Air and Darkness Read online

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  To BOBETTE ECKLAND,

  who did not run me down in her Oldsmobile station wagon the day we met in 1973

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dan Breen continues as my first reader. Occasionally I get queries from people who want to join my editorial board, so to speak. No: Dan catches things that are wrong. He does not try to improve my writing; he improves my typing and grammar.

  There are people who could improve my line-by-line prose; Harriet McDougal is one of them. There aren’t many, however, and Harriet was unique in my experience in making the lines better without trying to make them hers.

  Writing is not a group activity in my mind. Dan doesn’t imagine that it is, or that he can change me.

  My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, and Dorothy Day are my continuity checkers and, with Dan, store my texts against the possibility of disaster here in central North Carolina. I tend to think in terms of small, carefully aimed meteors.

  A more likely problem, however, is a computer catastrophe. Boy, I had a few of these during the course of this book. I only lost (and replaced) one actual computer (the older notebook), but there were repeated software glitches. I tend to blame myself when things go wrong in my electronic world, but this time (these times) I don’t think I was the cause. (The prize was when I got an apology from Oracle for sending horrible things that I hadn’t accepted instead of the ordinary Java update that I should have gotten.)

  In all these cases, my son, Jonathan, fixed matters, twice by shifting everything to an earlier state and reloading the necessary software. In one case, the computer had completely locked up; I’m damned if I know how he simply got it off Top Dead Center (to use a phrase from technology I’m more familiar with).

  I’m very fortunate in my friends and family. They make my life better and my work possible.

  Which is a good place to mention my wife, Jo. She keeps the house running and feeds me delicious, healthy meals. I’m in good shape for my age. This is partly exercise, but in no small measure it’s due to meals cooked from scratch instead of being heated with all the additives put in packaged food.

  My thanks to those who help me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The setting of this novel and the series The Books of the Elements is the city of Carce (pronounced KAR-see, as in The Worm Ouroboros) and the empire that Carce rules. These are extremely similar in history and culture to Rome of A.D. 30.

  Carce is not Rome, however. This was implicit in the earlier Books of the Elements, though the fact seems to have passed over the heads of some commentators. The difference becomes explicit in the conclusion of Air and Darkness, but it’s been there all along.

  The society of Carce, like that of Classical Rome, is built on slavery. In The Books of the Elements I generally use the term “servant,” but this almost always means “slave.” The horrors of slavery are not my subject—I tell stories; I don’t send messages—but I’m well aware of those horrors.

  War, like slavery, is an awful business. When I began writing military SF in the early ’70s, I described war as I had experienced it in Vietnam and Cambodia: my viewpoint characters, my heroes, saw and did terrible things, as I had seen and done terrible things. At the time, quite a number of commentators believed that I must be advocating the things that I described.

  I was not advocating war then, and I’m not advocating slavery now; but my heroes are slave owners and not particularly enlightened about it. To describe them otherwise would be to give a false picture of their society and the society of Classical Rome on which theirs is modeled.

  I don’t apologize for this, any more than I apologize for giving civilians a glimpse of the reality of war in Hammer’s Slammers. Many pundits of the ’70s and ’80s were horrified by that reality and angry at me for describing it. If what I imply about slavery angers people who romanticize the civilizations of the Classical World or the Antebellum South, so much the better.

  As in previous Books of the Elements (and in my fiction generally), I use real places and events whenever possible, and I often work literature and folktales into my fiction. The tags from the Sibylline Books are real, and classicists may recognize (loud) echoes of the Dionysiaca of Nonnos in Air and Darkness.

  I suspect even most classicists are unlikely to recall the City of Magicians, which Philostratus describes as being located between the Ganges and Indus river basins in northern India; and I have taken the haunted city buried in the Indian jungle from Adventures of a Younger Son by Edward John Trelawny. I don’t vouch for the historical accuracy of either Philostratus or Trelawny, but I didn’t invent the stories.

  I’ve taken a number of the incidents and themes from Indian folktales. One of them put me in mind of Apollonius, King of Tyre, which made me wonder how many Greek prose romances may have been drawn from Indian originals (or the reverse, of course).

  There’s an enormous non-literary influence on Air and Darkness: my trip to Italy while I was planning it. This comes through in matters as minor as the carpet of acanthus beneath the Tarpeian Rock, to my description of Bomarzo: ancient Polymartium.

  Bomarzo, carved into the Park of the Monsters in the 16th Century A.D., has an amazing spiritual aura, which I hope pervades Air and Darkness. I expect the experience to be part of everything I write for the rest of my life.

  And that’s not a bad thought with which to end this introduction and The Books of the Elements themselves: there is a truly wonderful world out there. Open yourself to it; become a part of it. There are Bomarzos around the corner for every one of us, if we’re just willing to accept them.

  DAVE DRAKE

  www.david-drake.com

  CHAPTER I

  “Help us, Mother Matuta,” chanted Hedia as she danced sunwise in a circle with eleven women of the district. The priest Doclianus stood beside the altar in the center. It was of black local stones, crudely squared and laid without mortar—what you’d expect, forty miles from Carce and in the middle of nowhere.

