hung bunches of leeks, turnips, radishes-and a pair of dead chickens. In the fourth corner was a stack of figured drinking-bowls (high-quality ware still packed in scrap papyrus to protect the designs from chipping during transit) and a wicker basket of new linen tunics.
For a moment, Vettius couldn't imagine why the church was used for storage of this sort. Then he noticed that each item was tagged: they were worshipers' gifts in kind, being consecrated by the Prophet's presence before they were distributed. Given the number of attendants Pyrrhus employed in his operation, such gifts would be immediately useful.
Pyrrhus sat up slowly on the couch, deliberately emphasizing his resemblance to a corpse rising from its bier. His features had a waxy stillness, and the only color on his skin was the yellow tinge cast by the lamp flames.
"Greetings, brothers and sisters in God," he said. His quiet, piercing voice seemed not to be reflected by the stone.
"Greetings, Pyrrhus, Prophet of God," the crowd and echoes yammered.
A pile of tablets stood beside the couch, skewed and colorful with the wax that sealed each one. Pyrrhus took the notebook on top and held it for a moment in both hands. His fingers were thin and exceptionally long, at variance with his slightly pudgy face.
"Klea, daughter of Menandros," he said. The elder of the two praying women who'd stood in front of Vettius during the open service gasped with delight. She stepped through the doorway, knelt, and took the tablet from the Prophet's hands."Remarriage," Pyrrhus said in the singsong with which he delivered his Verses, "is not for you but faith. You may take the veil for me in death."
"Oh, Prophet," the woman mumbled as she got to her feet. For a moment it looked as though she were going to attempt to kiss Pyrrhus.
"God has looked with favor on you, daughter," the Prophet said in a distant, cutting voice that brought the suppliant back to a sense of propriety. "He will accept your sacrifice."
From the bosom of the stola she wore, Klea took a purse and thrust it deep within the maw of the stone serpent-head which had served Pyrrhus as a pillow. The coins clinked-gold, Dama thought; certainly not mere bronze-beneath the floor. The bench served as a lid for Pyrrhus's treasury, probably a design feature left from the days the building was a temple.
"Oh, Master," the woman said as she walked back to her place in the anteroom.
Tears ran down her cheeks, but even Vettius's experience at sizing up women's emotions didn't permit him to be sure of the reason. Perhaps Klea cried because she'd been denied remarriage during life… but it was equally likely that she'd been overcome with joy at the prospect of joining Pyrrhus after death.
The Prophet took another from the stack of tablets. "Hestiaia, daughter of Mimnermos," he called, and the younger of the pair of women stepped forward to receive her prophecy.
Pyrrhus worked through the series of requests tablet by tablet. A few of the responses were in absolute gibberish-which appeared to awe and impress the recipients-and even when the doggerel could be understood, it was generally susceptible to a variety of meanings. Dama began to suspect that the man who'd been stoned and kicked from the gathering outside had chosen the interpretation he himself desired to an ambiguous answer about his brother's fate.
A man was told that his wife was unfaithful. No one but the woman herself could know with certainty if the oracle were false.
A woman was told that the thief who took her necklace was the slave she trusted absolutely. She would go through her household with scourge and thumbscrew… and if she found nothing, then wasn't her suspicion of this one or that proof her trust hadn't been complete after all?
"Severiana, daughter of Marcus Severianus," the Prophet called. Vettius stiffened as the Prefect's simpering wife joined Pyrrhus in the sanctum.
"Daughter," said Pyrrhus in his clanging verse, "blessed of God art thee. Thy rank and power increased shall be. Thy husband's works grow anyhow. And morrow night I'll dine with thou."
Dama thought: Pyrrhus's accent was flawless, unlike that of the Prefect's nomenclator; but in his verse he butchered Latin worse than ever an Irish beggar did…
Vettius thought: Castor and Pollux! Bad enough that the Prefect's wife was involved with this vicious phony. But if Pyrrhus got close to Rutilianus himself, he could do real harm to the whole Republic…
"Oh beloved Prophet!" Severiana gurgled as she fed the stone serpent a purse that hit with a heavierclank! than most of the previous offerings. "Oh, we'll be so honored by your presence!"
"Section Leader Lycorides!" Pyrrhus called. Vettius stepped forward, hunching slightly and averting his face as he passed Severiana. The timing was terrible-but the Prefect's wife was so lost in joy at the news that she wouldn't have recognized her husband, much less one of his flunkies. Though Pyrrhus's thin figure towered over the previous suppliants who faced him one-on-one, Vettius was used to being the biggest man in any room. It hadn't occurred to him that he too would have to tilt his head up to meet the Prophet's eyes.
Pyrrhus's irises were a black so deep they could scarcely be distinguished from his pupils; the weight of their stare gouged at Vettius like cleated boots.
For a moment the soldier froze. Heknew that what he faced was no charlatan, no mere trickster preying on the religiously gullible. The power of Pyrrhus's eyes, the inhuman perfection of his bearded, patriarchal face Pyrrhus was not merely a prophet; he was agod.
Pyrrhus opened his mouth and said, "Evil done requited is to men. Each and every bao nhieu tien."
The illusion vanished in the bath of nonsense syllables. Vettius faced a tall charlatan who had designs on the official whom it was Vettius's duty to protect.
Rutilianus would be protected. Never fear.
"God has looked with favor on you, son," Pyrrhus prodded. "He will accept your sacrifice."
Vettius shrugged himself to full alertness and felt within his purse. He hadn't thought to bundle a few coins in a twist of papyrus beforehand, so now he had to figure desperately as he leaned toward the opening to the treasury. He didn't see any way that Pyrrhus could tell if he flung in a couple bits of bronze instead of real payment, but…
Vettius dropped three denarii and a Trapezuntine obol, all silver, into the stone maw. He couldn't take the chance that Pyrrhus or a confederatewould know what he had done-and at best expose him in front of Severiana.
He stepped back into place.
"Marcus Dama!"the Prophet called, to the surprise of Vettius who'd expected Dama to use a false name. Diffidently lowering his eyes, the little man took the notebook Pyrrhus returned to him.
"God grants us troubling things to learn," the Prophet singsonged."Sorrows both and joys wait your return."
A safe enough answer-if the petitioner told you he'd left his wife and three minor children behind in Spain months before. Dama kept his eyes low as he paid his offering and pattered back to Vettius's side.
There were half a dozen further responses before Pyrrhus raised his arms as he had before making an utterance from the porch. "The blessings of God upon you!" he cried.
A single tablet remained on the floor beside the stone bench. Vettius remembered the well-dressed thug who'd tried to carry in a dagger…
"God's blessings on his servants Pyrrhus and Glaukon!" responded that majority of the crowd which knew the liturgy.
"Depart in peace…" rasped the bronze serpent from its cross, drawing out the Latin sibilants and chilling Dama's bones again.
The doors creaked open and the worshipers began to leave. Most of them appeared to be in a state of somnolent ecstasy. A pair of attendants collected the tablets which had been supplied to petitioners who didn't bring their own; with enough leisure, even the most devout believer might have noticed the way the waxed surface could be slid from beneath the sealed cover panel.
The air outside was thick with dust and the odors of slum tenements. Dama had never smelled anything so refreshing as the first breath that filled his lungs beyond the walls of Pyrrhus's church.
Almost all of those who'd attended the private service left in sedan chairs.
Vettius and Dama instead walked a block in silence to a set of bollards protecting an entrance to the Julian Mall. They paused, each lost for a moment in a landscape of memories. No one lurked nearby in the moonlight, and the rumble of goods wagons and construction vehicles-banned from the streets by day-kept their words from being overheard at any distance.
"A slick operation," Vettius said.
The merchant lifted his chin in agreement but then added, "His clientele makes it easy, though. They come wanting to be fooled."
"I'm not sure how…" Vettius said.
For a moment, his tongue paused over concluding the question the way he'd started it: I'm not sure how Pyrrhus managed to appear and disappear that way. But though he knew that was just a trick, the way some sort of trick inspired awe when Pyrrhus stared into the soldier's eyes… neither of those were things that Vettius wanted to discuss just now.
"… he knew what your question was," Vettius's tongue concluded. "Is the tablet still sealed?"
"Sealed again, I should guess," Dama said mildly as he held the document up to the full moon. "They could've copied my seal impression in quick-drying plaster, but I suspect-yes, there."
His fingertip traced a slight irregularity in the seal's edge. "They used a hot needle to cut the wax and then reseal it after they'd read the message."
He looked at his companion with an expression the bigger man couldn't read. "Pyrrhus has an exceptional memory," he said, "to keep the tablets and responses in proper order. He doesn't give himself much time to study."
Vettius gestured absently in agreement. The soldier's mind considered various ways, more or less dangerous, to broach the next subject.
Three wagons carrying column bases crashed and rumbled past, drawn by teams of mules with cursing drivers. The loads might be headed toward a construction site within the city-but more likely they were going to the harbor and a ship that would carry them to Constantinople or Milan.
Rome was no longer a primary capital of the empire. It was easier to transport art than to create it, so Rome's new imperial offspring were devouring the city which gave them birth. All things die, even cities.
Even empires… but Lucius Vettius didn't permit himself to think aboutthat.
"It doesn't appear that he's doing anything illegal," the soldier said carefully. "There's no law against lying to people, even if they decide to give you money for nothing."
"Or lying about people," Dama said-"agreed" would imply there was some emotion in his voice, and there was none. "Lying about philosophers who tell people you're a charlatan, for instance."
"I thought he might skirt treason," Vettius went on, looking out over the street beyond. "It's easy to say the wrong thing, you know… But if Pyrrhus told any lies-" with the next words, Vettius would come dangerously close to treason himself; but perhaps his risk would draw the response he wanted from the merchant "-it was in the way he praised everything to do with the government."
"There was the-riot, I suppose you could call it," Dama suggested as his fingers played idly with the seal of his tablet.
"Incited by the victim," the soldier said flatly. "And some of those taking part were-very influential folk, I'd estimate. There won't be a prosecution on that basis."
"Yeah," the merchant agreed. "That's the way I see it too. So I suppose we'd better go home."
Vettius nodded upward in agreement.
He'd have to go the next step alone. Too bad, but the civilian had already involved himself more than could have been expected. Dama would go back and make still more money, while Lucius Vettius carried out what he saw as a duty Knowing that he faced court martial and execution if his superiors learned of it.
"Good to have met you, Marcus Dama," he muttered as he strode away through a break in traffic.
There was a crackle of sound behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Dama was walking toward his apartment in the opposite direction.
But at the base of the stone bollard lay the splintered fragments of the tablet the merchant had been holding.
The crews of two sedan chairs were dicing noisily-and illegally-beside the bench on which Vettius waited, watching the entrance to Pyrrhus's church through slitted eyes. Business in the small neighborhood bath house was slack enough this evening that the doorkeeper left his kiosk and seated himself beside the soldier.
"Haven't seen you around here before," the doorkeeper opened.
Vettius opened his eyes wide enough to frown at the man. "You likely won't see me again," he said. "Which is too bad for you, given what I've paid you to mind your own business."
Unabashed, the doorkeeper chewed one bulb from the bunch of shallots he was holding, then offered the bunch to the soldier. His teeth were yellow and irregular, but they looked as strong as a mule's.
"Venus!" cried one of the chairmen as his dice came up all sixes."How'sthat, you Moorish fuzzbrain?"
"No thanks," said Vettius, turning his gaze back down the street.
The well-dressed, heavily veiled woman who'd arrived at the church about an hour before was leaving again. She was the second person to be admitted for a private consultation, but a dozen other-obviously less wealthy-suppliants had been turned away during the time the soldier had been watching.
He'd been watching, from one location or another in the neighborhood, since dawn.
"I like to keep track of what's going on around here," the doorkeeper continued. He ate another shallot and belched. "Maybe I could help you with what you're looking for?"
Vettius clenched his great, calloused hands, only partly as a conscious attempt on his part to warn this nuisance away. "Right now," he said in a husky voice, "I'm looking for a little peace and-"
"Hey there!" one of the chairmen shouted in Greek as the players sprang apart. One reached for the stakes, another kicked him, and a third slipped a short, single-edged knife from its hiding place in the sash that bound his tunic.
Vettius and the doorkeeper both leaped to their feet. The soldier didn't want to get involved, but if a brawl broke out, it was likely to explode into him.
At the very best, that would disclose the fact that he was hiding his long cavalryman's sword beneath his cloak.
The pair of plump shopowners who'd hired the sedan chairs came out the door, rosy from the steam room and their massages. The chairmen sorted themselves at once into groups beside the poles of their vehicles. The foreman of one chair glanced at the other, nodded, and scooped up the stakes for division later.
Vettius settled back on the bench. Down the street, a quartet of porters were carrying a heavy chest up the steps of the church. Attendants opened the doors for the men.
Early in the morning, the goods Vettius had seen in the building's anteroom had been dispersed, mostly across the street to the apartment house which Pyrrhus owned. Since then, there had been a constant stream of offerings. All except the brace of live sheep were taken inside.
Pyrrhus had not come out all day.
"A bad lot, those chairmen," the doorkeeper resumed, dusting his hands together as though he'd settled the squabble himself. The hollow stems of his shallots flopped like an uncouth decoration from the bosom of his tunic."I'm always worried that-"
Vettius took the collar of the man's garment between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He lifted the cloth slightly. "If you do not leave me alone," he said in a low voice, "you will have something to worry about. For a short time."
Half a dozen men, householders and slaves, left the bath caroling an obscene round. One of them was trying to bounce a hard leather ball as he walked, but it caromed wildly across the street.
The doorkeeper scurried back to his kiosk as soon as Vettius released him.
Three attendants, the full number of those who'd been in the church with Pyrrhus, came out and stood on the porch. Vettius held very still. It was nearly dusk-time and past time that the Prophet go to dinner.
If he was going.
Pyrrhus could lie and bilk and slander for the next fifty years until he died on a pinnacle of wealth and sin, and that'd still be fine with Lucius Vettius. There were too many crooked bastards in the world for Vettius to worry about one more or less of 'em…
Or so he'd learned to tell himself, when anger threatened to build into a murderous rage that was safe to release only on a battlefield.
Vettius wasn't just a soldier anymore: he was an agent of the civil government whose duties required him to protect and advise the City Prefect. If Pyrrhus kept clear of Rutilianus, then Pyrrhus had nothing to fear from Lucius Vettius.
But if Pyrrhus chose to make Rutilianus his business, then…
A sedan chair carried by four of Pyrrhus's attendants trotted to the church steps from the apartment across the street. A dozen more of the Prophet's men in gleaming tunics accompanied the vehicle. Several of them carried lanterns for the walk back, though the tallow candles within were unlighted at the moment.
Pyrrhus strode from the church and entered the sedan chair. He looked inhumanly tall and thin, even wrapped in the formal bulk of a toga. It was a conjuring trick itself to watch the Prophet fold his length and fit it within the sedan, then disappear behind black curtains embroidered with a serpent on a cross.
Three attendants remained on the porch. The remainder accompanied the sedan chair as it headed northeast, in the direction of the Prefect's dwelling. The attendants' batons guaranteed the vehicle clear passage, no matter how congested the streets nearer the city center became.
Vettius sighed. Well, he had his excuse, now. But the next-hours, days, years; he didn't know how long it'd take him to find something on this "Prophet" that'd stick…
The remainder of the soldier's life might be simpler if he didn't start at all. But he was going to start, by burglarizing Pyrrhus's church and private dwelling while the Prophet was at dinner. And if that didn't turn up evidence of a crime against the State, there were other things to try…
A hunter learns to wait. It would be dead-dark soon, when the sun set and the moon was still two hours beneath the horizon. Time then to move to the back of the church which he'd reconnoitered by the first light of dawn.
Men left the bath house, laughing and chatting as they headed for their dinners. Vettius watched the three attendants, as motionless as statues on the church porch; as motionless as he was himself.
And he waited.
When Vettius was halfway up the back wall of the church, a patrol of the Watch sauntered by in the street fronting the building.
Watch patrols were primarily fire wardens, but the State equipped them with helmets and spears to deal with any other troubles they might come across. This group was dragging the ferules of its spears along the pavement with a tremendous racket, making sure itdidn't come across such troubles… but Vettius still paused and waited for the clatter to trail off in the direction of the Theater of Balbus.
Back here, nobody'd bothered to cover the building's brick fabric with marble, and the mortar between courses probably hadn't been renewed in the centuries since the structure was raised as a temple. The warehouse whose blind sidewall adjoined the back of the church two feet away was also brick. It provided a similarly easy grip for the cleats of Vettius's tight-laced boots.
Step by step, steadying himself with his fingertips, the soldier mounted to the clerestory windows beneath the transom of the church. Each was about three feet long but only eight inches high, and their wooden sashes were only lightly pinned to the bricks.
Vettius loosened a window with the point of his sword, then twisted the sash outward so that the brickwork continued to grip one end. If matters went well, he'd be able to hide all signs of his entry when he left.
He hung his cloak over the end of the window he'd swung clear. He'd need the garment to conceal his sword on the way back.
The long spatha was a terrible tool for the present use. He'd brought it rather than a sturdy dagger or simply a prybar because Because he was still afraid of whatever he thought he'd seen in Pyrrhus's eyes the night before. The sword couldn't help that, but it made Vettiusfeel more comfortable.
There was a faint glow from within the building; one lamp wick had been left burning to light the Prophet's return home.
Vettius uncoiled his silken line. He'd thought he might need the small grapnel on one end to climb to the window, but the condition of the adjoining walls made the hooks as unnecessary as the dark lantern he'd carried in case the church was unlighted. Looping the cord around an end-frame of the window next to the one he'd removed, he dropped both ends so that they dangled to the floor of Pyrrhus's sanctum.
He had no real choice but to slide head-first through the tight opening. He gripped the doubled cord in both hands to keep from plunging thirty feet to the stone floor.
His right hand continued to hold the hilt of his naked sword as well. Scabbarded, the weapon might've slipped out when he twisted through the window; or so he told himself.
Pyrrhus's bronze serpent gaped only a few feet from Vettius as he descended the cord, hand over hand. The damned thing was larger than it had looked from below, eighteen-no, probably twenty feet long when you considered the way its coils wrapped the cross. Shadows from the lamplight below drew the creature's flaring nostrils into demonic horns.
At close view, the bronze head looked much less human than it had from the anteroom. There were six vertical tubes in each eye. They lighted red and green in alternation.
Vettius's hobnails sparked as he dropped the last yard to the floor. The impact felt good.
Except for Pyrrhus's absence, the sanctum looked just as it had when the soldier saw it the night before. He went first to the couch that covered the Prophet's strongbox. It was solid marble, attached to the floor by bronze pivots. Vettius expected a lock of some sort, but only weight prevented the stone from being lifted. So…
He sheathed his sword and gripped the edge of the couch with both hands. Raising the stone would require the strength of three or four normal men, but The marble pivoted upward, growling like a sleeping dog.
The cavity beneath was empty.
Vettius vented his breath explosively. He almost let the lid crash back in disgust, but the stone might have broken and the noise would probably alert the attendants.
Grunting-angry and without the hope of immediate triumph to drive him-Vettius lowered by main strength the weight that enthusiasm had lifted.
He breathed heavily and massaged his palms against his thigh muscles for a minute thereafter. Score one for the Prophet.
Vettius didn't know precisely what he'd expected to find in the crypt, but therehad to be some dark secret within this building or Pyrrhus wouldn't have lived in it alone. Something so secret that Pyrrhus didn't dare trust it even to his attendants…
Perhaps there was a list of high government personnel who were clients of Pyrrhus-or who supplied him with secret information. The emperors were-rightly-terrified of conspiracies. A list like that, brought to the attention of the right parties, would guarantee mass arrests and condemnations.
With, very probably, a promotion for the decurion who uncovered the plot.
If necessary, Vettius could create such a document himself; but he'd rather find the real one, since something of the sortmust exist.
The bronze lamp had been manufactured especially for Pyrrhus. Counterweighting the spouts holding the three wicks was a handle shaped like a cross. A human-headed serpent coiled about it.
Vettius grimaced at the feel of the object as he took it from its stand. He prowled the sanctum, holding the light close to the walls.
If there was a hiding place concealed within the bricks, Vettius certainly couldn't find it. The room was large and clean, but it was as barren as a prison cell.
There was a faint odor that the soldier didn't much like, now that he'd settled down enough to notice it.
He looked up at the serpent, Glaukon. Lamplight broke the creature's coils into bronze highlights that swept from pools of shadow like great fish surfacing. Pyrrhus might have hidden a papyrus scroll in the creature's hollow interior, but Vettius walked through the internal doorway, stepping carefully so that the click of his hobnails wouldn't alarm the attendants outside. He'd check the other room before dealing with Glaukon.
He didn't much like snakes.
The anteroom had a more comfortable feel than the sanctum, perhaps because the goods stored around the walls gave it the look of a large household's pantry. Vettius swept the lamp close to the top of each amphora, checking the tags scratched on the clay seals. Thasian wine from the shipowner Glirius. Lucanian wine from the Lady Antonilla. Dates from-Vettius chuckled grimly: my, a Senator. Gaius Cornelius Metellus Libo.
A brace of rabbits; a wicker basket of thrushes sent live, warbling hopefully when Vettius brought the lamp close.
In the corner where the stacks of figured bowls had been, Vettius found the large chest he'd watched the porters stagger in with that evening. The label read: A gift of P. Severius Auctus, purveyor of fine woolens.
A small pot of dormice preserved in honey. Bunches and baskets of fresh vegetables.
The same sort of goods as had been here the night before. No strongbox, no sign of a cubbyhole hidden in the walls.
Which left Vettius with no better choice than to try that damned bronze serpent after Outside the front doors, the pins of a key scraped the lock's faceplate.
Bloody buggering Zeus! Pyrrhus should've been gone for hours yet!
Vettius set down the lamp with reflexive care and ran for the sanctum. Behind him, the key squealed as it levered the iron dead-bolts from their sockets in both doorframes.
He'd be able to get out of the building safely enough, though a few of the attendants would probably fling their cudgels at him while he squirmed through the window. The narrow alley would be suicide, though. They'd've blocked both ends by the time he got to the ground, and there wasn't room enough to swing his spatha. He'd go up instead, over the triple-vaulted roof of the warehouse and down The door opened. "Wait here," called the penetrating, echoless voice of Pyrrhus to his attendants.
Vettius's silken rope lay on the floor in a tangle of loose coils. It couldn't have slipped from the window by itself, but…
The door closed; the bolts screeched home again.
Vettius spun, drawing his sword.
"Beware, Pyrrhus!" cried the bronze serpent. "Intruder! Intruder!"
Vettius shifted his weight like a dancer. Faint lamplight shimmered on the blade of his spatha arcing upward. Glaukon squirmed higher on the cross. Its somewhat-human face waved at the tip of the bar, inches from where the rope had hung. The creature's teeth glittered in wicked glee.
A chip of wood flew from the cross as Vettius's sword bit as high as he could reach; a hand's breadth beneath Glaukon's quivering tail.
"Come to me, Decurion Lucius Vettius," Pyrrhus commanded from the anteroom.
He couldn't know.
The flickering lamplight in the other room was scarcely enough to illuminate the Prophet's toga and the soft sheen of his beard. Vettius was a figure in shadow, only a dim threat with a sword even when he spun again to confront Pyrrhus.
Pyrrhus couldn't know. But he knew.
"Put your sword down, Lucius Vettius," the Prophet said. For a moment, neither man moved; then Pyrrhus stepped forward No, that wasn't what happened. Pyrrhus steppedaway from himself, one Pyrrhus walking and the other standing rigid at the door. There was something wrong about the motionless figure; but the light was dim, the closer form hid the further…
And Vettius couldn't focus on anything but the eyes of the man walking toward him. They were red, glowing brighter with every step, and they were drawing Vettius's soul from his trembling body.
"You are the perfect catch, Lucius Vettius," Pyrrhus said. His lips didn't move. "Better than you can imagine. In ten years, in twenty… there will be no one in this empire whom you will not know if you wish to, whom you cannot sway if you wish to. On behalf of Pyrrhus the Prophet. Or whatever I call myself then.
"Put your sword down, Lucius Vettius."
The hilt of Vettius's sword was hot, as hot and glowing as the eyes of the approaching Pyrrhus. He couldn't hold the blade steady; light trembled along its sharp double edges like raindrops on a willow leaf.
But it didn't fall from his hand.
Pyrrhus stepped through the doorway between the rooms. His shoulder brushed the jamb, brushed through it-form and stuccoed brickwork merging, separating; the figure stepping onward.
"I will have this empire," Pyrrhus said. "And I will have this world."
Vettius stared down a black tunnel. At the end of the tunnel glared Pyrrhus's eyes, orange-hot and the size of the universe. They came nearer yet.
"And when I return to those who drove me out, when I return to those who would haveslain me, Lucius Vettius," said the voice that echoed within the soldier's skull, "they will bow! For mine will be the power of a whole world forged to my design…
"Put down your sword!"
Vettius screamed and swung his blade in a jerky, autonomic motion with nothing of his skill or years of practice to guide it. Steel cut the glowing eyes like lightning blasting the white heart of a sword-smith's forge The eyes gripped Vettius's eyes again. The Prophet's laughter hissed and bubbled through the soldier's mind.
"You are mine, Lucius Vettius," the voice said caressingly. "You have been mine since you met my gaze last night. Did you think you could hide your heart from me?"
Vettius's legs took a wooden, stumbling step forward; another step, following the eyes as they retreated toward the figure standing by the outer door. The figure of Pyrrhusalso, or perhaps the only figure that was really Pyrrhus. The soldier now understood how the Prophet had appeared and vanished on the church porch the night before, but that no longer mattered.
Nothing mattered but the eyes.
"I brought you here tonight," said the voice.
"No…" Vettius whispered, but he wasn't sure either that he spoke the word or that it was true. He had no power over his thoughts or his movements.
