Out of the Waters (7 page)

The Sibyl turned her palms up, then down again. “If Typhon destroys Atlantis, will it not destroy this world, Lord Varus? Who but Zeus with his thunderbolts could halt him?”

The linked islands were a sludge of steam and drifting ash. Typhon, larger by far than the monster of his first appearance, crawled eastward. The setting sun threw his shadow across a red-tinged sea.

“Mistress?” said Varus. In this place he no longer had his notebook. He regretted that, because holding it would have given him something to do with his hands. “Is Zeus real?”

The Sibyl laughed. She said, “I know only what you know, Lord Varus. Are the Olympian gods real, philosopher?”

Of course not,
Varus thought, though he didn't open his mouth.
I'm an educated man, not a superstitious bumpkin.

The Sibyl laughed again. “Then let your philosophy console you!” she said.

The mist rose, lapping Varus' waist and stretching wisps toward the Sibyl's chair. He could feel words of closure trembling in his heart. Before they could burst from his mouth he cried, “Sibyl, was the Erymanthian Boar real? Did Heracles kill it?”

Without turning her head, the Sibyl lifted her right hand and caressed the great tusk beside her head. She said, “You are a clever, educated boy, Lord Varus. Something was real, and someone killed it. If you wish to say they were the Erymanthian Boar and Heracles, who is there to stop you? Not I, surely.”

“Open the Earth and the World to me!” Varus' lips shouted. His soul plunged through ice and fire until it filled his body again. He rocked on his stool and would have fallen if Pandareus had not caught him by the shoulders.

The illusion had vanished. The actor playing Hercules sprawled sobbing against the stone backdrop. Others of the performers huddled together or had fled from the stage.

The entire audience was on its feet, stamping and shouting, “
Saxa! Saxa! Saxa!
”

Father must be very pleased,
Varus thought.
I wish I knew as little about what happened as he does, so that I could be pleased also.

 

CHAPTER
III

The vision disappeared as suddenly as a lightning flash, leaving nothing behind but memories. Hedia was so cold inside that she continued to sit in numb silence, oblivious of the change.

The spectators, all the many thousands of them, were going wild.
That's dangerous!
she realized. Fear for her husband and family broke her out of the gray chill that had bound her.

Hedia got to her feet. She wasn't fully herself—she knocked the stool over behind her—but nobody would notice in this confusion. Alphena glanced up as Hedia walked toward the back of the Tribunal. The girl looked as though she wanted to say something, but Hedia had no time for chatter.

Servants waited in the rear of the box. Though excited, they didn't seem worried—or anyway, not more worried than could be explained by the fact that their mistress was approaching with a hard expression.

Hedia ignored her personal maid, Syra, and instead stepped close to Candidus, a deputy steward and the senior servant present. She gestured him to bend over so that she could speak into his ear and be heard.

I'll probably have to shout anyway.
Shouting was undignified, but Hedia supposed that under the circumstances she couldn't complain about a minor indignity.

She smiled. She couldn't change how she felt, but she was too self-aware not to be able to view herself clearly.

“Candidus, find the impresario Meoetes and tell him in the senator's name to draw the curtain at once,” she said, holding the lobe of the servant's left ear between her thumb and forefinger. “At once, do you understand? And go yourself; don't pass this off to an underling who might be disregarded.”

She wasn't pinching him, but her touch reminded the servant that he was dealing with Hedia, not her gentle, diffident husband. Candidus
would
obey, without question or hesitation.

The fellow made Hedia want to slap him. Well, cane him; she certainly didn't want her bare hand to touch his greasy skin. She had decided when she took charge of Saxa's household that so long as the servants obeyed
her
instantly, she would ignore any behavior that didn't directly touch the honor of her new family.

“At once, your ladyship!” Candidus said. He went down the stairs at the back of the Tribunal, taking each step individually but quickly.

Though a slave, Candidus affected a toga at public events like this one. The thick wool made him sweat like a broiling capon. In Hedia's present mood, the fellow's mere presence seemed an almost unbearable provocation.

