Air and Darkness (44 page)

I wish Bhiku were here,
Varus thought.
He could tell me what the king is saying.

But the little sage
would
be here unless Varus were successful in his task; and Govinda's offhand comment that on this journey “the beggar-sage” would probably fail—and therefore die—had sounded truthful.
Besides, it's knowledge.

The air above the table grew hazy, then abruptly coalesced into a flat ruby cup and a steel bar the length of Varus' extended arm. Govinda stopped chanting and lowered his hands with the tablet. He hunched slightly and seemed for a moment to have shrunk in on himself. Great wizard the king might be, but the incantation he had just performed was more than a conjuring trick.

Govinda put one hand on the hilt of his curved dagger and took several deep breaths before he raised his eyes and said, “Here are your tools, Westerner. You will drink the juice of the upas tree, then take the speculum and the lever into your hands and lie back. The juice will free you to pass the gate into Anti-Thule.”

He gestured toward the wall panel filled with swirling blacks and grays like the smoke of a bitumen fire. The others showed images of scenes that appeared real, though only those of the shrine by Dreaming Hill and the altar at Polymartium were familiar to Varus.

“Well, get on with it,” Govinda said sharply.

Varus looked at the king. After a moment, Varus smiled. “I daydream, Master Govinda,” he said mildly. “I regret if this inconveniences you.”

Varus took the cup in his right hand as he would have done at a drinking party and raised it to his lips. The crystal rim was cool as Varus expected, but the clear fluid was icy. Though tasteless, it made his tongue sting.

He emptied the cup and set it down on the table, then took the pry bar in his right hand and the disk of cannel coal in his left. The steel, as usual for metal, felt cooler than the air around it.

To Varus' surprise the black speculum was as warm as though it had been sitting in the bright Indian sunlight. His fingertips flicked away for a moment, but the disk wasn't hot enough to keep him from holding it normally.

His hands and feet were prickling. He supposed they would go numb shortly. He crossed the pry bar over his belly, still holding it, and put the speculum on his chest. He would have smiled at Govinda, but his lips were frozen in a rictus.

Govinda held out the tablet in his left hand and chanted in counterpoint to the hanging boy. Both voices seemed muffled and began to fade. Varus could not turn his head, but from the corners of his eyes he saw shapes begin to clarify in the panel of swirling blackness.

Varus was very cold.
I wonder if my body is shivering?
He could not tell; he could not feel anything. Govinda drew the dagger from his sash.

The last thing Varus saw in the Waking World was Govinda leaning forward and drawing the edge of his dagger across the throat of the boy. Blood gushed as though from a fountain.

*   *   *

P
ORTIONS OF THE ROCKY SLOPE
were very steep. Corylus used his staff frequently to support him, while Bion depended on his impressive arms and grip to pull himself over obstacles that his relatively feeble legs couldn't have managed on their own.

Aura climbed without effort, never even having to dab a hand down. Corylus had thought of the nymph as slight, which in a manner of speaking she was, but she covered ground with the nonchalant ease of a legionary in light marching order.

Corylus reached a broad ledge, or at any rate a twenty-foot-wide shelf where the slope was gentle enough to hold soil and therefore grass. Bion was struggling below; he had grabbed a bush that came out by the roots instead of holding him.

“Let's take a break,” Corylus said. He moved sideways till he was above the sailor, then lay flat and stretched down his staff. Bion grabbed the end gratefully and hauled himself up with Corylus anchoring him.

The sailor flopped onto his back and gave a great sigh. “Give me a rope,” he said with his eyes closed, “and I'll climb all day. If I liked rocks, I'd have stayed a goatherd like my old man.”

“What are your plans, Bion?” Corylus said. “We're glad to have your company—”

He was, at any rate; Aura probably didn't care.

“—but when we reach the Cave of Zagreus, I hope to return to Carce in the Waking World. Do you want to come with me?”