"You will be my emperor," the voice said. "In time. In no time at all, for me. With my knowledge, and with the weapons I teach you to build, you will conquer your world for me."
The glowing eyes shrank to normal size in the sockets of the thing that called itself Pyrrhus. The bearded phantasm moved backward one step more and merged with the figure that had not moved since entering the church.
"And then…" said the figure as all semblance of Pyrrhus drained away like frost in the sunshine, "… I will return home."
The toga was gone; the beard, the pudgy human cheeks. What remained was naked, bone-thin, and scaly. Membranes flickered across the slit-pupiled eyes, cleaning their surfaces; then the reptilian eyes began to carve their path into Vettius's mind with surgical precision.
He heard the creak of hinges, a lid rising, but the sound was as feint and meaningless as a seagull's cry against the thunder of surf.
"Pyrrhus!" shrieked the bronze serpent. "Intruder! Guards! Guards! Guards!"
Vettius awakened, gasping and shaking himself. He felt as though he'd been buried in sand, a weight that burned and crushed every fiber of his body.
But it hadn't been his body that was being squeezed out of existence.
The chest-A gift of P. Severius Auctus, purveyor of fine woolens-was open. Dama was climbing out of it, as stiff as was to be expected when even a small man closed himself in so strait a compass. He'd shrugged aside the bolt of cloth that covered him within the chest, and he held the scabbard of an infantry sword in his left hand.
His right drew the short, heavy blade with a musicalsring!
"Guards!" Glaukon shouted again.
The serpent had left its perch. It was slithering in long curves toward Dama.
Pyrrhus reached for the door-latch with one reptilian hand; Vettius swung at him off-balance. He missed, but the spatha's tip struck just above the lock plate and splintered its way deep into the age-cracked wood.
Pyrrhus hissed like tallow on a grill. He leaped toward the center of the room as the soldier tugged his weapon free and turned to finish the matter.
Glaukon struck like a cobra at Dama. The merchant, moving with a reflexive skill that would have impressed Vettius if he'd had time to think, blocked the bronze fangs with the scabbard in his left hand. Instead of a clack as the teeth met, light crackled like miniature lightning.
Dama swore in Greek and thrust with his sword at the creature's head. Glaukon recoiled in a smooth curve. The serpent's teeth had burned deep gouges into the scabbard's iron chape.
Vettius pivoted on the ball of his left foot, bringing his blade around in a whistling arc that would Pyrrhus's eyes blazed into the soldier's. "Put down your sword, Lucius Vettius," rang the voice in his mind. Vettius held as rigid as a gnat in amber.
There were shouts from outside. Someone knocked, then hammered the butt of his baton on the weakened panel. Splinters of gray wood began to crack off the inside.
Glaukon was twenty feet of shimmering coils, with death in its humanoid jaws. Dama feinted. Glaukon quivered, then struck in earnest as the merchant shifted in the direction of Pyrrhus who was poising in the center of the anteroom as his eyes gripped Vettius.
Dama jumped back, almost stumbling over the chest in which he'd hidden. He was safe, but the hem of his tunic smoldered where the teeth had caught it.
Put Several batons were pounding together on the door. The upper half of a board flew into the room. An attendant reached through the leather facing and fumbled with the lock mechanism.
– down your sword, Lucius Vettius.
Dama's sword dipped, snagged the bolt of cloth that had covered him, and flipped it over the head of the bronze serpent. Wool screamed and humped as Glaukon tried to withdraw from it.
Dama smiled with cold assurance and stabbed where the cloth peaked, extending his whole body in line with the blow. The sharp wedge of steel sheared cloth, bronze, and whatever filled the space within Glaukon's metal skull.
The door burst inward. Pyrrhus sprang toward the opening like a chariot when the bars come down at the Circus. Vettius, freed by the eyes and all deadly instinct, slashed the splay-limbed figure as it leaped past.
The spatha slicedin above the chin, shattering pointed, reptilian teeth. Down through the sinuous neck. Out, breaking the collar bone on the way.
The blood that sprayed from the screaming monster was green in the lamp-light.
Attendants hurled themselves out of the doorway with bawls of fear as the creature that had ruled them bolted through. Pyrrhus's domination drained with every spurt from his/its severed arteries. Men-men once more, not the Prophet's automatons-hurled away their cudgels and lanterns in their haste to flee. Some of the running forms were stripping off splattered tunics.
The point of Dama's sword was warped and blackened. The merchant flung his ruined weapon away as he and Vettius slipped past the splintered remnants of the door. Behind them, in the center of a mat of charred wool, the serpent Glaukon vomited green flames and gobbets of bronze.
Pyrrhus lay sprawled in a green pool at the bottom of the steps. The thin, scaly limbs twitched until Vettius, running past, drove his spatha through the base of the creature's domed skull.
The soldier was panting, more from relief than exertion. "Where did he come from?" he muttered.
"Doesn't matter." Dama was panting also."He didn't expect more of his kind to show up."
"I thought he was a phony. The tablets-"
They swung past the bollards where they'd talked the previous evening. Dama slowed to a walk, since they were clear of the immediate incident. "He was a charlatan where it was easier to be a charlatan. That's all."
Vettius put his hand on the smaller man's shoulder and guided him to the shadow of a shuttered booth. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming back tonight?" the soldier demanded.
Dama looked at him."It was personal," he said. Their faces were expressionless blurs. "I didn't think somebody in the Prefect's office ought to be involved."
Vettius sheathed his blade and slid the scabbard parallel to his left leg. If the gods were good, the weapon might pass unnoticed on his way home in the cloud-swept moonlight. "I was already involved," he said.
The merchant turned and met Vettius's eyes. "Menelaus was my friend," he replied, almost too softly to be heard. "Lucius Vettius, I didn't come here with a sword tonight totalk to my friend's killer."
In the near distance, the night rang with cries of horror. The Watch had discovered the corpse of Pyrrhus the Prophet.
Black Iron
Ammianus Marcellinus was the last great Latin historian and in fact the only great Latin historian to follow Tacitus, his predecessor by some three hundred years. (There were major historians of the second and third centuries AD-and after-but they wrote in Greek.) He had an enormous impact on me, and one small aspect of his influence is "Black Iron."
Ammianus was an officer in the imperial bodyguard during the middle of the fourth century AD, the period covered by the surviving books of his history. Emperors used their bodyguards as couriers and for other special missions. Ammianus was not only in a position to talk to virtually anyone in the empire, he was personally present at some of the most important events of his time. Though Ammianus isn't as good a writer as Tacitus (who's one of the finest prose stylists in Latin or any other language), he paints a vivid picture of his world.
That world was sliding into blood and chaos. It would not emerge from darkness for centuries.
The timing may be important here. I read Ammianus while I was in Vietnamese language school and during interrogation training afterwards. The future I saw before me was one of blood, chaos, and darkness, so I could identify-indeed had to identify-with the ancient soldier and historian as I read his work.
I come back to the World, reentered law school, and resumed writing fiction. "Black Iron" is the first story I wrote after my return. It's also the first story I wrote after getting to know two Chapel Hill fantasy writers, Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner.
Karl had just dropped out of UNC medical school to write full time (he later completed his schooling and got his MD). Manly was a giant of SF and fantasy; he'd been making virtually his whole living from freelance writing since the late '30s. Neither Karl nor I was ever a student of Manly's, but we were his junior colleagues and friends. We got together regularly for family meals and to read to one another the fiction we were working on.
This was the first thing I read to Manly and Karl. There would be many other stories over the years.
Ammianus was in Amida when the Persians besieged and captured that city. It wasn't a critically important event in the millennia-long struggle between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Basin, but Ammianus produced a bleak, brilliant piece of first-hand reporting. When I visited Turkey many years later, I stood on the enormous walls of Amida (modern Diyarbakir) and thought of Ammianus.
One further thing about "Black Iron" is worth mentioning. I sent the story to Mr. Derleth, who'd bought three previous stories from me. He wrote me a letter of acceptance in June 1971, and followed it with an Arkham House check dated July 3.
The next morning Mr. Derleth died of a heart attack. This was not only the last story I was to sell him, it was the last story he bought from anyone.
Vettius' markers were of green tourmaline that glinted cruelly in the lamplight. The pieces had been carven by a Persian. Though as smoothly finished as anything Dama had seen in the West, the heads had a rudeness, a fierceness of line that he disliked. Living near the frontier had shaken him, he thought with a sigh.
The soldier moved, taking one of Dama's pieces. The slim Cappadocian countered with a neat double capture.
"God rot your eyes!"Vettius exploded, banging his big hand down on the game board."I should know better than to play robbers with a merchant. By the Bull's blood, you're all thieves anyway. Doris, bring us some cups!"
The little slave pattered in with a pair of chalices. As she left the room Vettius slapped her on the flank and said, "Don't come back till you're called for."
The girl smiled without turning around.
"Little slut," the soldier said affectionately. Then, to Dama, "How do you want your wine?"
"One to three, as always," the blond merchant replied.
"I thought maybe your balls had come down since I saw you last," Vettius said, shaking his head. "Well, here's your wine; water it yourself."
He filled his own cup with the resin-thickened wine and slurped half of it. "You know," he said reflectively, "when I was on Naxos three years ago I made a special trip to a vineyard to get a drink of this before they added the pitch to preserve it in transport."
Vettius paused. "Well," Dama pressed him, "how was it?"
"Thin," the soldier admitted. "I'd rather drink Egyptian beer."
He began to laugh and Dama joined him halfheartedly. At last Vettius wiped the tears from his eyes and gulped the rest of his wine. When he had refilled his cup he rocked back on his stool and gazed shrewdly at his friend. "You brought a bolt of cloth with you tonight," he said.
"That's right," Dama agreed with a thin smile. "It's a piece of silk brocade, much heavier than what we usually see here."
Vettius smiled back at him, showing his teeth like a bear snarling."So I'm a silk fancier now?" he asked."Come on, nobody will come until I call them. What do you have under the silk that you didn't want my servants to see?"
Dama unrolled the silk without answering. The lustrous cloth had been wound around a sword whose hilt gleamed richly above a pair of laths bound over the blade. He tugged at the hilt and the laths fell away to reveal a slim blade, longer than that of a military sword. The gray steel was marked like wind-rippled water.
"Do you believe that metal can be enchanted?" Dama asked.
"Stick to your silk, merchant," the soldier replied with a chuckle, and took the sword from Dama. He whipped the blade twice through the air.
"Oh, yes," he went on, "it's been a long time since I saw one of these."
Setting the point against the wall, the big soldier leaned his weight against it. The blade bowed almost double. The point shifted very slightly and the steel sprang straight, skidding along the stone. The sword blurred, humming a low note that made both men's bowels quiver.
"Thought the way it bends was magical, hey?"
Dama nodded. "I thought it might be."
"Well, that's reasonable," Vettius said."It doesn't act much like a piece of steel, does it? Just the way it's tempered, though. You know about that?"
"I think I know how this blade was tempered," the merchant answered.
"Yeah, run it through a plump slave's butt a few times to quench it," Vettius said off-handedly. His fierce smile returned. "Not very… civilized, shall we say? But not magic."
"Not magic?" Dama repeated with an odd inflexion."Then let me tell you the rest of the story."
Vettius raised his cup in silent consent.
"I was in Amida…" the merchant began, and his mind drifted back to the fear and mud-brick houses overlooking the Tigris.
"We knew that Shapur was coming, of course; that spring, next spring-soon at least. He'd made peace with the Chionitae and they'd joined him as allies against Rome. Still, I had a caravan due any day and I didn't trust anyone else to bring it home to Antioch. It was a gamble and at the time it seemed worth it."
Dama snorted to himself, "Well, I guess it could have been worse.
"Aside from waiting to see whether my people would arrive before the Persians did, there was nothing to do in Amida but bake in the dust. It had never been a big place and now, with the shanties outside the wall abandoned and the whole countryside squeezed in on top of the garrison, there wasn't room to spit."
The merchant took a deep draught of his wine as he remembered. Vettius poured him more straight from the jar. "Mithra! There were two regiments of Gaulish foot there, half-dead with the heat and crazy from being cooped up. That was later, though, after the gates were shut.
"Wealth has its advantages and I'd gotten a whole house for my crew. I put animals on the ground floor and the men on the second; that left me the roof to myself. There was a breeze up there sometimes.
"The place next door was owned by a smith named Khusraw and I could see over his wall into the courtyard where his forge was set up. He claimed to be Armenian but there was talk of him really being a Persian himself. It didn't matter, not while he was turning weapons out and we needed them so bad."
"He made this?"Vettius asked, tapping the sword with his fingernail. The steel moaned softly.
Dama nodded absently, his eyes fixed on a scene in the past. "I watched him while he worked at night; the hammer ringing would have kept me awake anyway. At night he sang. He'd stand there singing with the hearth glaring off him, tall and stringy and as old as the world. He had a little slave to help him, pumping on the bellows. You've seen a charcoal hearth glow under a bellows?"
Vettius nodded. "Like a drop of sun."
Dama raised his eyebrows."Perhaps," he said, sipping at his thick wine, "but I don't find it a clean light. It made everything look so strange, so flat, that it was hours before I realized that the plate Khusraw was forging must have weighed as much as I did."
"Siege armor?" the soldier suggested.
"Not siege armor," Dama replied."There were other plates too, some of them that he welded into tubes, singing all the time."
The blond Cappadocian paused to finish his wine. He held out the cup to his host with a wan smile. "You may as well fill it again. I'm sweating it out faster than I drink it."
He wiped his brow with a napkin and continued. "It was a funny household in other ways. Khusraw, his wife, and his son-a boy about eight or ten. You can't really say with Persians. Those three and one slave boy I never heard to speak. No other servants in the house even though the woman looked like she was about to drop quints.
"I saw her close one day, trying to buy a sword for my foreman, seeing the way things were tending. Her belly looked wrong. It didn't shift like it ought to when she moved and she didn't seem to be carrying as much weight as if she were really pregnant. Padded or not, there was something strange about her.
"As for my own problem, that was decided the morning the Persians appeared. Oh, I know, you've fought them; but Lucius, you can't imagine what they looked like stretched all across the horizon with the sun dazzling on their spearpoints and armor. Mithra! Even so, it didn't seem too bad at first. The walls were strong and we were sure we could hold out until Ursicinius relieved us."
Vettius made a guttural sound and stared at the table. Dama laid his hand on the big soldier's forearm and said, "Lucius, you know I meant nothing against you or the army."
Vettius looked up with a ghost of his old smile, "Yeah, I know you didn't. No reason for me to be sensitive, anyhow. I didn't give the orders.
"Or refuse to give them," he added bitterly after a moment's reflection. "Have some more wine and go on with your story."
Dama drank and set his cup down empty. "Until things got really serious I spent most nights on my roof. Khusraw was working on a sword, now, and I forgot about the other stuff he had been forging. But everytime he had the metal beaten out into a flat blade he folded it back in on itself and started over."
The soldier nodded in understanding, running his finger along the watermarked blade. The merchant shrugged.
"Very late one night I awakened. Khusraw stood beside the forge and that evil white light flared over the courtyard every time the bellows pulsed. Tied to the anvil was a half-filled grain sack. The only noise, though, was the thump of the bellows and perhaps a whisper of the words Khusraw was chanting, and I couldn't figure out what had awakened me. Then another moan came from the house. That sound I knew-Khusraw's wife was in labor and I thought I'd been wrong about her belly being padded.
"Out in the courtyard the smith laid one hand on the grain sack. With the other, all wrapped in hides, he took the blade out of the hearth. The slave let the bellows stop and for an instant I could see both pairs of eyes reflecting the orange steel of the sword. Then Khusraw stabbed it through the sack. There was a terrible scream-"
"I'll bet there was!" Vettius interjected, his eyes glittering like citrines.
"-and inside the house the woman screamed too. Khusraw drew the blade out, half-quenched and barely visible, then plunged it back in. There was no scream but his wife's, this time. The slave had fallen to his knees and was making gabbling noises. When the smith drove the sword into the sack a third time, the woman bawled in the last agony of birthing and there was a crash of metal so loud I thought a Persian catapult had hit Khusraw's house. He ran inside shouting, 'My son! My son!' leaving the sword to lie crossways through that sack."
Dama paused. Vettius tossed him a fresh napkin and poured out more wine. "His own son," the soldier mused."Strange. Maybe Romulus really did sacrifice his brother to make his city great the way the old legends say."
The merchant gave him a strange smile and continued."That was the last night I spent in the house. Our garrison was too worn down to hold out any longer and every able man in the city had to help on the walls.
"Seventy-three days," Dama said, shaking his head."It doesn't sound like much to hold out, does it? Not in so strong a city. But there were so many Persians…
"No matter. The end came when a section of wall collapsed. The Persians didn't bring it down, we did ourselves-built it too high and it toppled. We tried to mass in the breach as the Persians poured through."
Dama paused with a wry grin. "Oh, you would have liked that, Lucius; the dust was sticky with blood. The armory had been buried when the wall fell and because the Persians were pushing us back, whenever a man lost his weapon he was out of the fight. I dodged out of the melee when my sword shattered on a shield boss. Then, when I had caught my breath I ran to Khusraw's shop, thinking he might still have some weapons I could carry back to the fighting.
"The front of the shop was empty, so I burst into the back. The smith was alone, holding a slender box open on his lap. When he saw me he slammed the lid shut, but I'd already caught the glint of steel inside. 'Give me the sword!' I said. 'No!' he cried, 'it's for my son to carry to King Shapur.' I grabbed the box, then, and knocked him down with my free hand. There was no time to talk and gods! but I was afraid.
"I tore the box open and drew this sword while Khusraw shouted something I didn't understand. Something clanged in the inner room. I turned to see the door swing open, and then I knew what the smith had made of his forgings.
"It was about a man's height, but from the way the ground shook there must have been twenty manloads of iron in it. I took a step back and the thing followed me. Even with the weight I might have thought it was a man in armor, but the eyes! They were little balls of cloudy orange. No one could have seen out through them, but they swiveled as I moved.
"I cut at the head of the… the iron man. The sword bounced off.
As sharp as the blade was, it only scratched the thing. Khusraw was backed against the wall to my left. He began to cackle, but I couldn't take my eyes off his creation long enough to deal with him.
"I thrust at the thing's throat. The point caught where the neck joined that black iron skull, but I didn't have enough strength to ram it home. Before I could recover, the iron man closed its hand over the blade. I yanked back and the sword shrieked out of its grip, slicing the metal fingers as neatly as it would have flesh."
Dama laughed grimly and tossed down his wine."I've mentioned how Khusraw was giggling at me? Well, he stopped then. He shouted, 'Son!' and jumped at me, just as his toy tried to smash me with its fist. I ducked and the steel hand caught Khusraw on the temple and slammed him into the wall. I tried to dodge through the door then, but my boot slipped in the blood. I scrambled clear of the thing's foot, but it had me backed against the wall.
"I thrust again, at the face this time. The tip skidded into an eye socket without penetrating, and the weight of the iron drove the hilt against the wall behind me. The blade bent but the very weight on it held the hilt firm. Then, as the thing reached for my head, the swordpoint shifted and the blade sprang straight, driving itself through the skull. The remaining eye went black and the thing crashed to the floor.
"There wasn't time to think then. I tugged the sword free and ran into the street to find the Persians had… well, the rest doesn't matter, I suppose. I was one of the lucky ones who slipped out of the city that night."
The soldier sighted down the length of the blade."So your smith put his own son's soul in the sword and it wrecked his machine for him," he said at last.
The slender merchant ran a hand through his blond hair, the tension gone from him now that he had finished his story. "No, I don't think so," he said quietly. "You're forgetting Khusraw's wife."
"Her pregnancy?" the soldier asked in bewilderment.
"She wasn't pregnant," Dama explained, "she was just a vehicle. The smith had his materials, a soul and a body. Somehow his wife's pretence of labor allowed him to join them. The thing was alive, an automaton."
Vettius shook his head."What you're calling an automaton-there must have been a dwarf inside with some very clever machinery."
Dama smiled gently. "There was no man inside. Lucius, when I pulled that sword free it was as clean as you see it now; no blood, no brains sticking to it."
The soldier looked from his friend to the sword. The blade had a faint green cast to it now as it caught the reflection of the gaming pieces so finely carven by some Persian craftsman.
The Shortest Way
Before I sent off my first story, I told myself that someday a story of mine would be published. After that first sale, I decided I'd like to sell another so that I wouldn't be a one-shot author.
Let me tell you, selling stories is an addiction. The need just gets worse.
I did well enough in law school that I was offered a place on the Duke Law Journal at the beginning of my second year. The upperclassman describing the journal told me that if I was really lucky, in my third year I might be able to publish a one-paragraph Note under my own name. "It's a real thrill to see your name in print!'' he said.
And I thought, "You twit. People pay to put my name in print!''
But that wasn't true: August Derleth had paid to put my name in print, and he was dead. I was going to have to find another market if I hoped ever to sell again.
Two professional magazines in 1971 published some fantasy. I sent Fantastic a story which vanished utterly, an event perhaps concerned with the problems that later got the editor a felony conviction for drug dealing. After that experience, Fantastic was no longer a potential market for me.
And there was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an excellent periodical which at about that time published a heroic fantasy novella by a writer with a high literary reputation. (It wasn't a very good story per se, which should have warned me.)
I wrote "The Shortest Way" and submitted it to F amp;SF with a covering letter that said, "I know you don't publish much heroic fantasy…'' It came back with a nice personal rejection from the editor, Mr. Ferman, agreeing that they didn't publish much heroic fantasy though this was a good story.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. And indeed, my friend Karl had an even closer brush: one of his heroic fantasies ("The Dark Muse") came back from F amp;SF already copyedited. Mr. Ferman had decided very late in the game not to publish.
"The Shortest Way" is based on the Sawney Beane legend. I'd heard of Sawney Beane many years before, but I first got the details when I read The Complete Newgate Calendar in the Duke Law School library. (I didn't like law school, but there were compensations.) The road itself is a real one in Dalmatia, torn up in the third century BC for reasons archeology can't determine. And I used the same two characters for the story as I had in "Black Iron": I'd started writing a series.
Stu Schiff-Stuart David Schiff, DDS-started Whispers magazine in 1972 with the stated intention of replacing the Arkham Collector (which had died with Mr. Derleth) as a home for new fantasy-themed fiction, poetry, and articles. (Stu would've used the title Whispers from Arkham if Arkham House had agreed. They didn't.) He bought the story and published it in the third issue of the magazine, with a wonderful Lee Brown Coye cover illo.
At the time I wrote "The Shortest Way," I wasn't sure "Black Iron" would ever be printed. (It finally came out in 1975 as part of an anthology Gerry Page put together for Arkham House, using all the material Mr. Derleth had acquired before his death, filled out by the considerable amount Gerry himself bought for the volume.) The stories don't have to be read in any particular order; they're just part of the same world.
Even so, the decision to write these stories in series probably had something to do with me a little later writing a second story about a group of future mercenaries called Hammer's Slammers. That was the choice that got me started on a real career writing, though I didn't know it at the time.
The dingy relay station squatted beside the road. It had a cast-off, abandoned look about it though light seeped through chinks in the stone where mortar had crumbled. Broken roof slates showed dark in the moonlight like missing teeth. To the rear bulked the stables where relays for the post riders stamped and nickered in their filthy stalls, and the odor of horse droppings thickened the muggy night.
The three riders slowed as they approached.
"Hold up," Vettius ordered. "We'll get a meal here and ask directions."
Harpago cantered a little further before halting. He was aristocrat enough to argue with a superior officer and young enough to think it worthwhile. "If we don't keep moving, sir, we'll never get to Aurelia before daybreak."
"We'll never get there at all if we keep wandering in these damned Dalmatian hills," Vettius retorted as he dismounted. His side hurt. Perhaps he had gotten too old for this business. At sunup he had strapped his round shield tightly to his back to keep it from slamming during the long ride. All day it had rubbed against his cuirass, and by now it had left a sore the size of his hand.
The shield itself galled him less than what it represented. A sunburst whose rays divided ten hearts spaced around the rim had been nielloed onto the thin bronze facing: the arms of the Household Cavalry. Leading a troop of the emperor's bodyguard should have climaxed Vettius's career, but he had quickly discovered his job was really that of special staff with little opportunity for fighting. He was sent to gather information for the emperor where the stakes were high and the secret police untrustworthy. There was danger in probing the ulcers of a dying empire, but Vettius found no excitement in it; only disgust.
Dama chuckled with relief to be out of his saddle again. He used his tunic to fan the sweat from his legs, looking inconsequential beside the two powerful soldiers. Though he was a civilian, a sword slapped against his thigh. In the backcountry, weapons were the mark of caution rather than belligerence. He nodded toward the still-silent building, his blond hair gleaming as bright in the moonlight as the bronze helmets of his two companions. "If it weren't for the light, I'd say the place was empty."
The door of the station creaked open, making answer needless. The man who stood on the threshold was as old and gnarled as the pines that straggled up the slopes of the valley. He faced them with wordless hostility. The last regular courier had passed, and he had been dozing off when this new party arrived. Like many petty officeholders, the stationmaster reveled in his authority-but did not care to be reminded of the duties that went with his position.
Vettius strode forward holding out a scroll of parchment. "Food for us," he directed, "and you can give our horses some grain while we eat."
"All right for you and the other," the stationmaster rasped. "The civilian finds his own meal."
"Government service," Harpago muttered. He spat.
Vettius began kneading one wrist with his other hand. The little merchant touched his friend's elbow, but Vettius shook him away. "I'll take care of it my own way," he said. His temper had worn thin on the grueling ride, and the stationmaster's sneering slovenliness gouged at his nerves.
"Old man," he continued in a restrained voice, "my authority is for food and accommodations for me and my staff. The civilian is with me as part of my staff. Do you dispute the emperor's authority?"
