The Storm of Heaven (28 page)

Franco reversed his vault, his grip spreading on the pole as he flew through the air. This time, the pole bent in a sharper half-circle, guided by the placement of his hands, and Franco landed lightly on the pine boards. He released the pole and it shivered upright. As soon as the vibration settled, Ila lifted the pole from the recess in the floor and undid a length of cloth wrapped around the base.

Springing up in a somersault, she let the long banner snap out and then made a quick figure eight in the air. The cloth snapped and fluttered, making a swift green and gold sign in the air. This done, she ran off the stage to the right, with Otho and Franco behind her, their arms swinging stiff in long arcs at their side.

In the alcove, high above the stage, Diana felt her limbs tremble in anticipation. Her skin seemed hot and everything acquired a preternatural clarity. She began taking deep, slow breaths, nostrils flaring. Her chest flexed with each breath. Reaching up, she took hold of the wooden rungs of the ladder leading up to the top of the backdrop. She swarmed up, breathing steady and even, and stepped out onto the roof of the theater. At the other end of the rooftop Otho was waiting for her with the flying wire, sweating from his swift climb up the opposite ladder.

Diana paced forward, aware that the audience below could see her as a white figure silhouetted against the dark sky. Otho crouched down, letting the roof hide him in shadow. He held up the wooden handle of the wire, tightly wrapped with leather, for her.

Remember to let it slack as you set down.

She nodded to herself, hearing Dummonus' voice in her mind. The Gaul had drilled her on the art of landing from the wire a thousand times. She wondered, again, what she had done in her forgotten life. Whatever it had been, she had gained enormous upper-torso and arm strength to go with wire-fine scars crisscrossing her arms and chest. Dummonus had been impressed. His art required tremendous strength and body control. Now, she could repay Vitellix for a little of his hospitality.

The wire in Otho's hand was a heavy cord of tightly woven silk. Of all of the things in the troupe's wagons, the flying wire was the only thing locked away in an iron chest with a heavy cruciform lock. The value of the fabric was far more than the wagons, mules, props and baggage. Diana sighted down the length of the backdrop. Sixty feet of sloping tile roof and wooden walkway separated her from the far end of the stage. Down below, Vitellix, Franco, Ila and Dummonus were hooking a finely woven sisal net to the walls of the theater.

Otho, watching them finish, clapped his hand on the wooden walkway, and she sprinted down the length of the rooftop.

The wire was waiting, swinging from a contraption Dummonus had hooked into place on the central hub of the awning cables. One end of the flying wire was attached to the ring by a swiveling joint. The other was held tight in Otho's hand, his whole body straining against the weight of the line.

Diana hit the end of the rooftop at a dead run, right hand slapped into the wooden handle. Otho rolled away. She soared off the end of the backdrop and swung her legs out stiff behind her. Her right arm burned with the effort of keeping herself at right angles to the rope. Her left jutted straight out. Momentum swept her out and down, in a great arc, over the startled heads of the audience.

Faces flashed past, mouths wide, and Diana heard only the excited cries of a little girl jumping up and down in the stands below. It was a giddy sensation, swooping through the air, freed of the chains of the earth. Above and behind her, the ball joint whined as it spun. The cables and oculus ring groaned as her weight and centrifugal force torqued the assembly.

The swing of the wire brought her back towards the backdrop with dizzying speed. She brought her knees up a little and touched down, springing from column to column. The people in the audience gasped, seeing her running along the face of a vertical wall. The little girl shrieked with delight and her mother stared, slack jawed.

Diana kicked off the last column and into a turn. This time, as she soared over the heads of the audience, she was very close, only a dozen feet away. She swung into line with the rope, bringing her legs up, stiff and close together. Her momentum shifted and her speed picked up. Coming out of the fly-by over the consular seats, she twisted sideways, breaking her momentum, slacking the rope. For a single moment, the wire went neutral in her hand and she alighted with a heavy
smack
of bare feet on stone in the round alcove on the third floor of the backdrop.

She turned, the wire still in her hand, and bowed deeply to the audience. Her arm was in agony and sweat was pouring off her body. She felt exalted and giddy, the world perfectly clear and distinct. The little girl was clapping her hands together as she jumped up and down.