“I don't know where Carce is,” said Bion. He didn't move from where he lay, but he had stiffened. “I want to go back to India, to my wife. I didn't want to leave in the first place, but Nearchos didn't give me a choice. Well, he gave me the choice of helmsman on the
Bird
or pulling an oar on one of the crappy barges the Indians use on the river. We brought some along as lighters.”

Bion rolled onto his elbow and opened his eyes. “It was just bad luck,” he said. “I'd gotten permission to stay back with my wife. Arrios, the port helmsman, could handle my job at the starboard oar, and he could train up a bosun's mate for his place. But then the day before the supply fleet started downriver Arrios caught a fever and died,”
blip!
—

Bion snapped his fingers.

“—and Nearchos came looking for me. The
Bird of the Hydaspes
was one of the ninety-four big ships, and he was going to have a trained helmsman on her. That was all there was to say about it.”

Corylus was looking back down the slope they were climbing. It seemed farther than he remembered to the green plains they had left that morning. He thought he saw a herd of goats ridden by dwarfs gamboling on the lower slopes. When a pair faced off on an outcrop long enough for Corylus to get a good look, however, he saw that they were unicorns as big as horses and the riders were apes who looked like men in fur garments.

“Well, I'd married a local woman, a princess I guess,” Bion said. “I loved her right enough, and I didn't think anything of it when she said that if we married it'd be us for the rest of our lives. I guess people mostly don't think about that, right? And I'm a sailor.… But you see, she really did mean it. And she was a wizard. I'd known that, but I hadn't known how much of a wizard she was. She couldn't stop Nearchos and the king above him, but she bound her soul and mine together the night before the fleet raised anchor.”

“I only know of one Nearchos,” Corylus said. He didn't believe what he was thinking, but the thought wouldn't go away. “He was the admiral of the fleet Alexander sent to Babylon while he marched his army back from India through the Gedrosian Desert.”

“Right, that's Nearchos,” Bion said, nodding. “You've heard of him in Carce? That'd please him to learn. He's a vain bastard, but I guess he had to be to take the job on. I heard there's two thousand—that's
thousand
—ships all told.”

He laughed. “Not that I can count that high,” he said. “It's a lot, anyhow; that much I can see. Well, I could see before Calaia grabbed me.”

“She's a sea breeze,” said Aura. “I've never met a nice one yet.”

“Well,
I'm
glad to be shut of her; that I'll tell you,” the sailor said. “We were out to sea; that's a true fact—”

He looked at Corylus. “But say, friend—the king wasn't marching through the desert; there's no food to speak of there. He's coming back along the shore and we'll meet him every night with the supplies. That's what we're doing, you know? We're the supply fleet. Only the winds had been against us the whole two weeks before I was taken, so we had to stand out to sea.”

“The winds never did change,” Corylus said. “They never do in summer. Nowadays captains use the seasonal winds to go to India and come back when they change, but nobody knew about them in Alexander's day.”

Corylus wished Pandareus and Varus were here to hear the helmsman … but he wished even more that Bion had stayed back in India as he wanted and none of this had happened. He seemed a decent fellow; not so different from Publius Cispius and the soldiers Corylus had grown up with on the frontiers.

“What do you mean, ‘Alexander's day'”? Bion said, sitting bolt upright. “Look, how long has it been since that bitch took me? Just the night before the day you saved me, right?”

“Three hundred and fifty years,” Corylus said quietly. He couldn't remember precisely how long it had been before Alexander's death during the 114th Olympiad that the king had left India, not long, though. “A little longer, I suppose.”

“Oh, by Fortune!” Bion said. He leaned his face into his hands, then repeated in a whisper, “By Fortune…”

“I suppose Calaia brought you here because you would have died in the Waking World,” Aura said, considering the matter as a puzzle rather than a tragedy. “She didn't care if you died, but you wouldn't have been much use as a lover if you were dead, would you?”

“I
couldn't
touch her!” Bion said. “Oh, I was willing enough—it'd been two weeks since we sailed, like I said. Nearchos didn't let any women come on board, but they came with the army onshore, you know? We were going to land every couple days, so that was fine for the ones whose women were coming along. And there was plenty of slaves and freelancers besides, for the fellows who hadn't brought their own.”