The stationmaster reared back his head to look the soldier in the eyes."Even the emperor can't afford to feed every starving thief who comes along," he began.
Vettius slapped him to the ground. "Will you call my friend a thief again?" he grated.
The old man's eyes narrowed in hatred as he sullenly dabbed at his bleeding lip, but he shook his head, cowering before the soldier. "I didn't mean it that way."
"Then take care of those horses-and be thankful I don't have you rub them down with your tongue." Vettius stamped angrily into the station, Harpago and Dama behind him.
"Food!" Vettius snapped. A dumpy peasant woman scurried to open a cupboard.
"I could have paid something, Lucius," the merchant suggested as they seated themselves at the trestle table. "After all, I came because I thought I could set up some business of my own here."
"And I brought you because I need your contacts," his friend replied. "The traders here won't tell me if they think the governor really is trying to raise money for a rebellion."
He paused, massaging the inside of his thighs where they ached from holding him into his stirrupless saddle since early dawn. "Besides," he added quietly, "it's been a long day-too long to be put upon by of some lazy bureaucrat."
Dama sighed as the serving woman set down barley bread and cheese."Not much of a meal anyway, is it?"he said."I thought the empire fed its post couriers better than this, even in the back country."
"And I thought we were going to get directions here," Harpago complained. "If we don't get to Aurelia before the fair ends we'll find all the merchants scattered-and then how are we going to learn anything?"
"We'll find a way," Vettius assured him sourly. He took a gulp of the wine the woman had poured him, then slammed the wooden cup back on the table. "Gods! That's bad."
"Local vintage," Dama agreed."Maybe I should try to sell some decent wine here instead of silk."
The older soldier swigged some more wine and grimaced wryly."Old man!" he shouted. After a moment the stationmaster came to the door. He limped slightly and his swollen lip was a blotch of color against his tight face.
The soldier ignored the anger in the old man's eyes."How far is it to Aurelia?" he demanded.
"By which road?" the other growled.
Vettius touched the pommel of his spatha so that the long straight blade rattled against the bench. "By the shortest way," he said testily.
"You have to…"the stationmaster began, then paused. He seemed to consider the matter carefully before he started again. "The shortest way, you say. Well, there's a road just past the station. If you turn north on it, it's only about twenty miles. But you'll have to look well, because nobody's been over that road for fifty years and the beginning is all grown over with trees."
The serving woman suddenly chattered something in her own language. The man snarled back at her and she fell silent.
"Could you catch any of that?" Vettius asked Dama under his breath.
The little Cappadocian shrugged."She said something about bandits. He told her to be quiet. But I don't really know the language, you know."
"Bandits we can take care of," Harpago muttered, one finger tracing a dent in the helmet he had rested on the table.
"How else can we get to Aurelia?" Vettius questioned, half-squinting as if to measure the stationmaster for a cross.
"You can keep on into Pasini, then turn back west on the Salvium road," the other replied without meeting the officer's eyes. "It's several times as long."
"Then we go by the straight route?"Vettius said, looking at his companions questioningly.
Harpago rose and reslung his shield.
"Why not?" Dama agreed.
The stationmaster watched them mount and ride off. His gnarled face writhed in terrible glee.
"What did they do, tear the whole road up?" Harpago asked. Even with the stationmaster's warning they had almost ridden past the junction. The surfacing flags and concrete certainly had been taken up. Seeds had lodged in the road metal beneath. They had grown to sizable trees by now, so that the only sign of the narrow road was a relative absence of undergrowth.
"The locals must have torn up this branch because it wasn't used much and they were tired of the labor taxes to repair it," Vettius surmised."They probably used the stone to fill holes on one of the main roads."
"But if this leads to the district market town, it should have gotten quite a lot of use," Dama argued.
"At least it'll guide us to where we're going," Harpago put in, plunging into the trees.
The pines grew close together and their branches frequently interlocked; riding through them was difficult. Vettius began to wonder if they should stop and turn back, but after a hundred yards or so the torn up section gave way to regular road.
Dama paused, looking back in puzzlement as his fingers combed pine straw out of his hair. "You know," he said, "I think they planted those trees on the roadbed when they tore up the surface."
"Why should they do that?" Vettius snorted.
"Well, look around," his friend pointed out. "The road is cracked here, too, but there aren't any trees growing in it. Besides, the trees don't grow as thickly anywhere else around here as they do on that patch of road. Somebody planted them to block it off completely."
The soldier snorted again, but he turned in his saddle. Dama had a point, he realized. In fact, the pines might even be growing in crude rows. "Odd," he admitted at last.
"Sir!" called Harpago, who had ridden far ahead. "Are you coming?"
Vettius raised an eyebrow. Dama laughed and slapped his horse's flank."He's young; he'll learn."
"Sorry if I seem to push," the adjutant apologized as they trotted onward, "but I don't like wasting time on this stretch of road. It's too dark for me."
"Dark?"Vettius echoed in amazement. For the first time he took more than cursory notice of their surroundings. The swampy gully to the left of the road had once been a drainage ditch. Long abandonment had left it choked with reeds, while occasional willows sprouted languidly from its edge. On the right, ragged forest climbed the slope of the valley. Scrub pine struggled through densely interwoven underbrush to form a stark, desolate landscape.
But dark? The moonlight washed the broken pavement into a metal serpent twisting through the forest. The trees were too stunted to overshadow the road, and the paving stones gleamed against the contrast of frequent cracks and potholes. Even the scabbed boles of the pines showed silver scales where the moon touched them.
"I wouldn't call it dark," Vettius concluded aloud, "though you could hide a regiment in those thickets."
"No, he's right," Dama disagreed unexpectedly. "It does seem dark, and I can't figure out why."
"Don't tell me both of you are getting nervous of shadows," jeered Vettius.
"I just wonder why they blocked off this road," the merchant replied vaguely. "From the look of the job it must have taken most of the district. Wonder what that stationmaster sent us into…"
Miles clattered gloomily by under their horses' hooves. It was fell, wasteland, a wretched paradigm for much of the empire in these latter days. This twisting valley could never have been much different, though. The humid bottoms had never been tilled; perhaps a few hunters had taken deer among its drooping pines. For the others who had come this way-lone travelers, donkey caravans, troops in glittering armor-the valley was only an incident of passage.
Now even the road was crumbling. Although only a short distance had been systematically destroyed, nature and time had taken a hand with the remainder. The flags had humped and split as water seepage froze in the winter, and one great section had fallen into the gully whose spring torrents had undercut it. They led their horses over the rubble while the pines drank their curses.
The usual nightbirds were hushed or absent.
Even Vettius began to feel uneasy. The moonlight weighed on his shoulders like a palpable force, crushing him down in his saddle. The moon was straight overhead now. Occasional streaks of light pierced the groping branches to paint the dark trunks with swordblades.
Itwas dark now. No white face would gleam from the forest edge to warn of the bandit arrow to follow in an instant. Was it fear of bandits that made him so tense? In twenty years' service he had ridden point in tighter places!
Letting his horse pick its own way over the broken road, Vettius scanned the forest. He took off his helmet and the tight leather cap that cushioned it. The air felt good, a prickly coolness that persisted even after he put the helmet back on, but there was no relief from the ominous tension. Grunting, he tried to hike his shield a little higher on his back.
Dama chuckled in vindication. "Nervous, Lucius?" he asked.
Vettius shrugged. "The woman at the station said there were bandits."
"On an abandoned piece of road like this?" Dama laughed bitterly. "I wish she were here now. I'd find out for sure what she did say. Do you suppose she knew any Greek besides 'food' and 'wine'?"
"No, she was too ugly for other refreshment," Vettius said. His forced laughter bellowed through the trees.
After a short silence, Harpago said, "Well, at least we should be almost to Aurelia by now."
"Look where the moon is, boy," Vettius scoffed. "We've only been riding for two hours or so."
"Oh, surely it's been longer than that," the younger man insisted, looking at the sky in amazement.
"Well, it hasn't," his commander stated flatly.
"Shall we rest the horses for a moment?"Dama suggested."That pool seems to be spring fed, and I'm a little thirsty."
"Good idea," Vettius agreed."I'd like to wash that foul wine out of my mouth too."
"Look," Harpago put in, "Aurelia must be just around the next bend. Why don't we ride on a little further and see-"
"Ride yourself if you want to be a damned fool," snapped Vettius. He didn't like to be pushed, especially when he was right.
Harpago flushed. He saluted formally. When Vettius ignored him, he wheeled and rode off.
Vettius unstrapped his shield and looked around while the Cappadocian slurped water from his cupped hand. The adjutant was out of sight now, but the swift clinking of his horse's hooves reached them clearly.
"If that young jackass doesn't learn manners, somebody's going to break his neck before he gets much older," Vettius grumbled. "Might even be me."
Dama dried his face on his sleeve and began filling the water bottles. "It's something in the air here," he explained. "We're all tight."
The soldier began scuffing at a stump fixed beside the roadway. Decayed wood flaked away under his hobnails and the wasted remnants of a bronze nail clinked on the pavement. "They crucified somebody here," he said.
"Urn?"
"These posts along the road," Vettius explained. "There were several others back a ways. They're what's left of crosses when the top rots away."
Around the bend the hoofbeats faltered and a horse neighed in terror. Vettius swore and slipped his left arm through the straps of his shield. Metal crashed on stone.
Someone screamed horribly.
The big soldier vaulted into his saddle. With one swift jerk Dama loosed the cloak tied to his pommel, snapped it swiftly through the air to wrap protection around his left arm. He scrambled astride his horse.
"Wait!" Vettius said. "You aren't dressed for trouble. Ride back and get help."
"I don't think I will," the merchant remarked, drawing the short infantry sword that was belted over his tunic. "Ready?"
"Yes," Vettius said. His spatha shimmered in his hand.
They rounded the bend at a gallop. Wind caught at their garments. The Cappadocian's tunic bulked out into a squat troll shape while Vettius's short red officer's cape flew straight back from his shoulders. When a man looked up at their approach, the soldier let out the terrible banshee howl he had learned from his first command, a squadron of Irish mercenaries, as they slaughtered pirates on the Saxon Shore.
One of the men in the road howled back.
Harpago's horse pitched wildly as two filthy, skin-clad men sawed at its reins. Startled by Vettius's howl, a dozen similar shapes in the middle of the road parted to disclose the adjutant himself. He lay on his back with his eyes wide open to the moon. One of the slayers was still lapping at the blood draining from Harpago's torn throat.
The bandits surged to meet them. A youngster with matted hair and a wool tunic too dirty to show its original color swung a club at Vettius. It boomed dully on his shield, and the bandit snarled in fury. Vettius struck back with practiced grace, felling the club wielder with an overarm chop, then stabbing another opponent over his own back as he recovered his blade. Dropping the reins, he smashed his shield down into the face of a third who was hacking at his thigh below his studded leather apron. Her rough cloak fell away from her torso as she pitched backwards.
Dama had ridden down one of the bandits. He was trading furious strokes with a second, a purple-garbed patriarch with a sword, when a third man crawled under his horse's belly and stabbed upward with a fire-hardened spear. The beast screamed in agony and threw the Cappadocian into the gully. He struggled upright barely in time to block the blow of a human thighbone used as a bludgeon, then thrust his assailant through the neck.
"Get Harpago's horse!" Vettius shouted as he cut through the melee to relieve his friend.
Dama caught at the beast's reins. A bandit, his mouth smeared with gore, clubbed him across the shoulders and he dropped them again. Stunned, he staggered into the horse. Before his opponent could raise his weapon for another blow, Vettius had slashed through his spine. Drops of blood sailed off the tip of the soldier's sword as each blow arced home.
Dama threw himself onto the saddle. As he struggled to swing a leg astride, the purple-clad swordsman who had engaged him earlier slipped behind Vettius's horse and cut at the blond merchant's face. Vettius wheeled expertly and lopped off the bandit's right arm.
The handful of surviving bandits fell back in mewling horror. Then a baby bawled from the darkness as his mother tore him from her breast and dropped him to the ground. The woodline crackled with frantic movement. Savage forms rushed from the black pines-children scarcely able to walk and feral women. In the hush their bare feet scratched on the stone. Their men, braced by their numbers, moved forward purposefully.
All looked bestially alike.
Vettius took the reeling bandit chief by the hair and thrust his blade against his bony throat. The ghoulish horde moaned in baffled rage, but hesitated.
Then one of the women snarled deep in her throat and rushed at the riders alone. Dama, reeling in his saddle, slashed at her. She ducked under his sword and raked the merchant's leg with teeth and horny nails. Dama hacked awkwardly at her back. The woman cried shrilly each time the heavy blade struck her, but only at the fourth blow did she sag to the pavement.
"Let's get out of here!" Dama cried, gesturing at the clot of savage forms. He could face their crude weapons, but the bloodlust in their eyes was terrifying.
Vettius was chopping at the bandit's neck with short strokes. At last the spine parted and the soldier howled again, flaunting his trophy as he kicked his horse into a gallop.
As they rounded the next bend, Dama glanced over his shoulder. Harpago's body was again covered by writhing men. Or things shaped like men.
A mile down the road they halted for a moment, looking to their wounds and gulping air. The merchant hung his head low to clear it. His face was still pale when he straightened.
Vettius had dropped his trophy into a saddlebag, so that he could grip the reins again with his left hand. He continued to rest the spatha on his saddlebow instead of sheathing it.
"We'd better be going," he said curtly.
The eastern sky was perceptibly brighter when their foam-spattered horses staggered into another stretch of dismantled roadway. The riders' skin crawled as they forced their way between the files of trees, but the passage was without incident. Beyond lay Aurelia, a huddle of mean houses surrounded by the tents of the merchants come for the fair.
Light bobbed as a watchman raised his lantern toward them."You!"he called, "Where did you come from?"
"South of here," Vettius replied bleakly.
"Gods," the watchman began, "nobody's come that way in-" The riders had come within the circle of lantern light and his startled eyes took in their torn clothes and bloody weapons. "Gods!" he blurted again, "Then the storyis true."
"What story?" Dama croaked, his gaze fixed on the watchman. Absently, he wiped his sword on his ruined tunic.
"There was a family of bandits-cannibals, really-living on that stretch-"
"You knew of that and did nothing?"Vettius roared, his face reddening with fury. "By the blood of the Bull, I'll have another head for this!"
"No!"the watchman squealed, cringing from the upraised sword."I tell you it's been fifty years! For a long time they killed everybody they attacked, so it went on for years and years without anyone knowing what was happening. But when somebody got away, the governor brought in a squadron of cavalry. He crucified them all up and down the road and left them hanging there to rot."
Vettius shook his head in frustration. "But they're still there!" he insisted.
The watchman gulped."That's what my grandfather said. That's why they had to close that road fifty years ago. Because they were still there-even though all of them were dead."
"Lucius," the merchant said softly. He had opened his friend's saddlebag. A moment later the severed head thumped to the ground.
Rosy light reflected from eyes that were suddenly vacant sockets. Skin blackened, sloughed, and disappeared. The skull remained, grinning at some secret jest the dead might understand.
Lord Of The Depths
"Lord of the Depths" is a more or less conscious copy of "Queen of the Black Coast," one of the best of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. The details of my story grew out of classical models, however.
I have a Latin edition of Pliny's Natural History, and during my honeymoon I read chunks of it. One interesting bit was that Alexander the Great sent a squadron under Nearchos from the Indus to Babylon by sea while Alexander himself marched back overland with his army. Pliny noted that en route the sailors found very large, aggressive squid. I assumed that Nearchos had been on an exploring voyage with a few ships.
The other classical influence was Juvenal's 14th satire. In it he rails against the mad lust for wealth that causes ships' captains to load their vessels to the gunwales, risking death for a fraction more profit.
Juvenal is a brilliant and evocative writer. Critics always talk about his bitterness and invective, but I find far more interesting his remarkable ability to draw character with a line or two. I hope I've been able to learn something from his craftsmanship in general, but the scene just mentioned certainly shaped the present story.
I didn't specifically reference Alexander in "Lord of the Depths," and I deliberately didn't learn any more about Nearchos' voyage than what I'd found in Pliny's passing mention in a discussion of squids. I didn't want to sully my fiction with reality. (If this seems very silly to you, it seems even sillier to me now. I can't imagine why I felt that way, but I know that I did.)
In fact Nearchos was in command of a fleet of thousands of ships which were intended to supply Alexander and the army on the march. They failed to do so because the Greeks didn't learn about the South Asian monsoon until some two centuries later. I could have turned the real event into a story; but it would've been very different.
I wrote "Lord of the Depths" during my first year in law school and sent it to Mr. Derleth. He requested that I cut a scene which he said didn't fit: the viewpoint characters are chased by a giant lizard which is killed by an arrow from the catapult on the deck of one of the vessels. (Mr. Derleth wasn't exactly wrong-the scene was unnecessary. I don't think it hurt the story, though. He liked to fiddle with things.) When I made that change, he bought the story for $50, the most he ever paid me.
This was my second sale. Those of you who've already read "Denkirch" will note that I made an entirely different set of mistakes in this one. I like to think of that as the story of my life: an unending quest to find new fashions in which to screw up.
There were five of the ships. I, deck watch on the leader, the kerkourosFlyer, turned from the invariance of sea and moonlit jungle to glance back along our wake. Behind us stretched our sistersForesight andCrane, dragged like us over a thousand leagues of plain and desert to reach their element at last in the Great River and thence to the sea. For all their mishandling, the light craft were far more seaworthy than the trieresService or theDominator, a great fiver wallowing far astern. Built on the River, the larger ships had suffered for lack of knowledgeable craftsmen and seasoned wood. Both had leaked from the start and theDominator had warped to the point that a dozen crewmen choked in the bilges to keep the level down.
We were running by night, for the heat of the days was too great to live, much less row, on the glancing oven of the water. At dawn we would beach our craft, cook what had been caught during the night or foraged on the shore, and pray to find fresh water-all but a handful of our casks had been of green wood also. Then we would seek shade and rest, cursing all the while the madness of our leader to order the voyage, and our own to obey him.
The breeze was gentle and we scudded before it, easily distancing the heavier vessels though their sides crawled with oars. Their captains had formed the crews into shifts to work some of the oars at all times in a vain effort to keep abreast of their nimbler kinsmen, but only in rough seas where weight told and we needs must reduce sail did they succeed. The larger ships had been a mistake. Whereas we had crews of only eighteen and the beaks stripped off for ease on the long portage, the decked ships had been sent off in full fighting trim. TheDominator bore three hundred men, artillery fore and aft, and a bronze ram of ten talents, cast from our leader's spoils and fit only to warp the seams worse on such a voyage as ours.
Far back from the silvery darkness came the triple soughing of theDominator 's command horn: Close up! It meant, as always, reef sails and await the sluggards. I sighed in vexation, for we were many months from home as was and with the penteres leaking like the pails of the Belides the situation could only get worse. A flash from starboard and shore recalled my attention as I leaned over to roust Hipporion, our bosun; the moon was glinting from something smooth in the jungle, metal or polished marble.
"Lay your dream-wench aside, Hylas," I said, for with such a nickname we mocked the grizzled old bosun. "There's something to be seen."
He only grunted as he awoke, but his eye followed my gesture right enough.
"I suppose we're to bugger ourselves while theFornicator closes up again?" he growled, and at my nod roared, "Off and on, ladies, it's time to pretend we're sailors again. Begging your pardon, sir."
This last to Antiopas, a brave man and our captain, but a better horseman than sailor. He snapped awake, pawing for the long cavalry sword now stowed below as too awkward even for dignity. "What's the matter, Hylas?" he complained. "What couldn't a detail handle that we all must be up for?"
"Xenias has found something of interest, sir," the bosun answered and pointed toward the shore. More was visible now, stonework and what seemed the remains of a pier jutting from the jungle.
"Would it be a difficult landfall?" Antiopas questioned.
"With a pier for hope and a leadsman for certainty, I don't see any problem," the bosun decided, and I took the lead while he shouted orders to the rest of the crew. TheForesight, following or perhaps anticipating our action, trailed us in while theCrane 's less adventurous captain held position offshore.
I swore as I retrieved the third cast and we stood but a bow-shot from the shore.
"What bottom?" Hylas queried.
"None at all," I answered, well aware of the fool I sounded. The bosun, surprised, took the line without comment and cast it himself. The twenty fathoms shot through his hands butter smooth."Horns of Tanit, thereis no bottom!" he snarled. "Take it gentle," he warned the four men on sweeps. "We've a strange coast here and I've no desire to learn of further oddities the hard way."
I continued to sound as we crawled toward the shore. Finally, within a ship's length of the pier, I found bottom at sixty feet. There was no rise to speak of after that, even when the crumbling stone was alongside.
The climate had long since devoured the bollards, but an ornamental stone bench at the end of the pier and parallel to the shore was still sturdy enough to hold us by a couple turns of hawser. The pier was almost the only bare stone visible. The buildings, not bathed in salt, were completely overgrown save where a massive pediment had been pried loose by questing tendrils recently enough to leave the substructure bare. Without that there would have been little to catch my eye, for the pier was low among the waves.
"I'm going to take out a party," the captain remarked to Hylas. "You'd better be ready to get us out of here fast if we must."
Antiopas took five others with him, carrying javelins and staying within sight of the ship for the most part. TheForesight docked across from us but her captain kept all on board to wait for Antiopas to report. The arms chests had been opened and that, more than the ruins themselves, made us uneasy. Just as theDominator signaled again one of the men on shore picked something from the ground and called to his mates. The six of them gathered but distance and the uncertain light hid the object they were discussing. Then they began to jog back in evident excitement. "Sir," called Hylas as the captain approached, "the flagship is signaling."
"Call 'em in!"Antiopas shouted back."We're not leaving here till we've done a mite more searching."
He raised his hands and the heavy torque he carried shone softly in the moonlight. Colors were washed out, but the perfect lack of corrosion left no doubt of what the ornament was made. If a single piece of jewelry contained several pounds of gold, a further search was indeed worthwhile.
For the night we dragged the lesser ships including theService ashore stern first. There was a sand beach and it appeared that the bottom sloped rather gently in most places. A channel of some sort, far too great not to be natural, led straight seaward from the pier. The fiver, too massive for us to beach it, was lashed to the pier with some difficulty as it seemed that there never had been any bollards or other provision for docking ships. Between the bench and anchors theDominator was adequately held, but it seemed a queer thing to some.
A few men spent the night searching, but for my own part I felt that sunshine and a clear head were better comrades than enthusiasm and stretched out on the beach. Events proved me right for dawn and the third hour had come before more gold was found.
When the discovery came it made up for the delay by its sheer magnitude. While I led a party through a ruin on the west of the city, which was laid out as a semicircle with streets raying out from the pier, someone in the far quadrant tugged on a bronze ring and raised a shout that soon had almost everyone milling around him.
When I finally got close enough to see what had been found-it wasn't until crewmen had begun to empty it-I saw a huge underground room, bare but for the tons of gold jewelry scattered over its floor. It was circular and reached by eight staircases around the rim, the only integral marring of its emptiness. A man writhed in mosaic at the bottom of the stairs at which I stood. The design was continued in a widening wavy line leading toward the center. It was too far and too dark to see what lay there or at the other entrances, and I did not care to remain in the room. Perhaps it was a theatre of some sort, though there seemed no provision for ventilation; certainly the jewelry had not been stored there. Yet why would thousands of people have packed the great room, then closed the doors and died so many years ago that not even bones remained? For thus it must have happened. I am not a philosopher; say only that we met stranger sights before we were clear of the port.
During the day three more chambers were found; it was easier when we knew what to look for. There was gold aplenty; in fact, there was more than perhaps the ships could safely hold. The sailing master of theDominator held several angry conclaves with high officers but to no avail: gold continued to stream into the fiver's hold.
We had theFlyer loaded before the evening meal. This was poor enough, dried fish and bitter fruit, but the gold gave it the savor of ambrosia. We had not been able to fish as normally and the hunting parties found nothing but a few birds that graced the Admiral's table. Perhaps they had spent more time looking for gold than for food; still, the jungle appeared more barren than expected.
Work continued for most of the next day; the Admiral seemed bound to leave no scrap of value behind him though it meant he must follow it to the sea bottom. Antiopas was a sensible man for all his lubberliness, and when the bosun pronounced us loaded to the limits of safety he refused to have more aboard us. There was no small sparking of tempers at his announcement, but because Antiopas had high connections indeed, no one cared to overrule him on a point bearing on his own command's safety. Not, at least, when he was so obviously correct.
As a result, we of theFlyer 's crew were free while others hauled metal aboard. I proposed a genuine exploring jaunt-not just a search for more gold. The captain gave permission to any who cared to go though he was of two minds himself, fearing the ship might be overloaded in his absence. In the end he decided that he could easily enough dump such excess over the side if it came to that and joined us.
We were six altogether, Antiopas and the bosun, and four of us crewmen, more adventurous or more bored. We followed the central street, heading with unspoken agreement for the huge domed structure on the edge of the jungle. Clearly it was a temple or palace, more likely the former, and when a people dies as this one had, one wonders what Gods it had worshipped. The jungle had recovered everything and the state of the road made me wish I had brought along a chopper. In some spots saplings had displaced paving blocks and had grown into trees, and vines covered practically everything.
The distance was greater than expected as well as being fatiguing; the enormous size of the dome had made it seem deceptively close. When at last we reached the treble base of the structure we all were spent and rested a while in the shade of the dome.
Without any particular intent I rubbed a patch of stone clear of vegetation. The result was disquieting: a round, slit-pupiled eye glared at me from the center of a nest of carven swirls. A cat, I mused, but didn't care to look at the decoration again. To avoid it I started climbing the steps to the yawning portal and the others followed.