Diana looked down and smiled, then bowed again and stepped away, out of the light. The audience suddenly found its voice, chattering and exclaiming in delight. Joyful sounds rose up in the wide bowl of the amphitheater.

Diana sat on the ground in the camp, arms stretched over Otho and Franco's knees. They were slowly massaging her muscles from fingertip to shoulder blade with scented oil and camphor. The art took a fierce toll on the arms and upper body of an aerialist, particularly when using the free wire. Some of the citizens attending the festival had sent the artists wine and roasted meat to show their appreciation. They had eaten well. Diana licked her lips, thinking of the fine lamb shank she had gnawed to the bone. The wine had been better than average, too, and she felt at peace with the world. Exhausted, but at peace. Having two men devoting their undivided attention to her didn't hurt either.

"...
still
the Emperor demurs on this matter of the games! It is past comprehension!"

Vitellix had spent the day making the rounds of the other performers' wagons, sharing a cup here and there with the actors, beast trainers, gladiators and fire eaters. He seemed disheartened by what he had learned. Dummonus sat placidly, watching the older man declaim. Ila was curled up beside their fire, already asleep.

"Evil signs have been reported in Arretium and Ravenna. One of the bear trainers from the north told me that he had seen,
himself
, a sacrifice at the temple of Jupiter bleed black blood and worms. The skies remain dark and clouded with poisonous fumes and mists. In the southern lands, the earth shakes and rumbles with Poseidon's wrath."

The Gaul shook his head sadly, his old bald head gleaming in the firelight. "The Emperor is like unto a god, the bridge between man and the divine, yet he must not anger the king of the heavens! Worse, every
lanista
and
editore
in the Empire has kenned the profit to be made from these games when they
finally
occur! Our chances of securing a spot grow smaller with each day..."

"No one else," Dummonus said, "can boast of a tandem on the wire as we make."

Vitellix nodded, his face still glum. "There will be riots and unrest in the city soon, or so it is rumored. Perhaps the games will be canceled."

Dummonus smiled faintly. He and Vitellix had known each other for a long time. "I think not. This is Rome, remember? The citizens love their
panes et circi
more than the gods."

"True." Vitellix straightened up, drawing upon some inner strength. "I have to find us a patron, which is unlikely if we are touring the sticks. Tomorrow, friends, we shall make our way to Rome and see what we may see."

The sound of waves crashing on rocks rolled out of the darkness. The shore was close, booming like a great drum, and the wave surge under the boat echoed each crash. Zoë was tied to the short-stepped mast of the second boat. Within an hour, the sun would rise, but now she was shivering in darkness, eyes closed in concentration. Around her, men labored on the sweeps, driving the boat downshore, with the wind whispering out of the right quarter.

The wind was supposed to die down by night. It had not. The sea had been rough when they had pushed the boats out into the surf at Krokodeilon. Two boats had keeled over in heavy waves, crushing many of their passengers, and then the rest had drowned in the rough water. There was no good harborage at Krokodeilon, only a steep beach and a landward wind.

The only good harbor was somewhere ahead. The roar of the sea led them on, for the Romans had built a vast breakwater out from the barren shore. When Zoë concentrated she could hear a wind bell sounding over the crash of the waves. A light, dull and green in the fog, gleamed and shifted in the sky.

"We're too close to the breakwater," Zoë called to the men on the steering oars. "Swing to sea." They struggled manfully to turn the boat away, across the rolling waves.

Zoë let herself relax into the ropes that bound her to the mast. She grimaced at the night, feeling the enormous strain of keeping the air cold. Fog boiled and writhed around the boats as they crabbed out to sea, trying to avoid the massive breakwater lurking in the landward darkness. By any right, the wind should have torn the fog from the wavetops and pushed it inland over the miles of sandy flat lying behind the harbor. Zoë couldn't stop the wind—it had been sweeping for hundreds of miles over the open water—but she could keep the air cold above the warm sea.

In any case, the wind was heavy from the southwest and that was exactly what she wanted. From that quarter, it blew directly into the anchorages on the outside of the breakwater, keeping the ships there battened down.