She turned and almost cannoned into Alphena, who must have followed her. Hedia stifled a curse—
she's following me to help, but this isn't the time for it!
—and hugged her daughter by the shoulders and swung around her.

“Give me a moment, dear,” Hedia said. “I must speak to your father.”

Saxa sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, beaming and blinking.
He no more understands the situation than a bull being led to the altar does!
Hedia thought, then muttered a prayer that the metaphor might not be a prophecy.

Syra had righted the stool. Hedia leaned across it, graceful despite her hurry, and touched her husband's upper arm.

“Dearest,” she said, hoping that concern wouldn't give her voice the whip-crack edge she knew it got at times. “Get up and thank the emperor. Raise your hands for silence. When things quiet a little, say that this was done by the emperor's gift. Make sure that at least the orchestra hears you. Do you understand?”

“What?” said Saxa. He looked at her, blinking. He seemed surprised to hear words in the midst of applause that had as little content as a crashing thunderstorm. “The emperor, my dear? No, Meoetes did all this, but he was doing it for me.”

“My lord and master,” Hedia said, chipping the words out and no longer trying to hide her frightened anger. “Tell Carce that it owes this entertainment to the emperor. Otherwise you and Meoetes and your family will be entertaining the city from the tops of crosses!”

Saxa looked blank for an instant. “Oh!” he said. “Yes, this was … this was…”

Apparently he couldn't decide how to describe the vision any better than Hedia could have, so he lurched to his feet instead of finishing the sentence. He raised his arms. For a moment the cheers increased, but Saxa turned his palms outward as though pushing the sound away.

Hedia sank onto her stool, feeling unexpected relief. She couldn't do anything about the glass figures of her dreams, but at least she had gotten Saxa—gotten her whole family—out of the immediate trouble. At any rate, she had done what was humanly possible to avoid immediate repercussions from this vision, this waking nightmare.

The curtain was canvas and split ceiling to floor down the middle. Ordinarily only half was used at a time, concealing set changes on a portion of the long stage. Now both right and left portions began to move toward the center, but they jerked and stuttered instead of sliding smoothly as they had before. By leaning over the railing, Hedia could see that three and four men were manhandling the heavy curtains rather than the dozen stagehands in each of the original crews.

Candidus must have carried the message successfully; that, or Meoetes had come to the same conclusion on his own. The actors still on stage looked like casualties of a gladiatorial show that the doctors and Charon—the costumed slave who drove the dead wagon—hadn't gotten to yet.

“My fellow citizens!” Saxa said. “Hail to the noble and generous emperor who has granted you this gift. Carce rules the world, and the emperor is the soul of Carce!”

His voice was pitched too high to command authority, but he was managing good volume; he would be heard. Hedia nodded approvingly.

“Long live the emperor!” Saxa said. “Long live the emperor, our father and god!”

Cheers and the banging of sandals on stone again overwhelmed the theater. Hedia noted wryly that her husband's fellow senators were the most enthusiastic, capering like monkeys in the orchestra.
Nobody wants word to get out that he was behind-hand when everyone around him applauded the emperor.

Hedia started to relax, but now that the immediate danger was past, memory of the dreadful glass figures returned. The memory gripped her like a hawk sinking its talons into a vole. She felt dizzy for an instant; she felt Alphena take her arm to steady her on the chair.

She recovered, straightening like the noble lady that she was. She patted her daughter's hand affectionately.

There was something very wrong going on, but there had generally been things wrong in Hedia's life—before her first marriage to Calpurnius Latus and most certainly ever afterward. She had seen her way through those troubles, and she would see her way through this one also.

She had to, after all. What would poor dear Saxa and his children, her children now, do without her?

Tomorrow she would visit Anna, Corylus' housekeeper and his former nurse. Anna was the wife of the boy's servant Pulto—and she was a Marsian witch.

And if Anna couldn't send away those glass nightmares, Hedia would find another way. It was her duty as a wife and mother, and as a noblewoman of Carce.