There was little left of the bronze doors, but the building itself, which was black and not of marble, had been very well preserved. The jungle had made few inroads on the interior, perhaps because relatively little light came through the top of the dome which was open save for a flat ellipse that spanned it. It could have been for structural reasons-I know little of domes, barbaric, inward straining things that they are-but the effect was unpleasantly similar to the carven eye outside. We could see well enough when our eyes adjusted, however. Much of the floor had been cut away in a pattern of swirls like that surrounding the eye graven on the plinth. The central portion, directly under the dome's center, had a small platform raised like an altar but the floor around it was sunken also.
"A sunburst, do you suppose?" the captain asked.
"I saw a carving outside," I replied. "It looked like some kind of eye."
"If this isn't the damnedest thing," Hylas said. "How do you get to the altar?"
I walked a few steps around the hall to get a different view. It was just as the bosun said: The altar was completely separated from the walkway around the edge of the building by a sunken area some ten feet deep. Then a sailor jumped down and made another discovery.
"Look, a drain," he called. "This whole thing must 'a been a pool."
We all looked where he stood beside a stone grating in the sunken part.
"Maybe for sacrifices?" someone suggested, thinking of the Orphic rites in which the communicants knelt beneath a grate while the victims were slaughtered above them.
"Zeus, no," the discoverer disagreed, peering through the grate."I can't even see bottom."
"Say, there's something on the altar," somebody called.
A shaft of sunlight was splashing from a green gem of some sort on the altar. None of us could see just what it was because of the dazzle but we all had hopes of a huge emerald.
"Did anybody bring a rope?" I asked, and blank looks answered me. "Well, who'll give me a boost, then?"
Leon, a brawny fellow and just the man for the job, was willing and we jumped down into the empty pool with the others following us. The central orb was surfaced and drained just as the tapered, recurved arms had been; neither gave any clue to its purpose.
The altar was on a floor-height pedestal, round and about four feet in diameter. Since the altar itself was rectangular there would be no trouble standing if I could mount to begin with. After a moment's discussion Leon braced himself against the pedestal with one hip jutting. I took a short run and jumped from his hip to shoulder, then swung myself up in front of the altar. There was an awkward piece of balancing for a moment since the ledge was only a foot and a half wide at most, but there was no need of a second attempt.
My first feelings on seeing the stone were merely of disappointment. It was a delicate piece of carving about the size of my fist, but the material was only some sort of glass. A second glance changed my disappointment to horror; I finally recognized the temple's motif. Dropping the little figurine into my tunic I leaped down beside Leon again.
"What's it worth?" he questioned eagerly.
"Damn little," I said. "Let's get out of here."
We padded across the smooth floor to the others who had managed to pry up a grating with their spears.
"Well, let's see it," Antiopas demanded. I dropped the little stone in his palm.
"By Castor!" he swore, "a glass octopus."
"Hell of a thing for a temple," somebody muttered."Do you s'pose it belongs here?"
"Take another look at the pool," I said, "or these eye designs all over. Eight arms and a cat slitted eye; that's what they worshipped, all right."
"And that explains what this pool was for," the captain added.
Leon blinked and looked shocked. He'd been a Highlander raised and I don't think he much cared to be in an octopus pool, even after the beasts were long gone. Well, I wasn't too happy about it, either.
"Captain!" one of the men called. "There's noises down here."
We all gathered around the drain, uneasily aware that we had to climb a ten-foot wall to leave.
"Just water sloshing down there," Hylas said. "It's what you'd expect under a drain."
"A long way down," Antiopas said thoughtfully.
There was a flicker of yellow in the depths.
"Zeus Father and Savior!" cried Antiopas, leaping back as we all did.
Then, while the rest of us stood in trembling panic, his face cleared and he began to laugh, pointing at the top of the dome.
"The reflection," I gasped in sudden understanding."It wasn't an eye, it was just a reflection of the skylight in the water."
No one was quite sure what happened then because we all were looking up when Hylas screamed and pitched through the opening. There was a splash, or perhaps that had come before; when I instinctively peered over the edge there was nothing below but a roil of bubbles.
We lifted each other out in tense silence, all but Leon, that is, who babbled to himself of what he had seen at the corner of his eye. He screamed during the night and my own dreams were bloody and mare-wracked until a gray dawn awoke me.
The captain was waiting when I opened my eyes. "Sleep well?" he asked.
I winced. "And yourself?"
He turned his palms up."It was bad enough when I only dreamed of drowning. Though it looks as if that too may come today."
I glanced at the sky. It marched solidly with black cumuli though the wind was still for the nonce.
"We'll not set out today," I said.
"Really? You're bosun now, you know, and I'll take your word for it-but theDominator seems to be making ready."
I nodded."The Admiral wants some sea room," I guessed."Remember, we've no proper harbor here and the fiver can't be beached. He'll try to keep her bow to the storm with the oars and take no chance of her being pounded to pieces against the shore. Though for my own part, I'd worry more that the wallowing slut's keel would split and spill me in the middle of it."
A messenger bore out my prediction within the hour and theDominator put out alone. The storm refused to break, however, and she rode a half-mile out on a smooth sea while the sultry heat grew more and more oppressive. The water was so calm that Antiopas and I, sitting in the bows of theFlyer, could see the channel in the sea bottom as a straight dark streak in the green.
"Where do you suppose it leads?" he asked.
"Where does a mountain lead?" I replied with a shrug.
Antiopas persisted. "This end leads to the pier," he said. "At least that far; the other end…"
He was voicing thoughts that had occurred to me also. "The drains," I said. "I suppose they have to lead somewhere."
Neither of us spoke for a while. When I did, I deliberately avoided what both of us were thinking of.
"Pity the baggars below decks on her," I said, thumbing toward the penteres.
"Pity the all of us, damned to this voyage," Antiopas replied and fumbled in his pouch."Do you suppose there is any value to this?"he continued, bringing out the octopus figure.
I took a closer look at the little idol, hefting it in my hand. "Just glass," I answered. "Not very pretty, the Gods know. Besides, I don't much like the idea of carrying other people's Gods around. Why don't we just drop it over the side and be done?"
"Images of Gods," Antiopas corrected me. "A stone is not the God but the symbol of the God."
Then why go to temples if the Gods aren't there? I thought but said nothing and watched the play of light within the figurine. The glass was so smooth that it slipped in my grasp and a tiny drop of blood formed where one of the arms pricked me.
"Castor!"Antiopas swore, "TheDominator 's moving; she's heading in. Now what under heaven for?"
I looked up from the idol. The surface had been roiled by the fiver's oars and there was another patch of foam far beyond her, almost on the horizon from where we sat though much nearer the penteres. I rose and pointed to it without speaking.
Antiopas stood too, and his face had gone white. One part of my mind remembered the little brown men telling us how these seas could rise in minutes, horizon to horizon, and sweep everything beneath them. Still I felt no fear, neither of that nor of what I knew in truth was approaching. The idol burned in my palm.
All along the shore men were staring in confusion at theDominator, whose battle-gong was clanging. As we watched, the sea darkened in front of the penteres and there was another splash of foam.
"That's no wave-" Antiopas began and broke off in horror to stare at the figurine in my hand. "Herakles who purged the world," he whispered, "be with us now."
Some started to run then but I think only the two of us realized what was coming. The crew of theService was readying the catapult on her forecastle. Although the Admiral must have realized by then that theDominator was not the quarry, the great fiver continued to cut through the sea pursuing now instead of fleeing.
The third time it arose it was half the distance between the shore and the swiftly approachingDominator. The sacklike body squirmed-Gods, it was huge!-to bring one slit-pupiled eye around to glare at us. Then it dived with another spurt of foam.
Someone had fired theService' s catapult before joining the rout. The bolt glanced off the waves, probably useless even if better aimed. Men were streaming away from the shore, their shouts drowning the thunder of the penteres' drummer hammering out the strokes as the bronze prow boiled through the glassy sea. There were only two men on her deck now, the helmsman and the Admiral himself. Even as I watched the helmsman dived overboard and the Admiral took the wheel. Probably the crew had no idea of what was happening; their only view was through the oarslots and ventilator gratings.
"Run, you fool!" someone shouted in my ear and it was Antiopas, my captain. But I could not move for it was not yet time, though the God was as fire in my hand.
"The bench," I whispered, "I should be on the bench."
"Run!"
An arm snaked over the side and wrapped about the rail. TheFlyer shuddered as she slid off the beach and continued to slant into the water toward the great weight that was dragging her down. I stared into the water as the ship lurched again and two more arms rippled up, two arms and a chalk-white beak larger than I was.
Antiopas screamed and slashed with his sword, not at the tentacle that curled toward him but the God in my hand. Then our bow heaved up and disintegrated, hurling us shoreward, as theDominator 's oak and gold and great bronze ram smashed through theFlyer and ground what was beneath her into the mud of the bottom forever.
We buried our dead-and there were many, for the penteres had crumpled to the mast step-beneath an honest mound with none of the decaying marble to defile them. The gold we gave to the sea, may it lie there forever. Yet still there is that which rots unburied in my mind, and my dreams are ill dreams for a sailor.
Children Of The Forest
Many years ago I mentioned that I was a Fortean to a careful reporter who was taping the interview. My several psychiatrist friends were hugely amused when the printed version stated that I was a Freudian. Since then I've been careful to give an explanation of what I mean by the word.
Charles Fort collected reports of anomalous events from periodicals (largely from scientific journals) and published them in four volumes from 1919 to 1932. These include reports of things which are now accepted as true (for instance, giant squid and ball lightning) but which orthodox science at the time rejected as observer errors; matters which are unexplained but aren't especially controversial (for instance, unconfirmed sightings of astronomical bodies by respectable observers); and utterly bizarre things like a rain of frogs in England or a rain of shaved meat in Kentucky. Fort didn't write about UFOs, but they're part of modern Fortean interests.
Now-the fact that I'm interested in such things doesn't mean I believe in all of them. There are people who do, just as there are people who believe that disproving a report of spontaneous human combustion disproves all such reports. I consider both groups delusional (and I consider people who think you get real science or real history from a TV show to be deeply ignorant, but that's a slightly different matter).
One of the most entertaining writers on Forteana (and on natural history generally) was
Ivan T. Sanderson. He was capable of modifying his data to improve a story, but he was a fine writer and a man of great culture and intelligence.
One of Sanderson's essays was on wudewasas, woodhouses (yes, that's what the name of the humorist P.G. Wodehouse comes from): the drawings of wild men found in the margins of medieval manuscripts. He speculated that there'd been a European version of the Sasquatch, but that it was man-sized rather than a giant like the wild man of the Northwest United States.
The likelihood that this is true (or for that matter, the likelihood that Bigfoot is running around Northern California) didn't matter for my purposes. I thought the notion would work for a story, so I wrote "Children of the Forest."
The form goes back to the fairy tales which I loved of mine even I could read. It's become fashionable to give fairy tales a modern slant or to twist them. I wasn't trying to be clever, but I did try to treat the realities of medieval life and its class structure with the same sort of realism that I'd bring to a story set in Viet Nam.
When "Children…" was first published in F amp;SF, it brought me two angry letters. (Only one other story of mine from the '70s aroused any comment at all.) I'm not sure what that means, as the letter writers were incensed about completely different aspects of the story (and both were wrong). It may simply indicate that when I'm on, my fiction arouses an emotional reaction in readers.
If so, well, that's what I'm trying to do.
When Teller came in from the field, gnarled as his hoe-handle and looking twice his forty years, his wife said, "The cow has gone dry, man." Teller scowled. She had slapped out her words like bolts from a crossbow. He understood them, understood also why she was whetting the black iron blade of their only knife. From his wife, warped and time-blackened by the same years that had destroyed him, Teller turned to his daughter Lena.
And Lena was a dazzle of sunlight in the darkened hut.
She was six, though neither of her parents could have told a stranger that without an interval of mumbling and dabbing fingers to cracked lips. But there were no strangers. In the dozen years since the Black Death had swept southern Germany, the track that once led to the high road and thence to Stuttgart had merged back into the Forest. The hut was all of civilization, a beehive with two openings in its thatch. Teller now stooped in the doorway; above him was the roof hole that served as chimney for the open fire in the center of the room. By that fire sat Lena, easing another baulk of wood under the porridge pot before looking at her father. Her smile was timid, but the joy underlying it was as real as the blond of her sooty hair. She dared not show Teller the welts beneath her shift, but she knew that her mother would not beat her in his presence.
"I said, the cow has gone dry," the woman repeated.
The rasp of iron on stone echoed her words."You know we can't go on until the harvest with three mouths and no milk."
"Woman, I'll butcher-"
"You will not." She slid to the floor and faced him, bandy-legged and shorter on her own legs than when sitting on the stool."The meat will rot in a month, we have no salt. Three mouths will not last the summer on the cow's meat, man.
"Three mouths will not last the summer."
She was an iron woman, black-faced and blackhearted. She did not look at Lena, who cowered as her mother stepped forward and held out the wood-hafted knife to Teller. He took it, his eyes as blank as the pit of his mouth opening and closing in his beard. "Perhaps… I can hunt more…?"
"Hoo, coward!"mocked the woman."You're afraid to leave the clearing now for the woods devils, afraid to go out the door to piss in the night!" The reek of the wall across from the pine-straw bedding proved her statement. "You'll not go hunting, man."
"But-"
"Kill her. Kill her! " she shrieked, and Lena's clear voice wailed hopelessly as a background to the raucous cries. Teller stared at the weapon as though it were a viper which had crawled into his hand in the night. He flung it from him in a fury of despair, not hearing it clack against the whetstone or theping! of the blade as it parted.
The woman's brief silence was as complete as if the knife had pierced her heart instead of shattering. She picked up the longest shard, a hand's breadth of iron whose edge still oozed light, and cradled it in her palms. Her voice crooned without meaning, while Teller watched and Lena burrowed her face into the pine needles.
"We can't all three eat and live to the harvest, man," the woman said calmly. And Teller knew that she was right.
"Lena," he said, not looking at the girl but instead at his cloak crumpled on the earthen floor. It was steerhide, worn patchily hairless during the years since he had bartered eggs for it from a passing peddler. That one had been the last of the peddlers, nor were there chickens anymore since the woods demons had become bolder.
"Child," he said again, a little louder but with only kindness in his voice. He lifted the cloak with his left hand, stroked his daughter between the shoulder blades with his right. "Come, we must go for a little journey, you and I."
The woman backed against the hut wall again. Her eyes and the knife edge had the same hard glitter.
Lena raised her face to her father's knee; his arm, strong for all its stringiness, lifted her against his chest. The cloak enveloped her and she thrashed her head free. "I'm hot, Papa."
"No, we'll play a game," Teller said. He hawked and spat cracklingly on the fire before he could continue. "You won't look at the way we go, you'll hide your head. All right, little one?"
"Yes, Papa." Her curls, smooth as gold smeared with river mud, bobbled as she obediently faced his chest and let him draw the leather about her again.
"The bow, woman," Teller said. Silently she turned and handed it to him: a short, springy product of his own craftsmanship. With it were the three remaining arrows, straight-shafted with iron heads, but with only tufts remaining of the fletching. His jaw muscles began to work in fury. He thrust the bow back to her, knots of anger dimpling the surface of his bare left arm. "String it! String it, you bitch, or-"
She stepped away from his rage and quickly obeyed him, tensing the cord without difficulty. The wood was too supple to make a good bow, but a stiffer bowshaft would have snapped the bark string. Teller strode from the hut, not deigning to speak again to his wife.
There was no guide but the sun, and that was a poor, feeble twinkling through the ranked pines and spruces. It was old growth, save in slashes where age or lightning had brought down a giant and given opportunity to lesser growth. Man had not made serious inroads on this portion of the Forest even before the Plague had stripped away a third of the continent's population. Fear had driven Teller and his wife to flee with their first child, leaving their village for a lonely clearing free from contamination. But there were other fears than that of the Black Death, things only hinted at in a bustling hamlet. In the Forest they became a deeper blackness in the shadows and a heavy padding on moonless nights.
They were near him now.
Teller lengthened his stride, refusing to look to the sides or behind him. He was not an intelligent man, but he knew instinctively that if he acknowledged what he felt, he would be lost. He would be unable to move at all, would remain hunched against a tree trunk until either starvation or the demons came for him.
Lena began humming a little tune. Though off-key, it was recognizable as a lullaby. Teller's wife had never bothered to rock Lena to sleep, but their elder daughter, born before the panicked flight into the wilderness, had absorbed enough of the memories of her babyhood to pass them on to her sister. It was not the Plague that had taken the girl, nor yet the demons. Rather, there had been a general malaise, a wasting fed by seven years in an environment that supported life but did nothing to make life supportable. In the end she had died, perhaps saving Teller the earlier agony of a journey like the one he made now.
Far enough, he decided. A spruce sapling thrust up from among three adult trees. Though its bole was only a hand's breadth in diameter, the first branches were a full ten feet in the air. It formed a post firmer than that on which Sebastian was martyred.
"Now, Lena," Teller said as he put the girl down, "you'll wait here by this tree for a while."
She opened her eyes for the first time since she had left the house with her father. The conifers around her were spearpoints thrust through the earth. Black-green branches shuddered in a breath of wind. The girl screamed, paused, and screamed again.
Teller panicked at the sound and the open terror of her bright blue gaze. He stopped fumbling at the cord knotted about his waist and struck open-handed, his palm smudging the soot on her cheek. Lena bounced back against the spruce trunk, stunned mentally rather than physically by the blow. She closed her mouth unblinking, then spun to her feet and ran. Teller gulped fear and remorse as he snatched up his bow to follow.
Lena ran like a startled fawn. She should not have been able to escape a grown man, but the fearsome shadows came to her aid. When Lena dodged around the scaly bole of a hemlock, Teller, following, was knocked sprawling by a branch. He picked himself up, picked up also the arrows he had scattered as he fell. He nocked the one with the most fletching, though he could not have explained to a questioner what he meant to do with it. "Lena?" he called. The trees drank his voice.
A rustle and a stutter of light caught his attention, but it was a squirrel's flag tail jerking on a spruce tip. Teller eased the tension on his bowstring.
There was another sound behind him, and he turned very quickly.
Lena, trembling in the crease of a giant that had fallen so long ago that the trees growing around it were of nearly equal girth, heard her father blundering nearby. Her frightened whimper was almost a silence itself, no more than the burr of a millipede's feet through the leaf mould in front of her nose. She heard Teller call, then a ghastly double cry that merged with the twang of a bow. No more voices, then, but a grunt and thechock! of something hollow crushing against a tree trunk.
For a moment, then, there was real silence.
"Coo-o?"trilled a voice too deep to be birdlike."Coo-o-o?"it repeated, closer now to Lena though unaccompanied by the crackling brush that had heralded her father's progress."Coo?"and it was directly above her. Almost more afraid to look up than not to, Lena slowly turned her head.
It was leaning over the log to peer down at her, a broad face set with sharp black eyes and a pug nose. The grinning lips were black, the skin pink where it could be glimpsed beneath the fine, russet fur. Lena's hands swung to her mouth and she bit down hard on her knuckles. The creature vaulted soundlessly over the log. It was about the height of Lena's father, but was much deeper in the chest. Palms and soles were bare of the fur that clothed the rest of it. Its right hand reached out and plucked away the arrow that flopped from its left shoulder. A jewel of blood marked the fur at that point, but the creature's torso and long arms were already sticky with blood not its own.
The hands reached down for Lena. She would have screamed again, but her mind was folding up within her as a white blur.
"Coo-ree?" questioned a liquid voice in Lena's ear, and she blinked awake. A girl with a shy grin was watching her, a child so innocent that Lena forgot to be afraid. Even though the child was as furry as the adult who must have brought Lena to the grassy hollow in which she now lay. A smile that bared square, yellowed teeth split the fur and the little-shorter even than Lena though more compactly built-creature held out a double handful of hemlock nodules, painstakingly knocked clean of dirt. The skin of her hands was a rich onyx black in contrast to the broken, copper-colored fingernails.
As shyly as her benefactress, Lena took the roots and crunched one between her teeth. The nodule had a rich, almost meaty, flavor and a texture pleasant to her gums. She smiled back. A twittering at the crest of the hollow caused her to spin about and gape at the broad-chested male creature she had met in the woods, now with a smaller companion to either side. On the right was a four-dugged female, slimmer than the male and slightly hunched. The remaining woods man-but Lena's mind still shrieked demon, troll-was another child, obviously male and of lighter coloration than his parents. His cublike roundness had not yet given way to ropy adult musculature, and his nervous smile was a reflection of his sister's.
Lena stood. Her body had gone cold and the bright sunlight seemed suddenly to glance away as from a block of ice. The adult male had washed since she first saw him: his pelt was smooth and clean save for the smudged left shoulder. Another drop of blood oozed to the surface and the female, seeing it, cooed in vexation and nuzzled the wound. Her teeth chopped as she cleaned it. The male pushed her gently away, his eyes locked with Lena's. Trembling with courage she had not known was hers, Lena bit off another hemlock nodule, then extended the remainder of the bunch toward the watching woods folk. The three before her began to caper with joy, and a warm, furry arm encircled Lena's waist from behind.
They were foragers and therefore by necessity wanderers, the family of which Lena was now a part. After a month in the bowl which chance or ancient vulcanism had pocked into the Jura Mountains, they spent a pair of weeks combing a stream with a different sleeping place every night. Food was plentiful in that spring and the summer it wore into: roots and berries, spruce tips and the tender shoots of other vegetation; birds' eggs while they lasted, but never the birds themselves. Lena was almost too young to remember the last of her parents' hens. Still, learning that they had succumbed to nest raiding, not slaughter, calmed a remaining bristle of unease.
She tried not to think of Teller at all.
Kort was the father of the family, even-tempered but awesomely strong. Rather than climb a hardwood to pick nuts before the squirrels had combed them, he would find a boulder or the largest fallen limb in the neighborhood and smash it against the tree trunk, showering himself and the ground with the ripe offerings. It was Kort, too, who trudged off on day-long journeys to the cave in which the family wintered, carrying in a bark-cloth basket the dried excess of their gleaning. The winter stores were kept beneath a stone too tight-fitting for a mouse to slide around and too massive for a bear's awkward limbs to thrust aside.
But if Kort's strength was the shaft which supported the family's existence, it was the quick mind of Kue-meh, his mate, which provided directing force. Her fingers wove the strips of cambium into fabric as smooth and as supple as the wool and linen of the villages beyond the Forest. The woods folk used the cloth for carrying bulky goods, not as clothing, though Lena once ineptly wove a crossbelt for herself when her shift disintegrated. Kue-meh guided the foraging, judging its progress and determining when and where the family would move. She could tell at a glance which hickory nut was sound and sweet, which had been emptied in its shell by a worm.
At first the children were never wholly alone, for there were dangers in the Forest. Not the bears, so much, for their strength and ugly tempers were outweighed by clumsiness and their preference for other food. Even Lena was soon able to scramble up a tree before a peevish grunt gave way to a charge. Lynxes were more of a potential threat, for they were swift and had the blood-lust common to all cats. Still Chi, the female woods child and smallest of the three, weighed forty founds by now and was too strong and active to be a comfortable victim.
The wolves, though, the wolves…
They feared nothing very greatly, those lean gray killers. Fire, perhaps; but the woods folk feared it more and Lena learned to avoid the flames after being cuffed fiercely away from a lightning-slashed tree. From spring through fall the wolves padded through the Forest alone and in pairs, tracking a plump doe or a healthy fawn to rip down and devour. Like most powerful carnivores, the wolves chose their prey not for its weakness but for its taste-and after years of chaos and the Plague, some of them had found a taste for men.
Lena's long legs, and the new sense of freedom brought by roaming the Forest with folk who thought it home, not exile, took her and Faal, the young male, almost into long-toothed jaws. They were digging root nodules, using sharpened stakes and cloth bags while Kue-meh wove. Faal went around one side of a huge hemlock, Lena the other-the far side. The empty woods, a chorus of blacks and greens and browns, spoke to her suddenly. Dropping her equipment with a silent giggle, Lena darted off among the aisles of trees.
Faal heard the pad of her feet-months in the wild had trained Lena's step, but not beyond notice of ears that had been born there. He followed her without calling or even thinking. Faal was swiftly gaining his father's deep chest, but he showed signs of being in Kort's mental image as well. The two children were gone a minute or longer before Kue-meh looked up from her own work and Chi to notice that her other charges were gone. She hooted in anger, but Faal was already beyond earshot and Lena was ahead of him.
She was a shuttle racing over a loom of needles and spruce twigs. Faal was stronger and his lungs might have brought him abreast of her in time, but Lena's legs would have been the envy of a doe. Faal on his stumpy limbs could not outsprint the girl. But the two wolves which converged on Lena in a grove of beeches were quicker yet.
Lena stopped, too startled at first to be frightened. Faal had aimed a playful tackle at her before he saw the reason for her halt. He flopped to the leaf mould instead and skidded. The nearer of the red-tongued wolves lowered its tail and hunched.
Lena stepped without thought between Faal and the gray killer. The wolf drew back. It was more than the scent of a true man, the reivers with iron and fire, where only woods folk had been expected. There was something within Lena herself that allowed her, a slim six-year-old, to face down a pair of wolves. They stood for an instant, each of them half again the girl's size; then they bolted. Only their fresh spoor was visible a moment later when Kue-meh raced into the glade, Chi under her left arm and a six-foot pine knot in her right hand. Lena and Faal were pummeled heavily for the run, but Kue-meh spent the rest of the afternoon in thought. Afterwards she let all three children stray, so long as her own two kept close to Lena.
Early hunger and a vegetarian diet should have stunted Lena's growth. Instead she gained willowy inches to quickly overtop Faal and Chi. The woods folk were a cleanly people and the grime that had disfigured Lena's first six years disappeared in the ice-fed stream nearest the hollow in which she joined the family. It never returned. Her skin was clear and did not, even bare to the sun and the wind, take on the swarthy cast of her parents'. In the summer she was a warm brown, traced with the thin scabs of bramble cuts; in the winter her complexion counterfeited the creamy yellowness of old ivory polished by loving hands.