The failure of the fleet to land had been a near disaster for the army. Alexander had marched inland because the desert, though harsh, was better than the coastal strip where there was no drinkable water and no food at all. When Corylus learned about the event as history, he had never thought to wonder what it had meant to the crews manning the ships.

“It was in the middle of the night,” Bion said. He'd taken his hands away from his face, but Corylus wasn't sure that the sailor was actually looking back the way they had come. The unicorns and their riders had disappeared. “I was on watch, but it got very still and the corposants were dancing on the mast and rigging. I called to Hermes—he was the captain—because I thought we might be about to get a storm … but everybody was asleep, not just Hermes. Everybody but me.”

Bion rubbed his forehead with both hands. His fingers were thick as tent pegs, with pads too callused to show wear from the rocks they had recently been gripping.

“I can't believe it's been so long,” he muttered. “And for what? It was just a quick tumble for her, but for me…”

“Breezes are usually whimsical,” Aura said. “It's easier that way.”

Her eyes glazed, focusing on the past. “It would be much easier for me,” she said in an afterthought.

“There was a little whiffle of wind,” Bion said. “It'd been dead still or I maybe wouldn't have noticed it. And there she was standing beside me, Calaia was. She ran her fingers over my shoulders and told me how strong I was, and she riffled my hair.”

“You were in the stern?” Corylus said, trying to imagine the scene. He didn't know how big the
Bird of the Hydaspes
had been, but he supposed it was at least three or four hundred tons like the ships from North Africa that brought grain to Carce. A good-sized vessel, certainly.

“Right, standing by the crossbar of the steering oar,” said Bion. “I was too surprised to do anything, but then she started to touch me—and it didn't do any good because my wife, you know? She'd fixed me so it wouldn't. And Calaia got mad and just
grabbed
me, and we were here.”

He rubbed his head again. “What will she think?” he said. “What will my wife think after all these years?”

“I think we'd best get on,” said Corylus, getting to his feet.

He didn't give the obvious answer to Bion's question, because that would be cruel:
Your wife, your new bride, doesn't think anything. She's been dead for centuries.

*   *   *

“
A
RE YOU SURE—”
Alphena said to the iron face when her second step into the short passage brought nothing but echoes. It was a silly question, it just meant she was nervous, and she
hated
being nervous—

The third step took her out of the urine-smelling enclosure and onto the bank of a stream running quickly enough that the pebbled streambed was distorted by the current. There were clumps of reeds in eddies where an outcrop had deflected the flow, but for the most part the water was clear.

“Yes, I'm sure,” said Janus. “I told you that I open things, lady. I close them, also, but that's not what you asked for.”

No longer was Alphena's guide the baton in her right hand: Janus was a man-sized figure standing beside her with what was probably meant for a sardonic smile. The iron's crude workmanship didn't improve from becoming larger. He had arms and legs, but they were just as coarsely modeled as the head of the original had been.

“Thank you,” said Alphena. Hedia had repeatedly told her that courtesy even to social inferiors—and almost anyone was socially inferior to the daughter of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa—often reaped benefits. At worst she might be thought of as harmlessly eccentric by her noble acquaintances.

Hedia didn't have to tell her daughter that simple courtesy would not make her appear weak. No one who knew Lady Hedia thought of her as weak.

Alphena dropped the borrowed cape and belted on the sword it had concealed. Lenatus carried an infantry weapon instead of the horseman's longer spatha that Corylus preferred. The shorter blade was both more familiar to Alphena and better suited to her height and short arms.

“Will I need the cape?” she asked her guide.

“We're going a quarter mile up the stream,” said Janus, pointing. She had the impression that the figure would have shrugged if he had been able to. “Whatever you wish.”

“Let's go,” Alphena said, then reached back and snatched up the cape. She strode swiftly forward, forcing herself not to look at Janus. She knew she was dithering, but no one had a right to complain if it didn't slow her down!