Veils of mist parted and something loomed out of the darkness. Zoë let some of her thought seep into sight and the darkness faded, replaced by the glittering shapes of the hidden world. A towering statue hove into view as the boat rode up on the crest of a wave. A man's face a dozen feet high jutted from the darkness. Behind him stood two more towering figures.

Supporting them, rising steeply from the massive bulk of the harbor entrance, was a slab of stone sixty feet high. The stone men faced the sea, heads turned to the west.

"Turn in, turn in!" Zoë suddenly remembered that the men on the oars could not see in the darkness. Off to the right, the green light flickered again, eighty feet above the water. In its muted gleam, another set of colossi were revealed. The entrance to the harbor was a hundred feet wide, filled with the boil and churn of the sea. Zoë breathed a prayer that she was riding a shallow-draft fishing boat. Her witch-sight revealed jagged wrecks beneath the surging waters.

The lead boat, shrouded lanterns bobbing at the stern to guide the following ships, passed between the colossi. Then Zoë's boat was surging into the great sweep of the harbor. To her right, the watching gods passed away into the murk, their crowns of green fire swallowed by darkness. Zoë shuddered, chilled, and turned her attention to the pattern she was holding in the sea.

In a way, it was an easy matter to force her will in the hidden world upon the liquid gleam of the air, slowing down the flickering, gelid sparks that sped over the waters. As they slowed in their frantic dance, a vast and invisible swarm of minute bees, the temperature in the air dropped. At the same time, all that vigorous energy had to go somewhere, so she urged it into the rolling surface of the waves. Then the sea warmed, excited to infinitesimal motion. Where the chilling air and the turbid, warm sea met, mist boiled up. Zoë's forehead creased with effort. With the remaining six boats within the arms of the harbor, she could release her hold on the sea beyond the breakwater.

Like everything the Romans did, the harbor was massive. Even in the darkness, with her witch-eyes stinging from the sea spray, Zoë could see a forest of masts lining the harbor wall. The Roman fleet was riding easy in harbor, sheltered from the wind that whined and moaned up out of the southwest. From Tyre in the north to Gazzah in the south, this was the only safe harbor for the Roman fleet. Fog and mist filled the four-mile-long basin, thickening up from the glassy waters. Zoë urged it to spill over the circular terrace filling the landward side of the harbor. There were more quays and piers there, crowded with ships. Heavy fog swallowed them, wrapping itself around their masts and flooding through the hatchways in their pine decks.

Zoë and her boat reached a small pier along the short, northern wall of the harbor breakwater. Towers loomed out of the mist, jutting from the breakwater at regular intervals.

Two of the Sahaba experienced with the merchant ships of the Al'Quraysh jumped from the front of the boat onto the pier. They lashed the boat to the stone mooring posts and then drew their swords. The side of the boat creaked against mossy stone, the sound muffled by the fog. They had seen no one yet, but everyone was sure that guards must be posted nearby. More sailors untied Zoë from the mast and helped her out of the boat. She felt weak. Even moving heat out of the air and into the water took a toll on her.

If Dwyrin were here, he'd have done it without a thought.

Zoë sighed as she staggered across the damp stones to the stairs that ran up from the dock to the ramparts of the harbor wall. She sat heavily, her legs trembling with the effort of walking.
But he's not and should I see him again, all ungainly ears and that damned red hair, it will be a cold business between us.

"You must get to some cover, my lady."

Zoë looked up, raising her head from her hands. She had almost fallen asleep. The mist was falling over the town like slow rain, drenching the streets and rooftops with a thick dew. Blinking, she made out the face of the noble Khalid in the washed-out, gray light. He was leaning over her, his liquid brown eyes filled with concern.

Surely concerned,
snarled Zoë to herself.
All his blessed plan depends on me and my skill. If I fail, he fails and his precious pride would fall hard.

"Of course," she said, looking away, the corner of her mouth twitching.

Khalid grunted and leaned down, sliding his arm under hers and lifting her up. He was a lithe, pretty man, with long eyelashes and a mane of rich, dark hair. It reminded Zoë of her own, back in some sunlit summer day of her youth. He seemed untouched by the cruel business of war, still young and smiling, his white teeth gleaming in a sun-darkened face. Zoë lay stiff in his arms, but he affected not to notice and strode up the steps, blade rattling at his side. The column of bowmen followed him up the stairs.