For all the beauty of her body and skin, Lena's hair was her crown. It had never been cut, a result of her mother's apathy rather than any interest in the girl's adornment. Washed out and laboriously carded with twigs by all four of the woods folk, it flowed down her back like liquid gold. Loose, it was a bright flood behind her as she ran-but then it snagged and caught and diminished. Faal began to plait it in the evening imitating Kue-meh's bark weavings. Simple at first, the patterns grew increasingly complex and changed nightly. The hair was Faal's delight. During the long winter evenings he spent hours braiding and reopening her tresses, then braiding them again. Lena bore the attention, but her mind strayed beyond the boy's gentle fingers.
There was another predator in the Forest, though Lena was twelve before she encountered it. She was miles from the high crag the family then occupied, following Kort to the winter cave, when a horn wound in the near distance. Kort's reaction was to panic. He danced in a little circle of indecision, then began scrambling up a princely fir tree. The bag of stores jerked with every hunch of his back, scattering bunches of hemlock nodules. Kort's feet and long right arm-his left held the bag and, in any case, would not lift above shoulder height since the arrow wound had healed-had shot him halfway up the trunk before he realized that Lena's progress was much slower than his own. There was more than a difference in strength. Though the woods folk did not have opposed big toes either, their control of their foot muscles was much greater than that of Lena's subspecies.
Kort scrabbled down again, chattering haste in an angry voice. Lena, terrified by the uncertain situation, tried to obey and lost her grip, slipping ten feet to the ground. Kort's nervous rage burst out in a clatter of syllables. Finally the stocky male threw himself up the bole in leaps that would have been impressive even if horizontal. He caught the bag of provisions in the crotch of a huge limb eighty feet in the air, then dropped back to Lena's level in four incredible stages. Slinging the girl with as little ceremony as he had the bag, he remounted the tree with equal speed. Shuddering with fear, pressed between the bole and Kort's great gasping breaths, Lena stared at the ground so far below that it trembled in the breeze. The horn blew again, very nearby.
A stag wobbled out of a clump of firs, its tongue grayish and drooling from the corner of its jaw. Twenty yards from the tree in which Kort and Lena sheltered, the deer fell under the whipsaw impact of a pair of mastiffs. Each dog looked as large as the victim. The stag cartwheeled. One of the great brindled dogs clamped on the deer's throat, the other caught the right foreleg. There was a flurry of humus. The stag's spine snapped like the first crack that follows the lightning.
There were a dozen dogs swirling on the forest floor now, hounds trained to back off after guiding the killer mastiffs to their prey. They belled and leaped for gobbets of the deer still thrashing in its death throes. The riders were on them then, two green-garbed huntsmen with full beards and long whips with which they cut at the milling pack… and a third man, a youth whose hair gleamed almost white in a stray beam of sun. He rocked back in the saddle of his great gray stallion and laughed to the sky. Lena froze to see his face lifting, but he was not searching the treetops, he was only bubbling over with the joy of the kill.
He was splendid, perfect in her eyes.
There were more riders, scores of men on foot including dog handlers as shaggy and grim as the beasts they dragged off the mangled stag. A huntsman's broad knife flashed and he raised the deer's ears and tail to the laughing youth. An unexpected warmth had driven the fear from Lena's mind. She watched, empty even of wonder at the scene beneath her-more men by ten times than she had ever before seen-while her eyes drank in every motion, every nuance of the young rider in red and gold.
Quick knives unlaced the deer, spilling the entrails to the reward of the hounds. The mastiffs sat aloof on their haunches, nearly the height of the footmen who skirted them with nervous eyes. Those killers were fed once daily and scorned to show interest in the game they brought down. Only their tongues… they flashed and rolled, infinitely flexible as they wiped clean the bloody jowls.
The babble thinned as did the crowd below. The hounds were tired and sated. They whined when the handlers chained them in pairs, but they allowed the men to lead them back the way they had come. Two brawny retainers slung the gutted deer on a pole and trotted off behind the youth on horseback. Riders drifted after them, talking and laughing as they passed out of earshot. Nothing remained but a ragged circle trampled black on the leaf mould. The horn was playing a caracol that seemed to hang in the air even after it was actually inaudible.
"The Ritter Karl," Lena was whispering to herself. She slurred into the heavy Swabish of her parents the name purred by the retainers. "Karl von Arnheim…"
Kort, already reslinging the load of food, paid her no attention. But Lena continued to roll the syllables under her tongue.
Months passed. Occasionally there were true men in the Forest: a pair of nervous travelers with packs and staves, whistling into the shadows; a vagabond whose rags were streaked with pus from the ulcers they covered; once a dozen men together, armed and as lean as the wolves… these wore mismated finery and as many as a dozen rings on each hand.
The von Arnheim hunt did not pass close enough for Lena to hear and run to it.
The woods folk travelled, but they did not roam. Lena's wanderings, at first for hours and then for days, were a cause of great concern to the family. Kuemeh pleaded with her, but the soft, cooing language of the folk had no words for the emotions that were driving the girl. The pleading stopped in time, for none of the family could catch Lena now if she ran. A foraging people learn not to waste effort. Some useful knowledge came from the trips: food sources that the family could exploit now or in the future, caves that opened into spacious chambers from throats too narrow for a bear to enter. But more and more, Lena's travels were to the edge of the fields of men; and this she did not explain to the woods folk, knowing instinctively that if she had, nothing would have kept Kue-meh from ordering an immediate move scores of miles deeper into the Forest.
And already the trips were considerable endeavors. Settlements had shrunk back from the trees, save for scattered households as Teller's had been. There were more of those than Lena would have guessed in the days when the Forest was a prison wall, but rarely did the inhabitants attempt to farm the thin soil as had her parents. Most were charcoal burners, blackened men or couples too bent to display sexual distinctions, hiking ever further to find the hardwoods that stoked their greedy kilns. Their huts were ragged shambles, sometimes lean-tos sprawled against some Forest giant; but the kilns were anchors, too slow and demanding of construction to be abandoned for new sites nearer the fuel. The increasing journeys to find an oak in the evergreen forest, then to fell it and laboriously drag back lengths with a shoulder harness, left no time for the necessary leisure of building another kiln.
Spread by the Plague, the lonely farmers were men who had tried to escape Death by running and had delayed his approach by a score of miserable years. The charcoal burners were caught between the upper and nether millstones of shrunken markets and scarcer raw materials, the farmers between declining fertility and impoverishment of tools. The third group, the meat hunters, had shrunk also though they might have been expected to increase. Game had returned to the fringe lands when men had melted away in the black ooze of the Plague, but the Forest had grown darker. Even those who had made their living in it for decades began to edge out into the sunlight.
The demons that haunted the minds of humans in the Forest were not the woods folk. In all her ramblings, Lena found no sign of hairy men other than Kort and his family.
She searched farther, into the lands where farms still sprawled in the open and men plowed behind animals, instead of prodding the soil with a stick. In the dusk she eeled along hedgerows so silently that the hens nesting in them did not stir. Where there were dogs, they rose and stalked stiff-legged over to Lena. After they sniffed at her, they whined and walked away. Occasionally a persistent brute would nuzzle the girl until her fingers stroked a rumbling purr from its rib cage. None of the beasts barked or attacked her.
The domestic animals were new to her, but she paid them little attention. Lena had come to the lands of men to find a man.
The farmers' huts were windowless, occasionally stone or proper wood but more often wattle and daub. The girl's eyes found chinks when the buildings were lighted, raked the faces of sleepy residents when they stumbled out to relieve themselves on the ground. But the man she sought would not be found in a hovel. It was long months before she came to understand that, however, since her upbringing had been silent about the Herren, the Masters.
As the seasons passed, as a month of searching became twelve, Lena's life was still almost wholly within the Forest. The trips beyond were windows of excitement that sparkled to set off well-loved panels of wood. The tall child had become a tall girl, muscled like a deer but with the same lithe slimness she had borne from the first. The woods folk did most things with grace, but they could not run. Faal watched Lena's sudden fits of exuberance, her flashing spurts across a clearing or through a briar thicket without misstep. His eyes glowed with the wonder and delight of a prophet to whom an angel was descending.
At night his copper nails glinted as they plaited her hair in wondrous fashion.
In a human world with little romance, the golden wraith became a legend before she was truly a rumor. Cottagers nodded and swilled thin beer as one of their number embellished an instant's vision. Sometimes Lena became a messenger from God or a Hell-sprite, searching for an infant's soul to steal. More often the stories were rooted deeper in the soul-earth of the peasants than Christ would ever be, and lowered voices spoke of Forest shadows and spirits of the Earth.
Marvel in most listeners became professional curiosity in gray Rausch the huntsman. His belt knife, honed to a wire edge on a stream-tumbled egg of granite, had silver mountings and the rampant wyvern crest of the von Arnheims. The late Ritter, Karl's father Otto, had presented it to Rausch twenty-one years before to replace the knife his junior huntsman had broken on a boar's scapula. Barehanded, ignoring the blood-slick tusks, Rausch had wrestled the beast to the dirt at the feet of the Ritter's pregnant wife. From that day he rode at Otto's right stirrup and that of Karl after him. He would not have exchanged that blade for the Emperor's sceptre.
Save for when von Arnheim hunted, Rausch's time was his own. If he chose to examine a hedgerow on his knees, snuffling like a gray-jowled hound, who was there to gainsay him? So Rausch listened and he watched, while as carefully as a cathedral mason his mind was constructing the hunt that would crown him and his master.
When the first hound belled, Lena ignored it. She knew now from long experience that the dogs were not her enemies. She had been away from the family the past three days, spending the daylit hours in the Forest fringe and the nights deeper into the open lands than she had ever gone before. The castle sitting gray on a detached plateau had drawn her eyes months earlier, but anticipation itself had delayed her approach to it. Now at last she had slipped to the very edge of its straggling curtain walls, let her fingers caress the rough stone. It could easily be climbed, but its hidden interior made the act not a moment's but a thing for long pondering in the Forest depths. That in her mind, Lena had started back, her course across the fields more hasty than deliberate since she had let the dawn stride too nearby as she studied the wall.
The second joyous bugling would have been a surface impression as well, except for the prompt echo of the hunting horn.
Lena was already among the trees. Her first reaction was that of her foster father, to choose the highest and secrete herself in the upper branches. A premonition that this hunt was no chance crossing of her path drove her instead to headlong flight. Panic rode her, a brutal jockey whose violence spewed out the strength that might otherwise have carried her free.
For a mile she sprinted, leaping obstacles and dreading at every instant that the hounds would give tongue again. They did not. She half turned, then, her nerves begging for the object of their fear, and her right shoulder brushed an oak sapling. It was no more than a glancing blow, but it sufficed to break her stride and allow reaction to her masterless effort throw her to the ground.
And as she lay sobbing on the needle-strewn earth, the hounds and the horn sounded again. She had gained on her pursuers; but they knew, dogs and men, that a hunt was decided in its last moments, not the first. They suited their pace to that certainty. With proper governance, Lena could have run all day. In the darkness, when the men were blind and the dogs nervously unwilling to range ahead, she would have disappeared. A night of sleepless excitement and the disastrous sprint had gutted her. Fear drove Lena back to her feet, but she had lost the ability to force the pace.
With leisure to choose the course, Lena might have led the hunt into empty stretches of the Forest where only squirrels would have been disturbed by its passage. Terror eliminated all chance of such forethought and she plunged straight as a plumb line for the distant cedar copse in which she had last huddled with the woods folk. Perhaps she would have done the same in any event: Lena had never before been hunted, and she lacked the instincts of the wild-born.
The sun was well up before a bright goosequill signaled the nearest of the hunters to Lena's backward glance. The feather bobbed, visible when the green hat and man and charger beneath it were not. She turned as if unfeeling, her face an ivory cameo, her legs scissors of bronze. She did not pump her arms as she ran, avoiding a practice that could stitch a runner's torso with cramps while the great veins of his legs still balanced oxygen and poisons in the working muscles.
The hounds were close behind her. The men may not have known how close, for except in that instant's flash down an aisle of trees they had been beyond sight. Rausch left little to chance, and two of the riders were horse handlers leading picked remudas. But time was lost changing from foundered mounts to fresh ones, and the strings could not follow with the ease of the unhindered riders through brush that clutched at leadropes. The dogs, loping with their muzzles high and quivering with the fresh scent, yelped madly but did not attempt to close the twenty yards separating them from their quarry. They were the fingers of Death, but not his jaws.
In a noon-bright clearing deep in the Forest, Lena stumbled a second time. She rolled smoothly to her feet and collapsed, her reflexes whole but her body without the strength to effect them. The hounds were in a yapping, yelping circle around her. When she tried to rise again the foam-smeared breast of a great stallion slammed her down.
Lena's lungs were balls of yellow fire. Above her bellowed the green-suited hunter, a little man who had unslung his cocked arbalest to wave it as a signal of triumph.
The knobbed end of a ten-foot tree limb dashed his brains out with the effectiveness of a trebuchet.
Kue-meh, bandy-legged and slight, had darted through the pack. If her strength was inferior to that of Kort, it was still beyond the standards of true men-and the female had the cold will to overcome panic and act in the face of catastrophe. The hounds gave back, snarling. The riderless horse lurched away from the dragging weight still caught in the reins. Two more men, Karl in red silk and cloth-of-gold and Rausch beside him, his grim face a fortress in the midst of chaos, burst into the clearing in which their victim lay: Kue-meh hissed at them and waggled her brain-spattered club.
Rausch reined up and his left hand caught his master's bridle as well, preventing the youth from thrusting into the deadly circle of the club. Then he whistled and from behind his horse, stark as Furies, loped a pair of mastiffs.
There was neither choice nor hope. Kue-meh strode forward as boldly as if her death were not certain. She swung at the nearer of the mastiffs, missing her aim as it reared back. Kort bellowed from the edge of the clearing, but his rage was too late. The second mastiff 's leap ended with its fangs grinding on the bones of Kue-meh's right shoulder. She cried out despairingly as the first dog's jaws closed on her head.
Her neck popped loudly.
The smack of a hunting crossbow was simultaneous.
Halfway between the brush and the killer dogs, Kort's body jerked backwards. The fourth hunter had ridden into the clearing, having paused first to lay a square-headed quarrel in the launching groove of his weapon. The great iron bolt lifted Kort, carrying part of his breastbone with it through the back of his ribs.
The mastiffs stalked away as the pack began to scuffle for its trophies. The archer slung his arbalest from the saddle of his blowing horse and dismounted to whip the dogs away from Kort. Rausch, too, slipped to the ground, a purposeful thumb on the edge of his blade as he walked toward Kue-meh.
"No, these-creatures-are unclean," the Ritter said, triumph vibrant through the weariness of his voice. "We won't carry those back. Let the dogs eat." He lifted himself out of the saddle. His eyes remained fixed on Lena's, holding her firm as a snake would a rabbit. His breeches and tunic were shot with gold no brighter than his unbound hair. Froth from the succession of horses he had ridden to death blackened his calves and thighs, and his tunic was dark with his own sweat. Still his broad shoulders did not droop and there was laughter on his tongue after he splashed it with wine from the skin Rausch offered. "So… She gave us a run, did she not, my Rauschkin? But I think she was worth a few horses, no…? And even poor Hermann, he rode well, but it was his own fault if he let a troll brain him."
In a more businesslike voice he added to Rausch, "Be ready to hold her arms."
Lena's eyes were open, staring. But even if the fact registered on her mind, she would not at first have understood why von Arnheim was unlacing his breeches.
Eventually, awareness returned. They had tied her for the ride back to the castle, her wrists to the saddlehorn and her ankles lashed to one another beneath the horse's belly. That pain she had escaped as during the grim, slow jogging she lay slumped over the corpse of Hermann who hung crosswise in front of her. Her blond hair was matted over a pair of transverse welts. Rausch had finally used the loaded end of his whip to quiet the girl for his master.
Her thighs were sticky with blood, some of it from the brambles.
She was in a tiny room when she awakened. Outside, a mastiff growled. It had a low rumble, penetrating without being loud, that could terrify in a way that the frenzied barking of lesser beasts could not. The hour was long past sundown, but odor alone told Lena that she had been thrust into an empty kennel with the mastiffs on guard at the opening. Unlike Karl's human retainers, the great dogs could be depended on to keep all others away from what was, for now, the Ritter's property alone.
Lena squirmed to the doorway. A horse-huge mastiff lay across it. The beast's head was raised and one of the dog handlers, well aware of the brute's capabilities, was scuttling away across the muddy courtyard. Only the casks of strong ale, broached for the Ritter's triumph, had given the man courage to approach as closely as he had.
Awakened by the intruder, the brindled dog turned to lick its own flanks. Lena froze, but moonlight on her hair drew the broad muzzle into the opening. The eyes were calm and dark-pupiled, larger than a man's. The mastiff 's tongue flapped against Lena's temple like a soft rag, sponging at the blood caked there.
Fearfully-no present kindness would erase memory of Kue-meh's last moment of life-Lena brushed her fingers across the dog's forehead, then caressed the upthrust ears. Power burred again in the dog's thorax, but it now was rich with delight. The head gave back, directed by the girl's proddings where it could not have been forced, and let her worm out into the open.
The courtyard was empty of all but the two dogs and a squalor which even the gentle moon limned clearly. The second, fawn-colored, mastiff whined and nuzzled Lena wetly. There was a faint murmuring from the other kennels, wattled domes little different in design from the huts of the peasants. No man or other dog appeared to try the wrath of the killer who now supported the girl on either side.
Her hands absorbing strength from the skin folded over the dogs' withers, Lena made her way to the wall. Behind her, the tower of the keep climbed seventy feet from the ground. No lights gleamed through its arrow-slits. The drink that had enspirited one man had crumpled all his fellows. Even perfect success could only briefly have counteracted the exertion required to gain it, and the Ritter's ale-sodden feast had done for the stay-at-homes as well. Three crossbowmen snored away their guard on the tower, and the occasional sounds from beyond the low wall to the inner court came from the fowl arid pigs of the humans quartered there. The snorts of the horses sharing the outer courtyard with Lena and the dogs were muted. Seven had been ridden to death during the morning or had been swallowed in the Forest beyond later recall by the exhausted hunters.
Lena touched the stones of the curtain wall, massive gray blocks more of nature than of man. She was beyond strength or weakness now, as inanimate as the limestone in which her hands found natural holds. The larger, brindled mastiff raised itself to its full height on the wall and licked the sole of her foot. Then she was over, sliding down the face of the wall and beginning to run the instant she touched the rocky soil below. This time there was no pursuit.
She followed the trail broken by the day's long hunt, knowing the confused scents would hinder the dogs if they were loosed on her. As she passed them, her hands plucked off berries and the pale, tender shoots of budding spruce. Once, in splashing across a rill, she paused for three quick gulps and a mouthful that she absorbed over the next minutes rather than swallowing. Her pace was not particularly swift, but it was as regular as a machine's.
The forest floor paid little mind to dawn or darkness, but the needles of sunlight piercing to the loam were nearly vertical when Lena reached the scene of death and capture. Kort lay huddled, flies black on the raw wounds which crows had already enlarged. Three of the birds croaked angrily from the limb to which Lena's intrusion had sent them, pacing from side to side and hunching their pinions.
Kue-meh's face, undisturbed by the fangs of the pack, bore a look of peculiar kindliness and peace. It was the face with which she had greeted Lena seven years before, less resigned than willing to accept. Lena looked away. It was not that for which she had returned.
"Coo-ee?" she called softly.
The Forest grew very silent. Even the crows left off their grumblings.
"Coo-ee?" the girl repeated. The bushes parted as she knew they must, and Chi, then Faal, stood timidly before her. Gurgling sounds that were partly tears and partly words of a language even older than that of the woods folk, Lena threw herself into their arms. She hugged their smooth, furred bodies like the shades of her lost innocence. At last she thrust them back to arm's length. Wiping her face free of the mingled tears, she said, "We must go now, very quickly. There are places in the Forest so far away from here that the Others will never come. They will never find us again."
She spoke and led the way into the Forest without a glance behind her. Chi followed at once. Faal, a picture of his father now in all but the gray that had tinged Kort's fur, hesitated. As yet he lacked the consciousness of strength that would let him unconcernedly follow into the unknown. But in a moment he ran to catch the females and, as he shambled on at Lena's side, his fingers began caressing the tawny gold of her hair.
The Barrow Troll
When I was very young my family was given a run of a 1938 children's magazine called Jack and Jill. The last feature in each issue was a serial, and one of those serials was an adaptation of "Beowulf."
I have no idea who did that version (I'm not even sure that I was able to read myself at the time; it may have been something my parents read to me), but it was really excellent. I didn't appreciate how good it was until much later. In the adaptation there's reference to the warriors' shields of yellow linden, a vividly realistic detail that I've remembered all my life since.
Twenty-odd years ago while I was plotting what became my first novel, I did a close reading of "Beowulf" in a literal translation. The shields of yellow linden weren't there. They must have been added by the adaptor to anchor the story in physical reality-which doesn't mean familiar reality, but rather something concrete that the reader can put his mental hands around even if he doesn't precisely understand its purpose. That was an important lesson for me.
And for those of you who wonder (as I did), "linden" is the common continental name for trees Americans call basswood. They're generally called lime trees in Britain.
Besides "Beowulf" I read and reread The Age of Fable, Bulfinch's retelling of Norse myth in a series of connected stories. (I had no idea how hard it would be to do that until I tried the same thing many years later in the Northworld trilogy.) Then I read translations of the "Eddas," the Icelandic originals from which Bulfinch had worked And finally I came to the Icelandic sagas themselves. I found their style and outlook very similar to my own. The narration is terse. Although the tales are fiction or at least fictionalized, there's a real attempt to keep the action realistic: even supernatural events are described in a realistic fashion.
Also the sagas contain a great deal of humor, but it's understated and frequently black beyond modern imagination. (For example, the posse hunting Gunnar arrives at his house. One of their number goes to the door to scout the situation. Gunnar stabs him with a spear. The scout walks back to his fellows who ask, "Is Gunnar home?" "I don't know," the scout replies, "but his spear is." And drops dead.)
Incidentally, my taste for that sort of joke is one of the reasons folks often think there's no humor at all in my fiction. They're wrong, but they're probably happier people for not understanding.
"The Barrow Troll" was an attempt to turn the elements I found in saga narration into a modern fantasy short story. Michel Parry bought it for a British collection titled Savage Heroes, but Stu Schiff brought the story out in Whispers magazine before its British publication.
I think "The Barrow Troll" succeeds at what it attempts about as well as anything that I've written.
Playfully, Ulf Womanslayer twitched the cord bound to his saddlehorn."Awake, priest? Soon you can get to work." "My work is saving souls, not being dragged into the wilderness by madmen," Johann muttered under his breath. The other end of the cord was around his neck, not that of his horse. A trickle of blood oozed into his cassock from the reopened scab, but he was afraid to loosen the knot. Ulf might look back. Johann had already seen his captor go into a berserk rage. Over the Northerner's right shoulder rode his axe, a heavy hooked blade on a four-foot shaft. Ulf had swung it like a willow-wand when three Christian traders in Schleswig had seen the priest and tried to free him. The memory of the last man in three pieces as head and sword arm sprang from his spouting torso was still enough to roil Johann's stomach.
"We'll have a clear night with a moon, priest; a good night for our business." Ulf stretched and laughed aloud, setting a raven on a fir knot to squawking back at him. The berserker was following a ridge line that divided wooded slopes with a spine too thin-soiled to bear trees. The flanking forests still loomed above the riders. In three days, now, Johann had seen no man but his captor, nor even a tendril of smoke from a lone cabin. Even the route they were taking to Parmavale was no mantrack but an accident of nature.
"So lonely," the priest said aloud.
Ulf hunched hugely in his bearskin and replied, "You soft folk in the south, you live too close anyway. Is it your Christ-god, do you think?"
"Hedeby's a city," the German priest protested, his fingers toying with his torn robe, "and my brother trades to Uppsala… But why bring me to this manless waste?"
"Oh, there were men once, so the tale goes," Ulf said. Here in the empty forest he was more willing for conversation than he had been the first few days of their ride north. "Few enough, and long enough ago. But there were farms in Parmavale, and a lordling of sorts who went a-viking against the Irish. But then the troll came and the men went, and there was nothing left to draw others. So they thought."
"You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me," said the priest.
"Aye, long before the gold I'd heard of the Parma troll," the berserker agreed. "Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear."
"Like you," Johann said, in a voice more normal than caution would have dictated.
Blood fury glared in Ulf's eyes and he gave a savage jerk on the cord."You'll think me a troll, priestling, if you don't do just as I say. I'll drink your blood hot if you cross me."
Johann, gagging, could not speak nor wished to.
With the miles the sky became a darker blue, the trees a blacker green. Ulf again broke the hoof-pummeled silence, saying, "No, I knew nothing of the gold until Thora told me."
The priest coughed to clear his throat. "Thora is your wife?" he asked.
"Wife? Ho!"Ulf brayed, his raucous laughter ringing like a demon's."Wife? She was Hallstein's wife, and I killed her with all her house about her! But before that, she told me of the troll's horde, indeed she did. Would you hear that story?"
Johann nodded, his smile fixed. He was learning to recognize death as it bantered under the axehead.
"So," the huge Northerner began. "There was a bonder, Hallstein Kari's son, who followed the king to war but left his wife, that was Thora, behind to manage the stead. The first day I came by and took a sheep from the herdsman. I told him if he misliked it to send his master to me."
"Why did you do that?" the fat priest asked in surprise.
"Why? Because I'm Ulf, because I wanted the sheep. A woman acting a man's part, it's unnatural anyway.
"The next day I went back to Hallstein's stead, and the flocks had already been driven in. I went into the garth around the buildings and called for the master to come out and fetch me a sheep." The berserker's teeth ground audibly as he remembered. Johann saw his knuckles whiten on the axe helve and stiffened in terror.