  “Help us, bringer of brightness! Help us, bringer of warmth!”

  Hedia sniffed. Though the pre-dawn sky was light, it certainly hadn’t brought warmth.

  The dance required that she turn around as she circled. Her long tunic was cinched up to free her legs, and she was barefoot.

  She felt like a complete and utter fool. The way the woman immediately following in the circle—the wife of an estate manager—kept stepping on her with feet as horny as horse hooves tipped Hedia’s embarrassment very close to fury.

  “Let no harm or danger, Mother, menace our people!”

  The things I do to be a good mother, Hedia thought. Not that she’d had any children herself—she had much better uses fo
r her body than to ruin it with childbirth!—but her current husband, Gaius Alphenus Saxa, had a seventeen-year-old son, Gaius Alphenus Varus, and a daughter, Alphena, a year younger.

  A daughter that age would have been a trial for any mother, let alone a stepmother of twenty-three like Hedia. Alphena was a tomboy who had been allowed to dictate to the rest of the household until Saxa married his young third wife.

  Nobody dictated to Hedia, and certainly not a slip of a girl who liked to dress up in gladiator’s armor and whack at a post with a weighted sword. There had been some heated exchanges between mother and daughter before Alphena learned that she wasn’t going to win by screaming threats anymore. Hedia was just as willing as her daughter to have a scene, and she’d been threatened too often by furious male lovers to worry about a girl with a taste for drama.

  “Be satisfied with us, Mother of Brightness!” Hedia chanted, and the stupid cow stepped on her foot again.

  A sudden memory flashed before Hedia and dissolved her anger so thoroughly that she would have burst out laughing if she hadn’t caught herself. Laughter would have disrupted the ceremony as badly as if she had turned and slapped her clumsy neighbor.

  I’ve been in similar circumstances while wearing a lot less, Hedia thought. But I’d been drinking and the men were drunk, so until the next morning none of us really noticed how many bruises we were accumulating.

  Hedia wasn’t sure that she’d do it all again; the three years since that party hadn’t turned her into a Vestal Virgin, but she’d learned discrimination. Still, she was very glad for the memory on this chill June morning.

  “Help us, Mother Matuta! Help us! Help us!”

  After the third “Help us,” Hedia faced the altar and jumped in the air as the priest had told her to do. The other dancers carried out some variation of that. Some jumped sooner, some leaped forward instead of remaining in place as they were supposed to, and the estate manager’s wife outdid herself by tripping and pitching headfirst toward the altar.

  It would serve her right if she knocked her few brains out! Hedia thought; but that wasn’t true. Being clumsy and stupid wasn’t really worthy of execution. Not quite.

  The flutist who had been blowing time for the dance on a double pipe halted. He bowed to the crowd as though he were performing in the theater, as he generally did. Normally the timekeeper would have been a rustic clapping sticks together or perhaps blowing a panpipe. Hedia had hired Daphnis, the current toast of Carce, for the task.

  Daphnis had agreed to perform because Hedia was the wife of a senator and the current Governor of Lusitania—where his duties were being carried out by a competent administrator who needed the money and didn’t mind traveling to the Atlantic edge of Iberia. Saxa, though one of the richest men in the Republic, was completely disinterested in the power his wealth might have given him. His wife, however, had a reputation for expecting people to do as she asked and for punishing those who chose to do otherwise.

  The priest Doclianus, a former slave, dropped a pinch of frankincense into the fire on the altar. “Accept this gift from Lady Hedia and your other worshipers, Mother Matuta,” he said, speaking clearly but with a Celtic accent. “Bless us and our crops for the coming year.”

  “Bless us, Mother!” the crowd mumbled, closing the ceremony.

  Hedia let out her breath. Syra, her chief maid, ran to her ahead of a pair of male servants holding their mistress’ shoes. “Lean on me, Your Ladyship!” Syra said, stepping close. Hedia put an arm around her shoulders and lifted one foot at a time.

  The men wiped Hedia’s feet with silken cloths before slipping the shoes on expertly. They were body servants brought to Polymartium for this purpose, not the sturdier men who escorted Lady Hedia through the streets of Carce as well as outside the city, lest any common person touch her.

  The whole purpose of Hedia’s present visit to the country was to demonstrate that she was part of the ancient rustic religion of Carce. The things I do as a mother’s duty! she repeated silently.

  Varus joined her, slipping his bronze stylus away into its loop on the notebook of waxed boards on which he had been jotting notes. He seemed an ordinary young man, handsome enough—Hedia always noticed a man’s looks—not an athlete, but not soft, either. A glance didn’t suggest how extremely learned Varus was despite his youth, nor that he was extremely intelligent.

  “The reference to me,” Hedia said, “wasn’t part of the ceremony as Doclianus had explained it. I suppose he added it on the spur of the moment.”