But oh! She wished Corylus was holding her now in his strong young arms!

*   *   *

T
HE SPECTATORS WERE BEGINNING
to drift toward the exits. Corylus led his burly servant through them against the flow. Pulto would have been more than willing to force a path, but Carce wasn't a frontier cantonment and Publius Corylus was no longer the son of a high military officer.

Still, though Corylus didn't push people out of his way, the senator's toady who thought to shove the youth aside got a knee in the crotch for his bad judgment. He heard Pulto chuckle behind him.
I am a freeborn citizen of Carce, and I learned on the Rhine how to handle lice.

They got clear of the audience and found that the steps from the orchestra to the stage were concealed behind an offset panel. “Just like a Celtic hill fort,” Pulto said as he followed his master up them.

Corylus' face blanked as he tried for an instant to fathom the deep inner meaning of what his servant had just said; then he smiled.
There isn't any deep inner meaning, here or ever with Pulto. He'd seen the entrances to Celtic hill forts designed the same way, so he said so.

Corylus ducked behind the curtain. A few actors were still standing on stage. One had been dressed as a naiad in silk pantaloons painted to look like a fish's tail with flowing fins. She had stripped off her costume and stood nude, weeping desperately.

“What's all that about, do you think, lad?” Pulto asked in puzzlement.

Corylus glanced at him; they were side by side again.
Pulto still thinks it was all stagecraft!

Picking his words carefully, Corylus said, “I think it must have surprised the actors even more than it did us in the audience. They were closer, you see.”

The performers had been inside the vision. Perhaps the effect simply blinded them, which would be frightening enough. From the stunned looks and worse on the faces of the actors he saw, the experience had been worse than that.

Pulto would realize before long that there had been more than trickery behind the vision. Corylus didn't see any reason to hasten his servant's discomfort, however.

And Pulto would
be
uncomfortable, because magic frightened him in a way that German spears did not. He knew how to divert a spear with his shield—and how to deal with the blond pig who'd thrust it, too. Magic, though, was as unfathomable as a storm at sea.

Corylus felt the same way. His smile became wry. He had too good an education, however, to allow him to pretend something hadn't happened simply because he wished that he hadn't seen it happen.

A great number of people waited in the wing beneath the Tribunal. A senator never went out without an entourage of both servants and clients—freemen who accompanied him in expectation of gifts, dinners, and similar perquisites. They had nothing better to do with their lives than to be parasites on a rich man.

“I wonder how they'd look in armor?” Corylus whispered to his companion.

Pulto snorted. “I'd sooner train a cohort of fencing dummies to hold the frontier,” he said. Unlike Corylus, he spoke in a normal voice. “At least they wouldn't talk back to me. And they'd stop spears just as well as this lot.”

Besides the normal entourage and the similar band which attended Lady Hedia, Saxa had a consul's allotment of twelve lictors. They had been hired from the Brotherhood here in Carce, though there was no absolute requirement to do so. An official who wished to save money could outfit his household servants as lictors instead.

From weapons drill, Corylus knew that it wouldn't be as easy as a layman might think to handle the lictor's equipment. Each man carried an axe wrapped in a bundle of rods, symbols of the consul's right to flog and to execute.

The additional cost of professionals meant nothing to Saxa. The mental cost to him if a servant turned lictor dropped an axe on someone's foot or spilled his rods at a gathering of dignitaries was beyond calculation.

There was room for the mob of attendants backstage: the emperor sat in the Tribunal when he attended performances. Besides the retinue of a civilian magistrate, he was always accompanied by fifty or a hundred German bodyguards.

Corylus smiled grimly. This complex included, along with the Temple of Venus at the front and the portico and gardens behind the theater proper, a fine Senate Hall. It had not been used since the afternoon Julius Caesar was assassinated in it.

Caesar had dismissed his Spanish guards, saying that a magistrate of Carce did not need foreigners to protect him from his own people. None of his successors would be so naive.