"Ho!" Ulf shouted, bringing his left hand down on the shield slung at his horse's flank. The copper boss rang like thunder in the clouds. "She came out," Ulf grated, "and her hair was red. 'All our sheep are penned,' says she, 'but you're in good time for the butchering.' And from out the hall came her three brothers and the men of the stead, ten in all. They were in full armor and their swords were in their hands. And they would have slain me, Ulf Otgeir's son, me, at a woman's word. Forced me to run from a woman!"
The berserker was snarling his words to the forest. Johann knew he watched a scene that had been played a score of times with only the trees to witness. The rage of disgrace burned in Ulf like pitch in a pine faggot, and his mind was lost to everything except the past.
"But I came back," he continued, "in the darkness, when all feasted within the hall and drank their ale to victory. Behind the hall burned a log fire to roast a sheep. I killed the two there, and I thrust one of the logs half-burnt up under the eaves. Then at the door I waited until those within noticed the heat and Thora looked outside.
"'Greetings, Thora,' I said. 'You would not give me mutton, so I must roast men tonight.' She asked me for speech. I knew she was fey, so I listened to her. And she told me of the Parma lord and the treasure he brought back from Ireland, gold and gems. And she said it was cursed that a troll should guard it, and that I must needs have a mass priest, for the troll could not cross a Christian's fire and I should slay him then."
"Didn't you spare her for that?" Johann quavered, more fearful of silence than he was of misspeaking.
"Spare her? No, nor any of her house," Ulf thundered back."She might better have asked the flames for mercy, as she knew. The fire was at her hair. I struck her, and never was woman better made for an axe to bite-she cleft like a waxen doll, and I threw the pieces back. Her brothers came then, but one and one and one through the doorway, and I killed each in his turn. No more came. When the roof fell, I left them with the ash for a headstone and went my way to find a mass priest-to find you, priestling." Ulf, restored to good humor by the climax of his own tale, tweaked the lead cord again.
Johann choked onto his horse's neck, nauseated as much by the story as by the noose. At last he said, thick-voiced, "Why do you trust her tale if she knew you would kill her with it or not?"
"She was fey," Ulf chuckled, as if that explained everything. "Who knows what a man will do when his death is upon him? Or a woman," he added more thoughtfully.
They rode on in growing darkness. With no breath of wind to stir them, the trees stood as dead as the rocks underfoot.
"Will you know the place?" the German asked suddenly. "Shouldn't we camp now and go on in the morning?"
"I'll know it," Ulf grunted. "We're not far now-we're going downhill, can't you feel?" He tossed his bare haystack of hair, silvered into a false sheen of age by the moon. He continued, "The Parma lord sacked a dozen churches, so they say, and then one more with more of gold than the twelve besides, but also the curse. And he brought it back with him to Parma, and there it rests in his barrow, the troll guarding it. That I have on Thora's word."
"But she hated you!"
"She was fey."
They were into the trees, and looking to either side Johann could see hill slopes rising away from them. They were in a valley, Parma or another. Scraps of wattle and daub, the remains of a house or a garth fence, thrust up to the right. The firs that had grown through it were generations old. Johann's stubbled tonsure crawled in the night air.
"She said there was a clearing," the berserker muttered, more to himself than his companion. Johann's horse stumbled. The priest clutched the cord reflexively as it tightened. When he looked up at his captor, he saw the huge Northerner fumbling at his shield's fastenings. For the first time that evening, a breeze stirred. It stank of death.
"Others have been here before us," said Ulf needlessly.
A row of skulls, at least a score of them, stared blank-eyed from atop stakes rammed through their spinal openings. To one, dried sinew still held the lower jaw in a ghastly rictus; the others had fallen away into the general scatter of bones whitening the ground. All of them were human or could have been. They were mixed with occasional glimmers of buttons and rust smears. The freshest of the grisly trophies was very old, perhaps decades old. Too old to explain the reek of decay.
Ulf wrapped his left fist around the twin handles of his shield. It was a heavy circle of linden wood, faced with leather. Its rim and central boss were of copper, and rivets of bronze and copper decorated the face in a serpent pattern.
"Good that the moon is full," Ulf said, glancing at the bright orb still tangled in the fir branches. "I fight best in the moonlight. We'll let her rise the rest of the way, I think."
Johann was trembling. He joined his hands about his saddle horn to keep from falling off the horse. He knew Ulf might let him jerk and strangle there, even after dragging him across half the northlands. The humor of the idea might strike him. Johann's rosary, his crucifix-everything he had brought from Germany or purchased in Schleswig save his robe-had been left behind in Hedeby when the berserker awakened him in his bed. Ulf had jerked a noose to near-lethal tautness and whispered that he needed a priest, that this one would do, but that there were others should this one prefer to feed crows. The disinterested bloodlust in Ulf's tone had been more terrifying than the threat itself. Johann had followed in silence to the waiting horses. In despair, he wondered again if a quick death would not have been better than this lingering one that had ridden for weeks a mood away from him.
"It looks like a palisade for a house," the priest said aloud in what he pretended was a normal voice.
"That's right," Ulf replied, giving his axe an exploratory heft that sent shivers of moonlight across the blade."There was a hall here, a big one. Did it burn, do you think?" His knees sent his roan gelding forward in a shambling walk past the line of skulls. Johann followed of necessity.
"No, rotted away," the berserker said, bending over to study the post holes.
"You said it was deserted a long time," the priest commented. His eyes were fixed straight forward. One of the skulls was level with his waist and close enough to bite him, could it turn on its stake.
"There was time for the house to fall in, the ground is damp," Ulf agreed. "But the stakes, then, have been replaced. Our troll keeps his front fence new, priestling."
Johann swallowed, said nothing.
Ulf gestured briefly."Come on, you have to get your fire ready. I want it really holy."
"But we don't sacrifice with fires. I don't know how-"
"Then learn!" the berserker snarled with a vicious yank that drew blood and a gasp from the German. "I've seen how you Christ-shouters love to bless things. You'll bless me a fire, that's all. And if anything goes wrong and the troll spares you-I won't, priestling. I'll rive you apart if I have to come off a stake to do it!"
The horses walked slowly forward through brush and soggy rubble that had been a hall. The odor of decay grew stronger. The priest himself tried to ignore it, but his horse began to balk. The second time he was too slow with a heel to its ribs, and the cord nearly decapitated him. "Wait!" he wheezed. "Let me get down."
Ulf looked back at him, flat-eyed. At last he gave a brief crow-peck nod and swung himself out of the saddle. He looped both sets of reins on a small fir. Then, while Johann dismounted clumsily, he loosed the cord from his saddle and took it in his axe hand. The men walked forward without speaking.
"There…" Ulf breathed.
The barrow was only a black-mouthed swell in the ground, its size denied by its lack of features. Such trees as had tried to grow on it had been broken off short over a period of years. Some of the stumps had wasted into crumbling depressions, while from others the wood fibers still twisted raggedly. Only when Johann matched the trees on the other side of the tomb to those beside him did he realize the scale on which the barrow was built: its entrance tunnel would pass a man walking upright, even a man Ulf's height.
"Lay your fire at the tunnel mouth," the berserker said, his voice subdued. "He'll be inside."
"You'll have to let me go-"
"I'll have to nothing!"Ulf was breathing hard."We'll go closer, you and I, and you'll make a fire of the dead trees from the ground. Yes… "
The Northerner slid forward in a pace that was cat soft and never left the ground a finger's breadth. Strewn about them as if flung idly from the barrow mouth were scraps and gobbets of animals, the source of the fetid reek that filled the clearing. As his captor paused for a moment, Johann toed one of the bits over with his sandal. It was the hide and paws of something chisel-toothed, whether rabbit or other was impossible to say in the moonlight and state of decay. The skin was in tendrils, and the skull had been opened to empty the brains. Most of the other bits seemed of the same sort, little beasts, although a rank blotch on the mound's slope could have been a wolf hide. Whatever killed and feasted here was not fastidious.
"He stays close to hunt," Ulf rumbled. Then he added, "The long bones by the fence; they were cracked."
"Umm?"
"For marrow."
Quivering, the priest began gathering broken-off trees, none of them over a few feet high. They had been twisted off near the ground, save for a few whose roots lay bare in wizened fists. The crisp scales cut Johann's hands. He did not mind the pain. Under his breath he was praying that God would punish him, would torture him, but at least would save him free of this horrid demon that had snatched him away.
"Pile it there," Ulf directed, his axehead nodding toward the stone lip of the barrow. The entrance was corbelled out of heavy stones, then covered over with dirt and sods. Like the beast fragments around it, the opening was dead and stinking. Biting his tongue, Johann dumped his pile of brush and scurried back.
"There's light back down there," he whispered.
"Fire?"
"No, look-it's pale, it's moonlight. There's a hole in the roof of the tomb."
"Light for me to kill by," Ulf said with a stark grin. He looked over the low fireset, then knelt. His steel sparked into a nest of dry moss. When the tinder was properly alight, he touched a pitchy faggot to it. He dropped his end of the cord. The torchlight glinted from his face, white and coarse-pored where the tangles of hair and beard did not cover it. "Bless the fire, mass-priest," the berserker ordered in a quiet, terrible voice.
Stiff-featured and unblinking, Johann crossed the brushwood and said, "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen."
"Don't light it yet," Ulf said. He handed Johann the torch. "It may be," the berserker added, "that you think to run if you get the chance. There is no Hell so deep that I will not come for you from it."
The priest nodded, white-lipped.
Ulf shrugged his shoulders to loosen his muscles and the bear hide that clothed them. Axe and shield rose and dipped like ships in a high sea.
"Ho! Troll! Barrow fouler! Corpse licker! Come and fight me, troll!"
There was no sound from the tomb.
Ulf's eyes began to glaze. He slashed his axe twice across the empty air and shouted again, "Troll! I'll spit on your corpse, I'll lay with your dog mother. Come and fight me, troll, or I'll wall you up like a rat with your filth!"
Johann stood frozen, oblivious even to the drop of pitch that sizzled on the web of his hand. The berserker bellowed again, wordlessly, gnashing at the rim of his shield so that the sound bubbled and boomed in the night.
And the tomb roared back to the challenge, a thunderous BAR BAR BAR even deeper than Ulf's.
Berserk, the Northerner leaped the brush pile and ran down the tunnel, his axe thrust out in front of him to clear the stone arches.
The tunnel sloped for a dozen paces into a timber-vaulted chamber too broad to leap across. Moonlight spilled through a circular opening onto flags slimy with damp and liquescence. Ulf, maddened, chopped high at the light. The axe burred inanely beneath the timbers.
Swinging a pair of swords, the troll leapt at Ulf. It was the size of a bear, grizzled in the moonlight. Its eyes burned red.
"Hi!" shouted Ulf and blocked the first sword in a shower of sparks on his axehead. The second blade bit into the shield rim, shaving a hand's length of copper and a curl of yellow linden from beneath it. Ulf thrust straight-armed, a blow that would have smashed like a battering ram had the troll not darted back. Both the combatants were shouting; their voices were dreadful in the circular chamber.
The troll jumped backward again. Ulf sprang toward him and only the song of the blades scissoring from either side warned him. The berserker threw himself down. The troll had leaped onto a rotting chest along the wall of the tomb and cut unexpectedly from above Ulf's shield. The big man's boots flew out from under him and he struck the floor on his back. His shield still covered his body.
The troll hurtled down splay-legged with a cry of triumph. Both bare feet slammed on Ulf's shield. The troll was even heavier than Ulf. Shrieking, the berserker pistoned his shield arm upward. The monster flew off, smashing against the timbered ceiling and caroming down into another of the chests. The rotted wood exploded under the weight in a flash of shimmering gold. The berserker rolled to his feet and struck overarm in the same motion. His lunge carried the axehead too far, into the rock wall in a flower of blue sparks.
The troll was up. The two killers eyed each other, edging sideways in the dimness. Ulf's right arm was numb to the shoulder. He did not realize it. The shaggy monster leaped with another double flashing and the axe moved too slowly to counter. Both edges spat chunks of linden as they withdrew. Ulf frowned, backed a step. His boot trod on a ewer that spun away from him. As he cried out, the troll grinned and hacked again like Death the Reaper. The shield-orb flattened as the top third of it split away. Ulf snarled and chopped at the troll's knees. It leaped above the steel and cut left-handed, its blade nocking the shaft an inch from Ulf's hand.
The berserker flung the useless remainder of his shield in the troll's face and ran. Johann's torch was an orange pulse in the triangular opening. Behind Ulf, a swordedge wentsring! as it danced on the corbels. Ulf jumped the brush and whirled. "Now!" he cried to the priest, and Johann hurled his torch into the resin-jeweled wood.
The needles crackled up in the troll's face like a net of orange silk. The flames bellied out at the creature's rush but licked back caressingly over its mats of hair. The troll's swords cut at the fire. A shower of coals spit and crackled and made the beast howl.
"Burn, dog-spew!" Ulf shouted. "Burn, fish-guts!"
The troll's blades rang together, once and again. For a moment it stood, a hillock of stained gray, as broad as the tunnel arches. Then it strode forward into the white heart of the blaze. The fire bloomed up, its roar leaping over the troll's shriek of agony. Ulf stepped forward. He held his axe with both hands. The flames sucked down from the motionless troll, and as they did the shimmering arc of the axehead chopped into the beast's collarbone. One sword dropped and the left arm slumped loose.
The berserker's axe was buried to the helve in the troll's shoulder. The faggots were scattered, but the troll's hair was burning all over its body. Ulf pulled at his axe. The troll staggered, moaning. Its remaining sword pointed down at the ground. Ulf yanked again at his weapon and it slurped free. A thick velvet curtain of blood followed it. Ulf raised his dripping axe for another blow, but the troll tilted toward the withdrawn weapon, leaning forward, a smoldering rock. The body hit the ground, then flopped so that it lay on its back. The right arm was flung out at an angle.
"It was a man," Johann was whispering. He caught up a brand and held it close to the troll's face. "Look, look!" he demanded excitedly. "It's just an old man in bearskin. Just a man."
Ulf sagged over his axe as if it were a stake impaling him. His frame shuddered as he dragged air into it. Neither of the troll's swords had touched him, but reaction had left him weak as one death-wounded. "Go in," he wheezed. "Get a torch and lead me in."
"But… why-" the priest said in sudden fear. His eyes met the berserker's and he swallowed back the rest of his protest. The torch threw highlights on the walls and flags as he trotted down the tunnel. Ulf's boots were ominous behind him.
The central chamber was austerely simple and furnished only with the six chests lining the back of it. There was no corpse, nor even a slab for one. The floor was gelatinous with decades' accumulation of foulness. The skidding tracks left by the recent combat marked paving long undisturbed. Only from the entrance to the chests was a path, black against the slime of decay, worn. It was toward the broken container and the objects which had spilled from it that the priest's eyes arrowed.
"Gold," he murmured. Then, "Gold! There must-the others-in God's name, there are five more and perhaps all of them-"
"Gold," Ulf grated terribly.
Johann ran to the nearest chest and opened it one-handed. The lid sagged wetly, but frequent use had kept it from swelling tight to the side panels. "Look at this crucifix!" the priest marveled. "And the torque, it must weigh pounds. And Lord in heaven, this-"
"Gold," the berserker repeated.
Johann saw the axe as it started to swing. He was turning with a chalice ornamented in enamel and pink gold. It hung in the air as he darted for safety. His scream and the dull belling of the cup as the axe divided it were simultaneous, but the priest was clear and Ulf was off balance. The berserker backhanded with force enough to drive the peen of his axehead through a sapling. His strength was too great for his footing. His feet skidded, and this time his head rang on the wall of the tomb.
Groggy, the huge berserker staggered upright. The priest was a scurrying blur against the tunnel entrance."Priest!" Ulf shouted at the suddenly empty moonlight. He thudded up the flags of the tunnel. "Priest!" he shouted again.
The clearing was empty except for the corpse. Nearby, Ulf heard his roan whicker. He started for it, then paused. The priest-he could still be hiding in the darkness. While Ulf searched for him, he could be rifling the barrow, carrying off the gold behind his back. "Gold," Ulf said again. No one must take his gold. No one ever must find it unguarded.
"I'll kill you!" he screamed into the night. "I'll kill you all!"
He turned back to his barrow. At the entrance, still smoking, waited the body of what had been the troll.
Than Curse the Darkness
I'm an HPL fan and started my career writing for Arkham House, the publisher founded to preserve Lovecraft's stories in book form, but "Than Curse the Darkness" is my only Cthulhu Mythos story. ("Denkirch" is Lovecraftian, but its model was HPL'S early-pre-Mythos-story "Polaris.") Ramsey Campbell, the unwitting spur to me writing my first story for publication, commissioned this one for an anthology he was editing for Arkham House, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Something that'd always puzzled me about the Mythos is why the Great Old Ones had human minions, since it was explicitly stated that if the Great Old Ones returned to Earth they would blast away all present life. Why would humans serve something that in human terms was absolute evil?
Writing a story is a very good way to focus logically on a question. I found an answer that satisfied me in human history. I set my story in the Congo Free State while it was still the personal possession of King Leopold II, but I could have picked any number of times or places. (Knowledge of history isn't an altogether cheerful accomplishment.) Things got a little better in the Congo after Leopold defaulted on a loan and the Belgian government took over the running of the colony, but only a little better.
At about the time this story was set, my friend Manly Wade Wellman was born in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), just south of the Congo. (His parents were medical missionaries.) Manly retained a deep interest in Africa all his life, and his library contained many volumes about the continent.
Histories looking back at a period can explain what happened at a time and place, but contemporary works do something even more valuable (at least for a fiction writer): they explain what people at the time thought was happening. For the story's background I used books from Manly's library like Actual Africa-The Coming Continent, as well the works of missionaries protesting Belgian atrocities and modern overviews of the "development" of the Congo Basin.
Does that sound like a lot of research for a fantasy story? Well, maybe, but it's a habit I've kept throughout my career. I think it's stood me in good stead.
One writerly difficulty I had with the story was in deciding on the viewpoint character. I wrote about half the piece, stopped, and threw out the whole business to start again with a female scholar instead of a male adventurer as my main protagonist. Things fell into place then.
The title, by the way, is from the motto of The Christophers, a religious society: It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
What with the research, the rewriting, and the fact that I was working a full-time job as Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill at the time, "Than Curse the Darkness" took me five months to complete. This had an unexpected but very beneficial side-effect.
One night shortly after I'd sent the story to Ramsey, the phone rang. By "night," I mean my wife and I were asleep. The caller introduced himself as Roger Elwood (whom I knew of as an indefatigable SF/fantasy/horror anthologist but had never met or dealt with). He told me that he was now editing a line of novels, and he'd been given my name. Would I like to write novels?
I was absolutely dumbfounded. At the time I'd only sold about ten stories and not all those had appeared in print. I blurted that I appreciated his call, but I couldn't possibly write a novel: I'd just taken five months to write a novelette. Mr. Elwood said he regretted that, because he was prepared to offer me a two-book contract right now on the phone, if I could turn the first one in six months. I repeated my refusal, and he went elsewhere.
That's how I avoided the Laser Books debacle, which blighted (and in some cases destroyed) the careers of so many of those who took similar offers.
I think I'd have refused the offer under any circumstances, but my recent struggle to do a good job on "Than Curse the Darkness" armored me against the thought of "easy money." Writing isn't easy if you care about the result. Laser Books taught a lot of people not to care about their work. If there's a worse lesson to learn early in your career, I don't know what it is.
I had to wait several more years to sell a novel. I don't regret that delay.
"What of unknown Africa?" -H. P. Lovecraft
The trees of the rain forest lowered huge and black above the village, dwarfing it and the group of men in its center. The man being tied to the whipping post there was gray-skinned and underfed, panting with his struggles but no match for the pair of burly Forest Guards who held him. Ten more Guards, Baenga cannibals from far to the west near the mouth of the Congo, stood by with spears or Albini rifles. They joked and chattered and watched the huts hoping the villagers would burst out to try to free their fellow. Then killing would be all right…
There was little chance of that. All the men healthy enough to work were in the forest, searching for more trees to slash in a parody of rubber gathering. The Law said that each adult male would bring four kilograms of latex a week to the agents of King Leopold; the Law did not say that the agents would teach the natives how to drain the sap without killing the trees it came from. When the trees died, the villagers would miss their quotas and die themselves, because that too was the Law-though an unwritten one.
There were still many untouched villages further up the river.
"If you cannot learn to be out in the forest working," said a Baenga who finished knotting the victim to the post with a jerk that itself cut flesh, "we can teach you not to lie down for many weeks."
The Forest Guards wore no uniforms, but in the Congo Basin their good health and sneering pride marked them more surely than clothing could have. The pair who had tied the victim stepped back, nodding to their companion with the chicotte. That one grinned, twitching the wooden handle to unfurl the ten-foot lash of square-cut hippopotamus hide. He had already measured the distance.
A naked seven-year-old slipped from the nearest hut. The askaris were turned to catch the expression on the victim's face at the first bite of the chicotte, so they did not see the boy. His father jerked upright at the whipping post and screamed, "Samba!" just as the featheryhiss-crack! of the whip opened an eight-inch cut beneath his shoulder blades.
Samba screamed also. He was small even for a forest child, spindly and monkey-faced. He was monkey quick, too, darting among the Guards as they spun. Before anyone could grab him he had wrapped himself around the waist of the man with the whip.
"Wau!" shouted the Guard in surprise and chopped down with the teak whip handle. The angle was awkward. One of his companions helped with a roundhouse swing of his Albini. The steel butt-plate thudded like a mallet on a tent stake, ripping off the boy's left ear and deforming the whole side of his skull. It did not tear him loose from the man he held. Two Forest Guards edged closer, holding their spears near the heads so as not to hit their fellow when they thrust.
The whipped man grunted. One of the chuckling riflemen turned in time to see him break away from the post. The rough cord had cut his wrists before it parted. Blood spattered as he took two steps and clubbed his hands against the whip-wielder's neck.
The rifleman shot him through the body.
The Albini bullet was big and slow and had the punch of a medicine ball. The father spun backward and knocked one of the Baengas down with him. Despite the wound he stood again and staggered forward toward Samba. A pink coil of intestine was wagging behind him from the bullet's exit hole. Both the remaining rifles went off. This time, when the shots had sledged him down, five of the spearmen ran to the body and began stabbing.
The Baenga with the whip got up, leaving Samba on the ground. The boy's eyes were open and utterly empty. Lt. Trouville stepped over him to shout, "Cease, you idiots!" at the bellowing knot of spearmen. They parted immediately. Trouville wore a waxed moustache and a white linen suit that looked crisp save for the sweat stains under his arms, but the revolver at his belt was not for show. He had once pistoled a Guard who, drunk with arrogance and palm wine, had started to burn a village which was still producing rubber.
Now the slim Belgian stared at the corpse and grimaced."Idiots," he repeated to the shame-faced Baengas. "Three bullets to account for, when there was no need at all to fire. Does the Quartermaster charge us for spear-thrusts as well as bullets?"
The askaris looked at the ground, pretending to be solely concerned with the silent huts or with scratching their insect bites. The man with the chicotte coiled it and knelt with his dagger to cut off the dead man's right ear. A thong around his neck carried a dozen others already, brown and crinkled. They would be turned in at Boma to justify the tally of expended cartridges.
"Take the boy's too," Trouville snapped. "He started it, after all. And we'll still be one short."
The patrol marched off, subdued in the face of their lieutenant's wrath. Trouville was muttering, "Like children. No sense at all."After they were gone, a woman stole from the nearest hut and cradled her son. Both of them moaned softly.
Time passed, and in the forest a drum began to beat.
In London, Dame Alice Kilrea bent over a desk in her library and opened the book a messenger had just brought her from Vienna. Her hair was gathered in a mousy bun from which middle age had stripped all but a hint of auburn. She tugged abstractedly at an escaped lock of it as she turned pages, squinting down her prominent nose.
In the middle of the volume she paused. The German heading gave instructions, stating that the formula there given was a means of separating death from the semblance of life. The remainder of the page and the three that followed it were in phonetic transliteration from a language few scholars would have recognized. Dame Alice did not mouth any of those phrases. A premonition of great trees and a thing greater than the trees shadowed her consciousness as she read silently down the page.
It would be eighteen years before she spoke any part of the formula aloud.
Sergeant Osterman drank palm wine in the shade of a baobab as usual while Baloko oversaw the weighing of the village's rubber. This time the Baenga had ordered M'fini, the chief, to wait for all the other males to be taken first. There was an ominous silence among the villagers as the wiry old man came forward to the table at which Baloko sat, flanked by his fellow Forest Guards.
"Ho, M'fini," Baloko said jovially, "what do you bring us?"
Without speaking, the chief handed over his gray-white sheets of latex. They were layered with plantain leaves. Baloko set the rubber on one pan of his scales, watched it easily overbalance the four-kilogram weight in the other pan. Instead of setting the rubber on the pile gathered by the other villagers and paying M'fini in brass wire, Baloko smiled."Do you remember, M'fini," the Baenga asked, "what I told you last week when you said to me that your third wife T'sini would never sleep with another man while you lived?"
The chief was trembling. Baloko stood and with his forefinger flicked M'fini's latex out of the weighing pan to the ground."Bad rubber," he said, and grinned. "Stones, trash hidden in it to bring it to the weight. An old man like you, M'fini, must spend too much time trying to satisfy your wives when you should be finding rubber for the King."
"I swear, I swear by the god Iwa who is death," cried M'fini, on his knees and clutching the flapping bulk of rubber as though it were his firstborn, "it is good rubber, all smooth and clean as milk itself!"
Two of the askaris seized M'fini by the elbows and drew him upright. Baloko stepped around the weighing table, drawing his iron-bladed knife as he did so. "I will help you, M'fini, so that you will have more time to find good rubber for King Leopold."