  “I’ve already made a note of the usage,” Varus said, tapping his notebook in acknowledgment. “From my reading, it appears that a blood sacrifice—a pigeon or a kid—would have been made in former times, but of course imported incense would have been impossibly expensive for rural districts like this. I don’t think the form of the offering matters in a rite of this sort, do you? As it might if the ceremony was for Mars as god of war.”

  “I’ll bow to your expertise,” Hedia said drily. There were scholars who were qualified to discuss questions of that sort with Varus—his teacher, Pandareus of Athens, and his friend, Publius Corylus, among them; but as best Hedia could see, even they seemed to defer to her son when he spoke on a subject he had studied.

  When she married Saxa, Hedia had expected trouble with the daughter. It was a surprise that both the children’s mother and Saxa’s second wife, the mother’s sister, had ignored their responsibilities so completely—letting a noblewoman play at being a gladiator!—but it was nothing Hedia couldn’t handle.

  Varus, however, had been completely outside Hedia’s experience. The boy wasn’t a drunk, a rake, or a mincing aesthete as so many of his age and station were. Hedia’s first husband, Gaius Calpurnius Latus, had been all three of those things and a nasty piece of work besides.

  Whereas Varus was a philosopher, a pleasant enough fellow who preferred books to people. That was almost as unseemly for the son of a wealthy senator as Alphena’s sword fighting was. Philosophy tended to make people question the legitimacy of the government. The Emperor, who was that government, had every intention of dying in bed, because all those who had questioned his right to rule had been executed in prison.

  Even worse, Varus had set his heart on becoming a great poet. Hedia was no judge of poetry—Homer and Vergil were simply names to her—but Varus himself was a very good judge, and he had embarrassed himself horribly with the disaster of his own public reading. Indeed, Hedia would have been worried that embarrassment might have led to suicide—Varus was a very serious youth—had not a magic disrupted the reading and the world itself.

  In the aftermath, Varus had given up composing poetry and was instead compiling information on the ancient religion of Carce, an equally pointless exercise, in Hedia’s mind, but one he appeared to have a talent for. This shrine was on the land from which the Hedia family had sprung, and they had been the ceremony’s patron for centuries. Her only personal acquaintance with the rite had come when an aunt had brought her here as an eight-year-old.

  Hedia had volunteered to bring Varus to the ceremony from a sense of duty. His enthusiastic thanks had shown her that she had done the right thing. Doing your duty was always the right thing.

  “Oh, Your Ladyship!” cried a stocky woman rushing toward them. Minimus, a big Galatian in Hedia’s escort, moved to block her, but the woman evaded him by throwing herself prostrate at Hedia’s feet. “It was such an honor to dance with you. You dance like a butterfly, like gossamer in the sunshine!”

  Light dawned: the estate manager’s wife. The heavy-footed cow.

  “Arise, my good woman,” Hedia said, sounding as though she meant it. She had learned sincerity by telling men what wonderful lovers they were. “It was a pleasure for me to join my sisters here in Polymartium in greeting the goddess on her feast day.”

  The matron rose, red faced and puffing with emotion. She moved with a sort of animal grace that no one would have guessed she had from her awkward trampling as she danced in
the company of a noblewoman.

  “Thank you, Your Ladyship,” she wheezed. “I could die now, I’m so happy!”

  Hedia nodded graciously and turned to Varus, putting her back to the local woman without being directly insulting. Minimus ushered the local out of the way with at least an attempt to be polite.

  “Did you get what you needed, my son?” Hedia asked. If he hasn’t, I’ve bruised my feet for nothing, she thought bitterly. Heels and insteps both, thanks to the matron.

  “This was wonderful, Mother!” Varus said with the sort of enthusiasm he’d never directed toward her in the past. She’d seen him transfigured like this in the past, but that was when he was discussing some oddity of literature or history with his teacher or Corylus. “Do you know anything about the group on the other side of the altar? They’re from India, I believe, or some of them are. Are they part of the ceremony usually?”

  How on earth would I know? Hedia thought, but aloud she said, “Not that I remember from when I was eight, dear boy, but I’ll ask.”

  She turned to the understeward who was in charge of her personal servants—as opposed to the toughs of her escort. “Manetho,” she said. “A word, please. Who are the people at the lower end of the swale from us? Some of them look foreign.”

  “Those are a delegation from Govinda, a king in India,” said Manetho. “They’re accompanied by members of the household of Senator Sentius, who is a guest-friend of their master. The senator has interests in fabrics shipped from Barygaza.”

  Manetho was Egyptian by birth and familiar with the Indian cargoes that came up the Red Sea and down the Nile to be shipped to Carce. A less sophisticated servant might have called Govinda “the King of India,” which was one of the reasons Hedia generally chose Manetho to manage her entourage when she went outside the city.

  She cared nothing about politics or power for their own sakes, but the wife of a wealthy senator had to be familiar with the political currents running beneath the surface of the Republic. That was particularly true of the wife of the unworldly Gaius Alphenus Saxa, who was so innocent that he might easily do or say something that an ordinary citizen would see as rankest treason.