Sergeant Osterman ignored the first of the screams, but when they went on and on he swigged down the last of his calabash and sauntered over to the group around the scales. He was a big man, swarthy and scarred across the forehead by a Tuareg lance while serving with the French in Algeria.
Baloko anticipated the question by grinning and pointing to M'fini. The chief writhed on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and both hands clutched to his groin. Blood welling from between his fingers streaked black the dust he thrashed over. "Him big man, bring no-good rubber," Baloko said. Osterman knew little Bantu, so communication between him and the Guards was generally in pidgin. "Me make him no-good man, bring big rubber now."
The burly Fleming laughed. Baloko moved closer, nudged him in the ribs."Him wife T'sini, him no need more," the Baenga said."You, me, all along Guards-we make T'sini happy wife, yes?"
Osterman scanned the encircling villagers whom curiosity had forced to watch and fear now kept from dispersing. In the line, a girl staggered and her neighbors edged away quickly as if her touch might be lethal. Her hair was wound high with brass wire in the fashion of a dignitary's wife, and her body had the slim delight of a willow shoot. Even in the lush heat of the equator, twelve-year-olds look to be girls rather than women.
Osterman, still chuckling, moved toward T'sini. Baloko was at his side.
Time passed. From deep in the forest came rumblings that were neither of man or of Earth.
In a London study, the bay window was curtained against frost and the gray slush quivering over the streets. The coal fire hissed as Dame Alice Kilrea, fingers tented, dictated to her male amanuensis. Her dress was of good linen but two buttons were missing, unnoticed, from the placket, and the lace front showed signs of lunch bolted in the library… "and, thanks to your intervention, the curator of the Special Reading Room allowed me to handle Alhazred myself instead of having a steward turn the pages at my request. I opened the volume three times at random and read the passage on which my index finger fell.
"Before, I had been concerned; now I am certain and terrified. All the lots were congruent, referring to aspects of the Messenger." She looked down at the amanuensis and said, "Capital on 'Messenger', John." He nodded.
"Your support has been of untold help; now my need for it is doubled. Somewhere in the jungles of that dark continent the crawling chaos grows and gathers strength. I am armed against it with the formulas that Spiedel found in the library of Kloster-Neuburg just before his death; but that will do us no good unless they can be applied in time. You know, as I do, that only the most exalted influence will pass me into the zone of disruption at the crucial time. That time may yet be years to come, but they are years of the utmost significance to Mankind. Thus I beg your unstinting support not in my name or that of our kinship, but on behalf of life itself.
"Paragraph, John. As for the rest, I am ready to act as others have acted in the past. Personal risk has ever been the coin paid for knowledge of the truth."
The amanuensis wrote with quick, firm strokes. He was angry both with himself and with Dame Alice. Her letter had driven out of his mind thoughts of the boy whom he intended to seduce that evening in Kettners. He had known for some time that he would have to find another situation. The problem was not that Dame Alice was mad. All women were mad, after all. But her madness had such an insidious plausibility that he was starting to believe it himself.
As presumably her present correspondent did. And the letter to him would be addressed to "His Royal Highness… "
In most places the trees grew down to the water edge, denser for being able to take sunlight from the side as well as from above. The margins of the shallow backwaters spread after each rain into sheets thick with vegetable richness and as black as the skins of those who lived along them. In drier hours there were sand banks and easy expanses on which to trade with the forest folk.
Gomes' dugout had already slid back into the slough, leaving in the sand the straight gouge of its keel centered in the blur of bare footprints. A score of natives still clustered around Kaminski's similar craft, fondling his bolts of bright-patterned cloth or chatting with his paddlers. Then the steamship swung into sight around the wooded headland.
The trees had acted as a perfect muffler for the chuffing engine. With a haste little short of panic, the forest dwellers melted back into concealment. The swarthy Portuguese gave an angry order and his crew shipped their paddles. Emptied of its cargo, the dugout drew only a few inches of water and could, had there been enough warning, have slid up among the tree roots where the two-decked steamer could never have followed.
Throttled down to the point its stern wheel made only an occasional slapping, the government craft edged closer to Gomes. On the Upper Kasai it was a battleship, although its beamy twenty-four meters would have aroused little interest in a more civilized part of the world. Awnings protected the hundreds of askaris overburdening the side rails. The captain was European, a blond, soft-looking man in a Belgian army uniform. The only other white man visible was the noncom behind the Hotchkiss swivel-mounted at the bow.
"Messieurs Gomes and Kaminski, perhaps?"called the officer as the steamship swung to, a dozen yards from the canoe. He was smiling, using his fingertips to balance his weight on the starboard bridge rail.
"You know who we are, de Vriny-damn you," Gomes shot back. "We have our patent to trade and we pay our portion to yourSociete Cosmpolite. Now leave us!"
"Pay your portion, yes," deVriny purred."Gold dust and gold nuggets. Where do you get such gold, my fine mongrel friends?"
"Carlos, it's all right," called Kaminski, standing in his grounded boat. "Don't become angry-the gentleman is doing his duty to protect trade, that is all." Beneath the sombrero which he had learned to wear in the American Southwest, sweat was boiling off Kaminski. He knew his friend's volcanic temper, knew also the reputation of the blond man who was goading them. Not now! Not on the brink of the success that would gain them entree to any society in the world!
"Trade?" Gomes was shouting. "What do they know about trade?" He shook his fist at de Vriny and made the canoe rock nervously, so that the plump Angolan woman he had married a dozen years before put a calming hand on his leg. "You hold a rifle to the head of some poor black, pay him a ha'penny for rubber you sell in Paris for a shilling fourpence. Trade? There would be no gold coming out of this forest if the tribes didn't trust us and get a fair value for the dust they bring!"
"Well, we'll have to explore that," grinned the Belgian."You see, your patent to trade was issued in error-it seems it was meant for some Gomez who spelled his name with a'z'- and I have orders to escort you both back to Boma until the matter can be resolved."
Gomes' broad face went saffron. He began to slump like a snow figure on a sunny day. "They couldn't take away our patent because of a spelling mistake their own clerks made?" he whined, but his words were more of a sick apostrophe than a real question.
The Belgian answered it anyway. "You think not? Don't you know who appoints the judges of our Congo oh-so-Free State? Not Jews or nigger-wenching Portu-gees, I assure you."
Gomes was probably bracing his sagging bulk against the thwart, though he could indeed have been reaching for the Mauser lying across the pack in front of him. Presumably that was what the Baenga thought when he fired the first shot and blew Gomes into the water. Every Forest Guard with a rifle followed in a ragged volley that turned the canoe into a chip dancing on an ornamental fountain. Jets of wood and water and blood spouted upward.
"Christ's blood, you fools!" de Vriny cried. Then, "Well, get the rest of them too!"
Kaminski screamed and tried to follow his paddlers in a race for the tree line, but he was a corpulent man whose boots punched ankle-deep into the soft sand. The natives had no chance either. The Hotchkiss stuttered, knocking down a pair of them as the gunner checked his range. Then, spewing empty cases that hissed as they bounced into the water, the machine gun hosed bullets across the other running men. Kaminski half turned as the black in front of him pitched forward hemorrhaging bright blood from mouth and nose. That desire to see his death coming preserved the trader from it: the bullet that would otherwise have exited through his forehead instead drilled through both upper maxillary bones. Kaminski's eyes popped out as neatly as oysters into a gourmet's silver spoon. His body slapped hard enough to ripple the sand in which it came to rest face up.
The firing stopped. Capsized and sinking, Gomes' shattered dugout was drifting past the bow of the steamer."I want their packs raised," deVriny ordered. "Even if you have to dive for them all day. The same with the packs on shore-then burn the canoes."
"And the bodies, master?" asked his Baenga headman.
"Faugh," spat the Belgian. "Why else did the good Lord put crocodiles in this river?"
They did not take Kaminski's ear because it was white and that would attract comment. Even in Boma.
Time passed. Deep in the forest the ground spurted upward like a grapefruit hit by a rifle bullet. Something thicker than a tree bole surged, caught at a nearby human and flung the body, no longer distinguishable as to sex or race, a quarter mile through the canopy of trees. The earth subsided then, but in places the surface continued to bubble as if made of heated tar.
Five thousand miles away, Dame Alice Kilrea stepped briskly out of her solicitors' office, having executed her will, and ordered her driver on to the Nord Deutscher-Lloyd Dock. Travelling with her in the carriage was a valise containing one ancient book and a bundle of documents thick with wax, ribbons, and gold foil-those trappings and the royal signatures beneath. On the seat across from her was the American servant she had engaged only the week before as she closed her London house and discharged the remainder of her establishment. The servant, Sparrow, was a weaselly man with tanned skin and eyes the frosty color of lead cast in too hot a mold. He said little but glanced around frequently; and his fingers writhed as if with separate life.
Occasionally chance would merge the rhythm of mauls and axes splitting wood in a dozen parts of the forest. Then the thunk-thunk-THUNK would boom out like a beast approaching from the darkness. Around their fire the officers would pause. The Baengas would chuckle at the joke of it and let the pounding die away. Little by little it would reappear at each separate group of woodsmen, finally to repeat its crescendo.
"Like children," Colonel Trouville said to Dame Alice. The engineer and two sergeants were still aboard theArchiduchesse Stephanie, dining apart from the other whites. Color was not the only measure of class, even in the Congo Basin. "They'll be cutting wood-and drinking their malafou, wretched stuff, to call it palm wine is to insult the word 'wine'-they'll be at it almost till dawn. After a time you'll get used to it. There's nothing, really, to be done, since we can only carry a day's supply of fuel on the steamer. While they of coursecould find and cut enough dry wood by a reasonable hour each night, when one is dealing with the native 'mind'… "
De Vriny and Osterman joined in their Colonel's deprecating laughter. Dame Alice managed only a preoccupied smile. During the day, steaming upriver from the Stanley Pool, she had stared at the terrain in which her battle would be joined: heavy forest, here mostly a narrow belt fringing the watercourse but later to become a sprawling, barely penetrable expanse. The trees climbed to the edge of the water and mushroomed over the banks. Dame Alice could imagine that where the stream was less than the Congo's present mile breadth the branches would meet above in laced blackness.
Now at night, blackness was complete even on the lower river. It chilled her soul. The equatorial sunset was not a curtain of ever-thickening gauze but a knifeblade that separated the hemispheres. On this side was death, and neither the laughter of the Baenga askaris nor the goblets of Portuguese wine being drunk around Trouville's campfire could change that.
Captain de Vriny swigged and eyed the circle. He was a man of middle height with the roundedness of a bear, a seeming softness which tended to mask the cruelty beneath. Across from him, Sparrow dragged on the cigarette he had rolled and lit his face orange. The captain smiled. Only because his mistress, the mad noblewoman, had demanded it, did Sparrow sit with the officers. He wore a cheap blue-cotton shirt, buttoned at the cuffs, and denim trousers held up by suspenders. Short and narrow-chested, Sparrow would have looked foolish even without the waist belt and the pair of huge double-action revolvers hanging from it.
Dame Alice was unarmed by contrast. Like the men she wore trousers, hers tucked into low-heeled boots. De Vriny looked at her and, shaping his mocking smile into an expression of friendly interest, said, "It surprises me, Dame Alice, that a woman as well-born and, I am sure, delicate as yourself would want to accompany an expedition against some of the most vicious sub-men on the globe."
Dame Alice lifted the faintly bulbous tip of her nose and said, "It's no matter of wanting, Captain."She eyed deVriny with mild distaste."I don't suppose you want to come yourself-unless you like to shoot niggers for lack of better sport? One does unpleasant things because someone must. One has a duty."
"What the Captain is suggesting," put in Trouville, "is that there are no lines of battle fixed in this jungle. A spearman may step from around the next tree and snick, end all your plans-learned though we are sure they must be."
"Quite," agreed Dame Alice, "and so I brought Sparrow here-" she nodded to her servant-"instead of trusting to chance."
All heads turned again toward the little American.
In French, though the conversation had previously been in English to include Sparrow, deVriny said, "I hope he never falls overboard. The load of iron-mongery he carries will sink him twenty meters through the bottom muck before anyone knows he's gone."
Again the Belgians laughed. In a voice as flat and hard as the bottom of a skillet. Sparrow said, "Captain, I'd surely appreciate a look at your nice pistol there."
De Vriny blinked, uncertain whether the question was chance or if the American had understood the joke of which he had been made the butt. Deliberately, his composure never more than dented, the Belgian unhooked the flap of his patent-leather holster and handed over the Browning pistol. It was small and oblong, its blued finish gleaming like wet sealskin in the firelight.
Sparrow rotated the weapon, giving its exterior a brief scrutiny. He thumbed the catch in the grip and stripped out the magazine, holding it so that the light fell on the uppermost of its stack of small brass cartridges.
"You are familiar with automatic pistols, then?" asked Trouville in some surprise at the American's quick understanding of a weapon rarely encountered on his native continent.
"Naw," Sparrow said, slipping the magazine back home. His fingers moved like those of a pianist doing scales. "It's a gun, though. I can generally figure how a gun works."
"You should get one like it," de Vriny said, smiling as he took the weapon back from Sparrow. "You would find it far more comfortable to carry than those-yours."
"Carry a toy like that?" the gunman asked. His voice parodied amazement. "Not me, Captain. When I shoot a man, I want him dead. I want a gun what'll do the job if I do mine, and these. 45s do me jist fine, every time I use'um." Sparrow grinned then, for the first time. De Vriny felt his own hands fumble as they tried to reholster the Browning. Suddenly he knew why the askaris gave Sparrow so wide a berth.
Dame Alice coughed. The sound shattered the ice that had been settling over the men. Without moving, Sparrow faded into the background to become an insignificant man with narrow shoulders and pistols too heavy for his frame.
"Tell me what you know about the rebellion," the Irishwoman asked quietly in a liquid, attractive voice. Her features led one to expect a nasal whinny. Across the fire came snores from Osterman, a lieutenant by courtesy but in no other respect an officer. He had ignored the wine for the natives' own malafou. The third calabash had slipped from his numb fingers, dribbling only a stain onto the ground as the bearded Fleming lolled back in his camp chair.
Trouville exchanged glances with de Vriny, then shrugged and said, "What is there ever to know about a native rebellion? Every once in a while a few of them shoot at our steamers, perhaps chop a concessionaire or two when he comes to collect the rubber and ivory. Then we get the call"-the Colonel's gesture embraced the invisibleArchiduchesse Stephanie and the dozen Baenga canoes drawn up on the bank beside her. "We surround the village, shoot the niggers we catch, and burn the huts. End of rebellion."
"And what about their gods?" Dame Alice pressed, bobbing her head like a long-necked diving bird.
The Colonel laughed. De Vriny patted his holster and said,"We are God in the Maranga Concession."
They laughed again and Dame Alice shivered. Osterman snorted awake, blew his nose loudly on the blue sleeve of his uniform coat. "There's a new god back in the bush, yes," the Fleming muttered.
The others stared at him as if he were a frog declaiming Shakespeare. "How would you know?"de Vriny demanded in irritation."The only Bantu words you know are 'drink' and 'woman'."
"I can talk to B'loko, can't I?" the lieutenant retorted in a voice that managed to be offended despite its slurring."Good ol'Baloko, we been together long time, long time. Better fella than some white bastards I could name… "
Dame Alice leaned forward, the firelight bright in her eyes."Tell me about the new god," she demanded. "Tell me its name."
"Don' remember the name," Osterman muttered, shaking his head. He was waking up now, surprised and a little concerned to find himself center of the attention not only of his superiors but also of the foreigner who had come to them in Boma as they readied their troops. Trouville had tried to shrug Dame Alice aside, but the Irishwoman had displayed a patent signed by King Leopold himself…"Baloko said it but I forget," he continued, "and he was drunk too, or I don' think he would have said. He's afraid of that one."
"What's that?"Trouville interrupted. He was a practical man, willing to accept and use the apparent fact that Osterman's piggish habits had made him a confidant of the askaris. "One of our Baenga headmen is afraid of a Bakongo god?"
Osterman shook his graying head again. Increasingly embarrassed but determined to explain, he said, "Not their god, not like that. The Bakongos, they live along the river, they got their fetishes just like any niggers. But back in the bush, there's another village. Not a tribe; a few men from here, a few women from there. Been getting together one at a time, a couple a year, for Christ… maybe twenty years. They got the new god, they're the ones who started the trouble.
"They say you don' have to pay your rubber to the white men, you don' have to pray to any fetish. Their god gonna come along and eat up everything. Any day now."
Osterman rubbed his eyes blearily, then shouted, "Boy! Malafou!"
A Krooman in breeches and swallow-tailed coat scurried over with another calabash. Osterman slurped down the sweet, brain-stunning fluid in three great gulps. He began humming something meaningless to himself. The empty container fell, and after a time the Fleming began to snore again.
The other men looked at one another."Do you suppose he's right?"the Captain asked Trouville.
"He could be, "the slim Colonel admitted with a shrug."They might well have told him all that. He's not much better than a nigger himself despite the color of his skin."
"He's right," said Dame Alice, looking at the fire and not at her companions. Ash crumbled in its heart and a knot of sparks clawed toward the forest canopy. "Except for one thing. Their god isn't new, it isn't new at all. Back when the world was fresh and steaming and the reptiles flew above the swamps, it wasn't new either. The Bakongo name for it is Ahtu. Alhazred called it Nyarlathotep when he wrote twelve hundred years ago." She paused, staring down at her hands tented above the thin yellow wine left in her goblet.
"Oh, then youare a missionary," de Vriny exclaimed, glad to find a category for the puzzling woman. Her disgusted glance was her reply. "Or a student of religions?" de Vriny tried again.
"I study religions only as a doctor studies diseases," Dame Alice said. She looked at her companions. Their eyes were uncomprehending."I…" she began, but how did she explain her life to men who had no conception of devotion to an ideal? Her childhood had been turned inward to dreams and the books lining the cold library of the Grange. Inward, because her outward body was that of an ugly duckling whom everyone knew had no chance of becoming a swan. And from her dreams and a few of the very oldest books had come hints of what it is that nibbles at the minds of all men in the darkness. Her father could not answer or even understand her questions, nor could the Vicar. She had grown from a persistent child into an iron-willed woman who lavished on her fancy energies which her relatives felt would have been better spent on the Church… or, perhaps, on breeding spaniels.
And as she had grown, she had met others who felt andknew what she did.
She looked around again. "Captain," she said simply, "I have been studying certain-myths-for most of my life. I've come to believe that some of them contain truths or hints of truths. There are powers in the universe. When you know the truth of those powers, you have the choice of joining them and working to bring about their coming-for they are unstoppable-or you can fight, knowing there is no ultimate hope for your cause and going ahead anyway. Mine was the second choice." Drawing herself even more rigidly straight, she added, "Someone has always been willing to stand between mankind and Chaos. As long as there have been men."
De Vriny snickered audibly. Trouville gave him a dreadful scowl and said to Dame Alice, "And you are searching for the god these rebels pray to?"
"Yes. The one they call Ahtu."
From the score of firelit glades around them came the thunk-thunk-THUNK of axe and wedge, then the booming native laughter.
"Osterman and de Vriny should have their men in position by now," said the Colonel, pattering his fingertips on the bridge rail as he scanned the wooded shore line. "It's about time for me to land, too."
"Us to land," Dame Alice said. She squinted, straining forward to see the village the Belgian force was preparing to assault."Where are the huts?"she finally asked.
"Oh, they're set back from the shore some hundreds of meters," Trouville explained offhandedly."The trees hide them, but the fish weirs-"he pointed out the lines of upright sticks rippling foam tracks down the current- "are a good enough guide. We've stayed anchored here in the stream so that the villagers would be watching us while the forces from the canoes downriver surrounded them."
Muffled but unmistakable, a shot thudded in the forest. A volley followed, drawing with it faint screams.
"Bring us in," ordered the Colonel, tugging at the left half of his moustache in his only sign of nervousness.
TheArchiduchesse grated as her bow nuzzled into the trees, but there was no time now for delicacy. Forest Guards streamed past the Hotchkiss and down the gangplank into the jungle. The gunner was crouched behind the metal shield that protected him only from the front. Tree boles and their shadows now encircled him on three sides.
"I suppose it will be safe enough on the shore," said Trouville, adjusting his harness as if for parade instead of battle."You can accompany me if you wish-and if you stay close by."
"All right," said Dame Alice as if she would not have come without his permission. Her hand clutched not a pistol but an old black-bound book. "If we're where you think, though, you'll need me very badly before you're through here. Especially if it takes till sunset." She swung down the companionway behind Trouville. Last of all from the bridge came Sparrow, grimy and small and deadly as a shark.
The track that wound among the trunks was a narrow line hammered into the loam by horny feet. It differed from a game trail only in that shoulders had cleared the foliage to greater height. The Baengas strode it with some discomfort-they were a Lower Congo tribe, never quite at home in the upriver jungles. Trouville's step was deliberately nonchalant, while Dame Alice tramped gracelessly and gave an accurate impression of disinterest in her physical surroundings. Sparrow's eyes twitched around him as they always did. He carried his hands waist-high and over his belted revolvers.
The clearing was an anticlimax. The score of huts in the center had been protected by a palisade of sorts, but the first rush of the encircling Baengas had smashed great gaps in it. Three bodies, all of them women, lay spilled in the millet fields outside. Within the palisade were more bodies, one of them a naskari with a long iron spearhead crosswise through his rib cage. About a hundred villagers, quavering but alive, had been forced together in the compound in front of the chief's beehive hut by the time the force from the steamer arrived. Several huts were already burning, sending up shuddering columns of black smoke.
Trouville stared at the mass of prisoners, solidified by fear into the terrible, stinking apathy of sheep in the slaughtering chute."Yes…"he murmured appreciatively. His eyes had already taken in the fact that the fetishes which normally stood to the right or left of a well-to-do family's doorway were absent in this village. "Now," he asked, "who will tell me about the new god you worship?"
As black against a darkness, so the new fear rippling across faces already terrified. Near the Belgian stood an old man, face knobbed by a pattern of ritual scarring. He was certainly a priest, though without a priest's usual trappings of feathers and cowrie shells. Haltingly he said, "Lord, l-lord, we have no new gods."
"You lie!" cried Trouville. His gloved fingertip sprang out like a fang. "You worship Ahtu, you lower-than-the-apes, and he is a poor weak god whom our medicine will break like a stick!"
The crowd moaned and surged backwards from the Colonel. The old priest made no sound at all, only began to tremble violently. Trouville looked at the sky."Lieutenant Osterman," he called to his burly subordinate, "we have an hour or so till sunset. I trust you can get this carrion-" he pointed to the priest- "to talk by then. He seems to know something. As for the rest… de Vriny, take charge of getting the irons on them. We'll decide what to do with them later."
The grinning Fleming slapped Baloko on the back. Each seized one of the priest's arms and began to drag him toward the shade of a baobab tree. Osterman started to detail the items he needed from the steamer and Baloko, enthusiastic as a child helping his father to fix a machine, rattled the list off in translation to a nearby askari.
The evening breeze brought a hint of relief from the heat and the odors, the oily scent of fear and the others more easily identified. Osterman had set an overturned bucket over the plate of burning sulphur to smother it out when it was no longer needed. Reminded by Trouville, he had also covered the brush of twigs he had been using to spread the gluey flames over the priest's genitals. Then, his work done, he and Baloko had strolled away to add a bowl of malafou to the chill. "Thank you, Lieutenant," which was all the praise Trouville had offered for their success.
The subject of their ministrations-eyes closed, wrists and ankles staked to the ground-was talking. "They come, we let them," he said, so softly and quickly that Trouville had to strain to mutter out a crude translation for Dame Alice. "They live in forest, they not bother our fish. Forest here evil, we think. We feel god there, we not understand, not know him. All right that anybody want, wants to live in forest."
The native paused, turning his head to hawk phlegm into the vomit already pooled beside him. Dame Alice squatted on the ground and riffled the pages of her book unconsciously. She had refused to use the down-turned bucket for a stool. Sparrow paid only scant attention to the prisoner. His eyes kept picking across the clearing, thick and raucous now with Baengas and their leg-shackled prisoners; the men and the trees beyond them. Sparrow's face shone with the frustrated intensity of a man certain of an ambush but unable to forestall it. Shadows were beginning to turn the dust the color of the noses of his bullets.
The priest continued. The rhythms of his own language were rich and firm, reminding Dame Alice that behind Trouville's choppy French were the words of a man of dignity and power-before they had brought him down. "All of them are cut men. First come boy, no have ears. His head look me, like melon that is dropped. Him, he hear god Ahtu calling do what god tell him.
"One man, he not have, uh, manhood. God orders, boy tells him… he, uh, he quickens the ground where Ahtu sleeps.
"One man, he only half face, no eyes… him sees, he sees Ahtu, he tells what becoming, uh, is coming. He-"
The priest's voice rose into a shrill tirade that drowned out the translation. Trouville dispassionately slapped him to silence, then used a rag of bark cloth in his gloved hand to wipe blood and spittle from the fellows mouth. "There are only three rebels in the forest?" he asked. If he realized that the priest had claimed the third man was white, he was ignoring it completely.
"No, no… many men, a ten of tens, maybe more. Before we not see, not see cut men only now and now, uh, again, in the forest. Now god is ripe and, uh, his messengers… "
Only a knife edge of sun could have lain across the horizon, for the whole clearing was darkening to burnt umber where it had color at all. The ground shuddered. The native pegged to it began to scream.
"Earthquake?"Trouville blurted in surprise and concern. Rain forest trees have no deep tap roots to keep them upright, so a strong wind or an earth tremor will scatter giants like straw in the threshing yard.
Dame Alice's face showed concern not far from panic, but she wholly ignored the baobab tottering above them. Her book was open and she was rolling out syllables from it. She paused, turned so that the pages opened to the fading sun; but her voice stumbled again, and the earth pitched. It was sucking in under the priest whose fear so gripped him that, having screamed out his breath, he was unable to draw another one.
"Light!"Dame Alice cried."For Jesus' sake, light!"If Trouville heard the demand against the litany of fear rising from the blacks, guards and prisoners alike, he did not understand. Sparrow, his face a bone mask, dipped into his shirt pocket and came out with a match which he struck alight with the thumb of the hand that held it. The blue flame pulsed above the page, steady as the ground's motion would let the gunman keep it. Its light painted Dame Alice's tight bun as she began again to cry words of no meaning to any of her human audience.
The ground gathered itself into a tentacle that spewed up from beneath the prisoner and hurled him skyward in its embrace. One hand and wrist, still tied to a deep stake, remained behind.
Two hundred feet above the heads of the others, the tentacle stopped and exploded as if it had struck a plate of lightning. Dame Alice had fallen backward when the ground surged, but though the book dropped from her hands she had been able to shout out the last words of what was necessary. The blast that struck the limb of earth shattered also the baobab. Sparrow, the only man able to stand on the bucking earth, was knocked off his feet by the shock wave. He hit and rolled, still gripping the two handguns he had leveled at the afterimage of the light-shot tentacle.
Afterwards they decided that the burned-meat odor must have been the priest, because no one else was injured or missing. Nothing but a track of sandy loam remained of the tentacle, spilled about the rope of green glass formed of it by the false lightning's heat.
Colonel Trouville rose, coughing at the stench of ozone as sharp as that of the sulphur it had displaced. "De Vriny!" he called. "Get us one of these devil-bred swine who can guide us to the rebel settlement!"
"And who'll you be finding to guide you, having seen this?" demanded the Irishwoman, kneeling now and brushing dirt from the fallen volume as if more than life depended on her care.
"Seen?" repeated Trouville. "And what have they seen?" The fury in his voice briefly stilled the nightbirds. "They will not guide us because one of them was crushed, pulled apart, burned? And have I not done as much myself a hundred times? If we need to feed twenty of them their own livers, faugh! the twenty-first will lead us-or the one after him will. This rebellion must end!"
"So it must," whispered Dame Alice, rising like a champion who has won a skirmish but knows the real test is close at hand. She no longer appeared frail. "So it must, if there's to be men on this earth in a month's time."
The ground shuddered a little.
Nothing moved in the forest but the shadows flung by the dancers around the fire. The flames spread them capering across the leaves and tree trunks, distorted and misshapen by the flickering.
They were no more misshapen than the dancers themselves as the light displayed them.
From a high, quivering scaffold of njogicane, three men overlooked the dance. They were naked so that their varied mutilations were utterly apparent. De Vriny started at the sight of the one whose pale body gleamed red and orange in the firelight; but he was a faceless thing, unrecognizable. Besides, he was much thinner than the plump trader the Belgian had once known.
The clearing was a quarter-mile depression in the jungle. Huts, mere shanties of withe-framed leaves rather than the beehives of a normal village, huddled against one edge of it. If all had gone well, Trouville's askaris were deployed beyond the hut with Osterman's group closing the third segment of the ring. All should be ready to charge at the signal. There would not even be a fence to delay the spearmen.
Nor were there crops of any kind. The floor of the clearing was smooth and hard, trampled into that consistency by thousands of ritual patterns like the one now being woven around the fire. In, out, and around-crop-limbed men and women who hobbled if they had but one foot; who staggered, hunched and twisted from the whippings that had left bones glaring out of knots of scar tissue; who followed by touch the motions of the dancers ahead of them if their own eye-sockets were blank holes.
There was no music, but the voices of those who had tongues drummed in a ceaseless chant: "Ahtu! Ahtu!"
"The scum of the earth," whispered deVriny."Low foreheads, thick jaws; skin the color of a monkey's under its hair. Your Mr. Darwin was right about Man's descent from the apes, Dame Alice-if these brutes are, in fact, kin to Man."
"Notmy Mr. Darwin," the Irishwoman replied.
The Krooman steward, in loincloth now instead of tailcoat, was behind the three whites with a hissing bull's-eye lantern. Dame Alice feared to raise its shutter yet, though, and instead ran her fingers nervously along the margins of her open book. Three other blacks, armed only with knives, stood by de Vriny as couriers in case the whistle signals were not enough. The rest of the Captain's force was invisible, spread to either side of him along the margin of the trees.
"Don't like this," Sparrow said, shifting his revolvers a millimeter in their holsters to make sure they were free in the leather. "Too many niggers around. Some of 'em are apt to be part of the mob down there, coming back late from a hunt or something. Any nigger comes running up in the dark and I'm gonna let 'im hold one."
"You'll shoot no one without my order," deVriny snapped."The Colonel may be sending orders, Osterman may need help-this business is going to be dangerous enough without some fool killing our own messengers. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you talking."A stray glimmer of firelight caught the throbbing vein in Sparrow's temple.
Rather than retort, the Belgian turned back to the clearing. After a moment he said, "I don't see this god you're looking for."
Dame Alice's mouth quirked."You mean you don't see a fetish," she said. "You won't. Ahtu isn't a fetish."
"Well, what kind of damned god is he then?" de Vriny asked in irritation.
The Irishwoman considered the question seriously, then said, "Maybe they aren't gods at all, him and the others… it and the others Alhazred wrote of. Call them cancers, spewed down on Earth ages ago. Not life, surely, not eventhings- but able to shape, to misshape things into a semblance of life and to grow and to grow and to grow."
"But grow intowhat, madame?" de Vriny pressed.
"Into what?" Dame Alice echoed sharply. Her eyes flashed with the sudden arrogance of her bandit ancestors, sure of themselves if of nothing else in the world. "Into this earth, this very planet, if unchecked. And we here will know tonight whether they can be checked yet again."
"Then you seriously believe," de Vriny began, sucking at his florid moustache to find a less offensive phrasing."You believe that the Bakongos are worshipping a creature which would, will, begin to rule the world if you don't stop it?"
Dame Alice looked at him."Not 'rule' the world," she corrected. "Ratherbecome the world. This thing, this seed awakened in the jungle by the actions of men more depraved and foolish than I can easily believe… this existence, unchecked, would permeate our world like mold through a loaf of bread, until the very planet became a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles toward Mars. Yes, I believe that, Captain. Didn't you see what was happening last night in the village?"
The Belgian only scowled in perplexity.
A silver note sang from across the broad clearing. De Vriny grunted, then put his long bosun's pipe to his lips and sounded his reply even as Osterman's signal joined it.
The dance broke apart as the once-solid earth began to dimple beneath men's weight.
The Forest Guards burst out of the tree line with cries punctuated by the boom of Albini rifles. "Light!" ordered Dame Alice in a crackling alto, and the lantern threw its bright fan across the book she held. The scaffolding moved, seemed to sink straight into ground turned fluid as water. At the last instant the three figures on it linked hands and shouted, "Ahtu!" in triumph. Then they were gone.
In waves as complex as the sutures of a skull, motion began to extend through the soil of the clearing. A shrieking Baenga, spear raised to thrust into the nearest dancer, ran across one of the quivering lines. It rose across his body like the breaking surf and he shrieked again in a different tone. For a moment his black-headed spear bobbled on the surface. Then it, too, was engulfed with a faint plop that left behind only a slick of blood.
Dame Alice started chanting in a singsong, molding a tongue meant for liquid Irish to a language not meant for tongues at all. A tremor in the earth drove toward her and those about her. It had the hideous certainty of a torpedo track. Sparrow's hands flexed. De Vriny stood stupefied, the whistle still at his lips and his pistol drawn but forgotten.
The three couriers looked at the oncoming movement, looked at each other… disappeared among the trees. Eyeballs white, the Krooman dropped his lantern and followed them. Quicker even than Sparrow, Dame Alice knelt and righted the lantern with her foot. She acted without missing a syllable of the formula stamped into her memory by long repetition.
Three meters away, a saw-blade of white fire ripped a cross the death advancing through the soil. The weaving trail blasted back toward the center of the clearing like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.
De Vriny turned in amazement to the woman crouched so that the lantern glow would fall across the black-lettered pages of her book."You did it!"he cried. "You stopped the thing!"
The middle of the clearing raised itself toward the night sky, raining down fragments of the bonfire that crowned it. Humans screamed-some at the touch of the fire, others as tendrils extruding from the towering center wrapped about them.
Dame Alice continued to chant.
The undergrowth whispered. "Behind you, Captain," Sparrow said. His face had a thin smile. De Vriny turned, calling a challenge. The brush parted and a few feet in front of him were seven armed natives. The nearest walked on one foot and a stump. His left hand gripped the stock of a Winchester carbine; its barrel was supported by his right wrist since there was a knob of ancient scar tissue where the hand should have been attached.
De Vriny raised his Browning and slapped three shots into the native's chest. Bloodspots sprang out against the dark skin like additional nipples. The black coughed and jerked the trigger of his own weapon. The carbine was so close to the Belgian's chest that its muzzle flash ignited the linen of his shirt as it blew him backwards.
Sparrow giggled and shot the native through the bridge of his nose, snapping his head around as if a horse had kicked him in the face. The other blacks moved. Sparrow killed them all in a ripple of fire that would have done justice to a Gatling gun. The big revolvers slammed alternately, Sparrow using each orange muzzle flash to light a target for his other hand. He stopped shooting only when there was nothing left before his guns; nothing save a writhing tangle of bodies too freshly dead to be still. The air was thick with white smoke and the fecal stench of death. Behind the laughing gunman, Dame Alice Kilrea continued to chant.
Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot-thick column of what had been earth dominated the night. A spear of false lightning jabbed and glanced off, freezing the chaos below for the eyes of any watchers. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering over all with inclusions of quartz. They snaked among the combatants as flexible as silk; when they closed, they ground together like millstones and spattered blood a dozen yards up the sides of the central column. The tendrils made no distinction between Forest Guards and the others who had danced for Ahtu.
Dame Alice stopped. The column surged and bent against the sky, its peak questing like the muzzle of a hunting dinosaur. Sparrow hissed, "For the love ofGod, bitch!" and raised a revolver he knew would be useless.
Dame Alice spoke five more words and flung her book down. The ground exploded in gouts of cauterizing flame.
It was not a hasty thing. Sparks roared and blazed as if the clearing were a cauldron into which gods poured furnaces of molten steel. The black column that was Ahtu twisted hugely, a cobra pinned to a bonfire. There was no heat, but the light itself seared the eyes and made bare flesh crawl.
With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the center of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.
When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to sprinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume downwind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different than the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.
"God damn if you didn't kill it," Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater. There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.
"I didn't kill anything," Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. "Surgeons don't kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there's always a little left to grow and spread again…"
She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping toward them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the center, skirting also the group of Baengas with a two-year-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.
"But without the ones who worshipped it," Dame Alice went on, "without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been… the end of Man, the end of Life here in any sense you or I-or those out there-would have recognized it… It'll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?"
Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humor showed on the gunman's face.
"It's like this," Sparrow said. "If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I'd never thought of that before, is all."
He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.
The Song of the Bone
I read a two-volume translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala in Viet Nam. "The Song of the Bone" is set in Norway in Viking times, but a wedding feast from the Kalevala is the genesis of this story.
I didn't write "The Song of the Bone" till after I'd gotten back to the World. I didn't have a potential market. Because I was pretty depressed about the piece when I finished it I didn't try to send it anywhere. (I was pretty depressed about most things at the time, frankly. It was some years before I was able to look straight at Nam, and a very long time before that didn't make life even more depressing. I'm not sure I'm out of that stage quite yet.)
Stuart David Schiff, an army dentist who'd just been assigned to Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, came to a Sunday afternoon get-together at the home of the Murray brothers, collectors extraordinaire, in Durham. Stu was planning to start a small-press fantasy/horror magazine to replace The Arkham Collector. Part of his reason for doing so was that he'd been art editor on Meade Frierson's huge 1971 fanzine HPL and didn't feel that he'd gotten proper recognition for his work. By doing the production himself, he'd keep that from happening again.
Stu wanted fiction, but he didn't plan to pay for it. I gave him "The Song of the Bone," but I told him I thought he was making a mistake: free fiction was generally going to be worth what he paid. I thought my story was valueless, which was the only reason I was giving it to him.
Stu took the piece, but much more important he took my advice: after the second issue of Whispers he began paying a penny a word for stories. We're both convinced that the decision to pay for fiction is the reason that Whispers was there to keep alive the fantasy/horror short-story genre during the 1970s.
The difference between low pay (and a penny a word was as good as some professional SF magazines were paying at the time) and no pay was the difference between being a professional and being a dilettante. That was important to some of us, me included, even though it was nearly a decade before I even dreamed of making a living from writing fiction.
On the next issue I became Stu's assistant editor. Throughout Whispers' run, I read all the fiction that came to the magazine, sending on the ones I thought were publishable to Stu. It was a frustrating job, but I'm glad I did it. Mr. Derleth had spent more time on me than I was worth. I couldn't repay him, but I could pass the effort on.
Olaf was king in Drontheim and prayed to the White Christ, but there were other gods still in the upcountry and it was to them that Hedinn and his wife sacrificed in the evening. Finished, they waited a moment to watch the clouds that piled up high over the tops of the firs. Hedinn smiled as the first of his cows walked across the clearing toward the cattle shed, the rest following in a silent procession. On the left side pattered a black mongrel which snapped at the nose of a cow that began to stray, and at the end of the line shambled Gage the herdsman, almost lost in the gloom of the forest behind him.
"He doesn't have a staff,"Gudrun said to her husband. "How does he keep them in line like that?"
Hedinn shrugged."He seems to whistle at them. He's got forest blood in him, you know, and they can do things with animals. Mostly the dog does the work anyway."
The herdsman turned toward the couple and, though darkness and distance hid his features, Gudrun shuddered. "Ugh," she said, "I wish we didn't have to look at him. Why don't you sell him to a trader?"
"Now, Sweetning," Hedinn said, stroking his wife^' s fine hair with affection, "he's a good herdsman despite his looks. And we'd never get a worn kettle for him, you know."
The dog had waited for his master at the shed door. They entered together, Gage closing the door behind them.
"He sleeps with the cows, then?" Gudrun asked in surprise.
"In a corner of the cowshed," her husband agreed. "He and his dog together. And he eats any scraps the cook cares to give him. He's really no trouble for the work he does," Hedinn concluded complacently, "if you can learn to stand his face, Darling."
Gudrun laughed and patted her husband's arm. "Other men don't matter at all, Sweetning, no other men."
"Ooh, Gudrun, how do I look?"Inga asked, pirouetting in a blue embroidered dress that showed her buxom charms to the full above a belt of copper disks. Gudrun leaned back against the wall and stared critically at her sister-in-law. The girl's thick braid was hanging loose, not gathered about her head, and it shone in the lamplight. A few strands had become tangled in Inga's necklaces of facetted tin beads.
"Here now," said Gudrun, freeing the hairs, "you mustn't throw yourself around like that or you'll not be fit to meet Bjorn. You must not dishonor the house or your brother."
"Oh, tush," the younger girl complained, "they'd never notice, they'll be so drunk by now. Why couldn't Bjorn have seen me while he was still able to see?"
"The brideprice had yet to be discussed," Gudrun chided. "It wouldn't have been proper. And no matter who can appreciate it, you must look your best for your husband."
"Oh, I do want to be pretty," Inga answered petulantly, "but I don't think Bjorn wants a wife who's just a stick doll and sits in the corner doing nothing. You know," the girl added with a speculative grin, "they say he really is a bear, just like his name. All rough and strong…"
Gudrun nodded sternly to silence the girl."You're as ready as you can be," she said, "and the men are waiting."
The two women stepped out into the warm May darkness where the sliver moon hid in the overcast. The summer kitchen blazed with light and servants trotted between it and the main hall. Two empty tuns of mead stood outside the open main door already. It was difficult to believe that the roisterers could possibly have put away that much liquor and still down the quantities of venison being carried in.
"Oh!" gasped Inga as she saw the squatting shape lighted by the glare through the hall doorway. "But it's just Gage."
The herdsman turned and stared at the women. At his feet lay his black mongrel, gnawing on a deer haunch. Gage looked more human with his stubby legs folded under him, but his limbs were almost as shaggy as his dog and his sloping forehead was scarcely human.
As the women started to edge around him, Gage swept the bone from his dog's mouth and flourished it to Inga, who squealed and shied back.
With a silly mocking grin, the herdsman set the bone between his molars and crunched the end to splinters.
He was still grinning as Gudrun propelled the younger girl into the hall with a firm hand on her waist.
Fish oil lamps in wall niches lit the hall, but the best quality oil was already gone and a film of soot had begun to settle over the room. No one seemed to notice it; some were already too drunk to stand and one had vomited-a fox skin had been tossed over the ejecta but a sour odor permeated the room. Only one had actually collapsed, though, and most were in full voice.
The women paused uncertainly at the doorway. After a moment Hedinn looked up from his argument with the hulking young man beside him and saw them. He stood and shouted something unintelligible and unnoticed in the general din. Angry, he picked up his bronze drinking cup, reconsidered, and drew the sword that he wore at his belt like everyone else. He slammed the hilt twice on the table, jouncing it on the trestles and rocking the sleeper onto the floor. Slowly the room quieted.
There were about twenty men packed into the hall, Hedinn's relatives and retainers and those of the prospective bridegroom. Negotiations for the bride-price and dower had been sharper than either of the two prosperous farmers had expected, so that the temper of the hall was harsh despite the drink. As a result Hedinn glared at Bjorn and his voice rang louder than needful, "My sister!"
Bjorn rose a little unsteady, and squinted across the table. "Haw!" he cried, flushing, "she'll do for a milch cow if not for a wife. But we'll turn her trinkets to real silver and gold when I wed her."
Hedinn turned white but it was Gudrun who spoke."Husband, must we hear each beardless beggar prate as we feed him?"
Inga screamed as Bjorn snatched at his sword, but his own uncle Skeggi pinned the youth in a hammerlock and wrestled him back from his host. The table crashed over on its side and those not too befuddled drew. Skeggi roared, "Get him clear! No blood! No blood!"
Two or three of the others of Bjorn's party aided Skeggi in forcing him outside. Hedinn and his own people crowded back away from the door, unable to help and barely unwilling to hinder.
Never had Bjorn looked more the bear his name meant. Even with four big men clinging to him he had managed to draw his broadsword but had not quite come to the point of using it on his own kinsmen. With a convulsive effort they rushed him through the door, but he shook free outside it.
Gage scrambled away but his dog yelped in fear of being trampled. In sheer berserk fury Bjorn whirled and lopped the black mongrel in two. His overhand blow finished in shattering the sword-blade against a cobblestone, leaving the dog's corpse in a great splash of blood. The right forepaw twitched, making dark ripples in the lamplight.
Skeggi held back a man prepared to seize Bjorn again. The farmer turned slowly, his anger washed away by the shock that had numbed his whole side.
"Quick, a horse," Skeggi commanded. One of the servants dropped his platter and ran to the shed. Aided in tense silence by two of Bjorn's men he saddled the nearest horse, a big roan, and led it to Skeggi who was holding his nephew by the arm. Skeggi grunted and lifted Bjorn into the saddle where he sagged, almost too stupefied to put his feet in the stirrups.
"Now lead him out of here before he wakes up," Skeggi snapped to one of the men. "We'll follow. This night has gone on long enough."
Because she had stepped to the door, leaving Inga to weep inside the hall, Gudrun was the only one to see Gage put two fingers to his mouth and give a short whistle.
The horse whickered softly, then whinnied and tore the reins free. Before any of the half-drunken men could stop it, the roan had galloped blindly into the forest.
"Not on foot, you frog-spawn!" Skeggi bellowed to the men stumbling after Bjorn. "Saddle horses!"
Inga cried herself to sleep, but Gudrun was standing in the kitchen doorway when Hedinn and his men rode back in the pre-dawn.
"Where is Bjorn?" she asked quietly as her husband approached.
"Dead," Hedinn answered in a flat, expressionless voice."The horse must have dragged him a mile. We never did find his leg."
"There's hot water inside," Gudrun said.
She stood beside Hedinn as he plunged his face into the water. When he straightened she began massaging her husband's neck, loosening the tense muscles. At last Gudrun turned Hedinn around to face her.
"Did you see Gage kill him?" she asked.
"Don't talk about Gage now, Sweetning," Hedinn ordered wearily.
"Gage killed Bjorn, Hedinn; he whistled and the horse-"
"Stop it!" her husband snapped. "It's more important than whether you like a herdsman, now. There's a man dead after being insulted in my house; a man's dead!"
Gudrun stared at him without expression, then ran her hand down the curve of his biceps. "It's been a long night, Sweetning; let's go to bed."
Gudrun was alone in the hall when she heard the cows returning that evening. An unfamiliar sound, a high trill, drew her to the door to watch. Gage was blowing a pipe of some sort. A shadow wavered near the head of the file and a cow jerked back into line.
Gudrun began to walk toward the herd. Her belly started to tremble and she ran, hair loosening to stream out behind her splendid body. The herdsman glanced up and paused as she approached.
The woman stopped a body-length from him, breathing in tight, controlled pants. In his hand Gage held a bone flute crudely drilled with finger holes. It was a small thigh bone, and Gudrun remembered the dog's mangled body as Gage raised the flute to his lips. The sound whispered between them, surprisingly musical to come from such a brutish minstrel.
A small black shadow danced on the grass, so real that Gudrun saw its pink tongue loll. Gage began to play louder…
Gudrun screamed and snatched the flute away, crushing the fresh bone between her fingers.
"Witch!" she shouted. "Killer witch!"
The herdsman made a guttural sound. Somewhere behind her Gudrun heard her husband call and whirled to run.
"Hedinn! He tried to rape me! Kill him, KILL HIM!"
But before Hedinn could reach her, Gage had disappeared into the forest and the cattle were already beginning to stray.
In the night she heard the whistling as she lay on the low couch with her husband. For a moment she pretended that it wasn't real, was only a dream, but another trill from the darkness froze her. Still she waited, bone cold, until the sound rippled around her a third time. It seemed to be nearer.
"Hedinn," she whispered, shaking her sleeping husband, "Hedinn."
"Uh…?" grunted Hedinn. "Sweetning?"
"Shh. Listen."
After a moment Hedinn padded over to a window and loosed its leather flap to peer out. He swore and began to pull on his boots.
"Is it him?" Gudrun whispered.
"It's him, yes," Hedinn answered, groping for his sword.
"Then call the men out," Gudrun hissed.
"I don't need help to teach that dog vomit a lesson," Hedinn said, throwing open the door. Gudrun followed him barefoot.
The herdsman faced them fifty paces away, his expression shaded by his thick shock of hair. He carried a bone, large enough to make a dangerous club. Not a club though, Gudrun knew, for she could see the shadows of finger holes as on the smaller flute.
This had been a man's thigh, a large man's.
Hedinn stalked toward his slave, his sword held low across his body.
"Wait!"Gudrun screamed, running after her husband as Gage raised the flute to his lips. There was no whisper of sound this time, no keening, but a full-throated skirling that turned Gudrun's sweat acid.
A bear loomed up beside Gage, swinging its right paw with terrible precision. Hedinn's ribs caved in and his body hurtled back against his wife.
Gudrun screamed again as the bear waddled hugely toward her, and the laughter of the thigh bone rang behind it.
The Master Of Demons
I was in correspondence with Ramsey Campbell for much of the 1970s. When he became president of the British Fantasy Society, I joined the organization (the original anthologies in which most of my fantasy and horror appeared were all British anyway). At Ramsey's request I then wrote "The Master of Demons" for the club's fantasy magazine, Dark Horizons.
Dark Horizonsdidn't pay for its material. My warning to Stuart about the value of gift stories might be recalled here. Having said that, I felt free to experiment on this story. I'm not dissatisfied with the result, though this stylistic form isn't one I've ever tried when I expected to be paid for my work.
The core of the story is the fact that William the Conqueror swore, "By the face of Lucca!" Lucca is a shrine of the Virgin in Northern Italy, but the source I used stated that the meaning of the oath was unknown. William's career and the fact that his father was called Robert the Devil gave me the basic notion.
The story's set in Late Medieval Europe, when there was a unique climate for learning. Classical science and literature were returning to the intellectual mainstream, but much was being discovered for the first time as well. Scholars all spoke Latin, so a Catalan and a Bohemian might meet in Bologna, for example, to discuss Arab researches into optics.
The division between what we now consider science and what we call mysticism were less obvious some hundreds of years ago also. (It's useful to remember that Newton developed calculus to simplify astrological computations.)
I wish I could have gotten more of the wonder of the period into this story; but I hope at least some of it comes through.
There is a hierarchy in Hell and this Hermann of Prague knew; but the way of it he failed to grasp, so this is the story of his pride and his ignorance and what came of them. Perhaps he had been born in Prague, but at the end he lived alone in a room cut from the rock of a sea-pounded crag on the western edge of the continent.
His tower of glass was the key, the tall helix squirming into the air from a bulb of purple fluid, without that the parchment of Andromedes would have been worthless, mere words in the darkness.
And even possession of the memoirs of the bitter Greek stemmed from the dreaming glass. There had been rumors, hints; but only that until Hermann lit an oil lamp beneath the base of the helix. Then, nude, he smeared his body with an ointment of fats and belladonna before reclining on a couch to watch the purple liquid stir and bubble, lighted by the one lamp alone. As the sluggish blobs of color mounted in the closed tube and the drug took hold it seemed as if the helix lengthened immensely, and Hermann's mind followed the bubbles into a height of discord and whispers. In time the lamp burned out and the fluid dripped back into its reservoir, but when Hermann awoke he knew where the manuscript was hidden and how it might be had.
Even so it was three years before Hermann had the parchment to hand, but to argue with necessity is time ill spent and there had been no other way. It was a short chronicle of knowledge and failure, of wisdom made useless by the inadequacy of its goals. In the midst of the Greek a single line in Latin stood out, not a gloss for it too was written in Andromedes' own crabbed hand: