Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth

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  To the late

  HANK REINHARDT,

  hoping that he would be pleased with the way I’ve used some of the information he provided me with over the years

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Epilogue

  Air and Darkness Teaser

  Tor Books by David Drake

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dan Breen continues as my first reader. He has summed up our different approaches to editing as, “You want to make it better. I just want to make it right.” We went over about two-thirds of this novel in a single five-hour session, which gives you a notion of how extensive his help to me is.

  Dan doesn’t just point out missing words or typos (and I can be very creative with typos). He and I can discuss the place of Vergil in the Middle Ages or the reason for a seeming digression in my text or a hundred other matters that interest the two of us more than they’re likely to interest anybody else. Readers like Dan stretch me, and there aren’t many readers like Dan.

  Dan, Dorothy Day, and Karen Zimmerman, my webmaster, archive my texts as I complete them and occasionally answer my panicked queries about what I said in an earlier chapter. Things not infrequently (very frequently!) go wrong with my hardware when I’m working on a novel. I feel better knowing that my work is safe in three widely separated locations even if something horrible happens to my entire network.

  Speaking of which: my base unit (the desktop) failed just as I finished the rough draft. As it turned out, the on/off button had stuck. This was the second time I’d had trouble with the same button. This time my son Jonathan fixed it by swapping the computer internals into a new case.

  A few days later my printer died. Jonathan researched the options, ordered me a replacement printer, and guided me through installation. (Fewer things are plug-and-play if you’re me than they might be for other people.) My friend Mark Van Name backstopped Jonathan by offering to print the draft out if I needed it sooner than UPS could get the printer to me. I’ve got the best IT support structure in the world.

  I have a homegrown geek, as the preceding shows. Mark’s daughter Sarah helped in a different fashion. Her photograph of and paper on the tombstone of Quintus Coelius, Signifer of the 11th Legion, in the Uffizi Gallery gave me valuable contemporary information that I would not otherwise have had.

  My generation can be proud of raising offspring like Jonathan and Sarah. The future is better for having people like them in it.

  And my wife, Jo, kept things going while I was writing Monsters of the Earth. Coincidentally, we were building a major addition to the house (which is also my workplace). She handled the stress a lot better than I did and kept as much of it off me as possible.

  Thank you all, and thanks to the many others who helped me. Writing is indeed a lonely business, but the life of a writer doesn’t have to be lonely, if he has family and friends like mine.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I intend individual volumes in The Books of the Elements to be self-standing (though I also hope that they add up to something greater than the sum of their parts). This note will therefore repeat some things that I said in The Legions of Fire and in Out of the Waters.

  The most important of these repetitions is that my fictional city of Carce (KAR-see) is not the historical Rome of A.D. 30. (Neither is it the fictional city of Carce in The Worm Ouroboros, a novel by E. R. Eddison, which I urge you all to read.)

  Here in Monsters, the most important difference is that the historical poet Vergil is also the mythical magician Virgil. In the Middle Ages, the idea grew that the author of the Aeneid was a powerful magician. The most pervasive aspect of this myth was that his name began to be spelled “Virgil” rather than the correct “Vergil.”

  A magician’s wand in Latin is a virgilla, the diminutive of virga, a staff or branch, so the mythical magician became Virgil to make the connection clear. The poet’s name is still generally spelled “Virgil,” especially in America, because the myth became so widespread. This has occasionally caused me problems with copy editors who are sure that I’m wrong in referring to Vergil.

  Speaking of possible problems with copy editors: the Old World sycomore tree is quite different from the North American sycamore. The Egyptians often built ships out of sycomore wood for want of anything better, though it wouldn’t ordinarily be recommended for such a purpose.

  Which leads me to a further point: I make mistakes, but they’re usually not careless errors. I try to avoid reading reviews, because I get unreasonably angry at seeing a reviewer, for example, state that Romans didn’t really behave in some fashion that I describe.

  Everybody has a right to an opinion. My opinions are based on extensive reading of Latin literature in the original, from Plautus to Macrobius. The folk who seem most determined to correct me appear to base their opinions on Hollywood—or perhaps on the Natural Wisdom that Plato claims Socrates believed in. Take your pick.

  Most of the spells in Monsters are translated or paraphrased from the Sibylline Books, the Aeneid, and a West African (Yoruba) folktale. There are also snatches of Ovid, Diogenes Laertius, and goodness knows who else. We are what we eat, and I devour classical literature for pleasure.

  In passing, I reread my OCT volume Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae, but that was mostly to refresh myself in the rhythms of Latin prose rather than use it as source material. I mostly read and translate verse nowadays.

  Roman society was based on slavery, which I regard as an unspeakable evil, and was extremely class-conscious even by later European standards. My dad was an electrician, and I am well aware of where I would have been placed in the Roman class structure. I know exactly how that feels, because I was a junior enlisted man in Vietnam. I much prefer an egalitarian society.

  That said, I describe the society of Carce as I understand the society of Rome in the 1st Century A.D. to have been: as a reporter, not an advocate. I shouldn’t have to mention this, but thirty years ago I was repeatedly pilloried for describing war as horrible by people who honestly thought I was advocating the horrors.

  A final note on the dedication. My son is aware that I’ve been in correspondence with Arthur C. Clarke and that I’ve known and even been friends with many famous SF and fantasy writers. I don’t think he’s paid much attention to that.

  Some years ago, however, he saw a picture of me at dinner with Hank Reinhardt. He immediately asked, “Is that the Hank Reinhardt?” I assured him that it was.

  For the first ti
me, Jonathan was impressed at the fact that his dad knew somebody.

  DAVE DRAKE

  www.david-drake.com

  CHAPTER I

  Gaius Alphenus Varus looked back over his shoulder. There were only a dozen servants ahead of him and his friend Corylus as they wound through the streets of Puteoli to the wharfs on the Bay itself. Behind, however, there must be a hundred people. More!

  “We look like a religious procession,” Varus muttered. He tugged the shoulder of his toga, a square of heavy wool with the broad purple stripe of a senatorial family, to settle it a little more comfortably.

  Varus had no taste for pomp, but he was polite, so he couldn’t treat this occasion as though he were merely a scholar who needed only a tunic and at most one servant to carry his satchel of writing and reference materials. That would be insulting to the friend of Corylus’ father whom they were visiting—and to Varus’ own father, Gaius Alphenus Saxa: senator and recent consul of the Republic of Carce.

  Corylus chuckled. He said, “We look like a train of high officials going to consult the Sibyl, you mean? That’s a good five miles from here, though, farther than I want to hike, wearing a toga on a day this warm.”

  He and Varus were the same age, seventeen, but Publius Cispius Corylus was taller by a hand’s breadth and had a bright expression that made him look five years younger than his companion. Corylus had gotten his hair, reddish with touches of gold, from his mother.

  He had been born on the Rhine frontier where his father had commanded a cohort. His mother, Coryla, was a local girl who had died giving birth. Soldiers couldn’t marry while on active duty, but Cispius had acknowledged his son as legitimate.

  “Saxa wouldn’t be in the best shape after a five-mile hike,” Varus said mildly, pitching his voice so that only his friend was likely to hear the words. “Let alone Hedia.”

  Hedia was Saxa’s third wife and therefore by law the mother of Varus and his sixteen-year-old sister, Alphena. Hedia was twenty-three, beautiful, and sophisticated to the point of being, well, fast.

  In most senses, one could scarcely imagine a less motherly woman than Hedia. In others—in all the ways that really mattered—well, she had faced demons for her stepchildren. What was even more remarkable was that the demons had been the losers.

  Varus was a bookish youth who had almost no interests in common with his stepmother. He had nevertheless become glad of the relationship, and he was very glad that his father had a champion as ruthlessly determined as lovely Hedia.

  “It’s not something I need, either,” Corylus said. “Especially not in a toga. I told Pulto—”

  He nodded to his servant, who had been the elder Cispius’ servant throughout his army career.

  “—that he needn’t bother wearing one unless he wanted to impress somebody.”

  Though Corylus kept a straight face, Varus knew the servant well enough to chuckle. He said, “How did Pulto respond to that?”

  “He said that if he needed to impress somebody, he’d do it with a bloody sword,” Corylus said, grinning again. “Like he’d done a couple hundred times before, he figured. I told him I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary on a visit to an old friend like Marcus Veturius.”

  Pulto was a freeborn citizen of Carce, unlike the other servants and attendants accompanying the nobles and dignitaries present. That said, Pulto had spent his army career keeping Publius Cispius as comfortable and well fed as was possible in camp, and alive when they were in action.

  Since Corylus’ father believed in leading from the front, “a couple hundred” Germans and Sarmatians probably had met the point of Pulto’s sword. Pulto had accumulated medals over the years, but his real honors were the scars puckering and crisscrossing his body.

  An animal screamed in the near distance, meaning they were nearing the compound where Veturius stored the beasts he imported. From here he shipped them to amphitheaters—largely in Carce, but all over Italy.

  Varus felt his lips tighten. His first thought had been that the cry had come from a human in pain, but it was too loud.

  “An elephant, perhaps?” said Corylus, who must have been thinking the same thing.

  “Loud even for that,” Varus said. “Well, we’ll know soon enough.”

  The spectators lining both sides of the street shouted, “Hail, Lord Saxa!” and similar things. Balbinus, the steward who ran Saxa’s home here on the Bay of Puteoli, must have planned extremely well.

  This district housed sellers of used clothing and cookware whose booths would normally fill the street. A detachment of husky servants had cleared them back before Saxa and his entourage had tried to pass through, but the squad leading the procession itself was flinging little baskets to the crowd.

  The gifts—sweet rolls, candied fruit, or a few copper coins—changed the residents’ mood from riotous to a party and led them to cheer instead of finding things of their own to hurl. Buildings in Puteoli didn’t reach four or five stories as they did in Carce, but even so bricks thrown from a rooftop would be dangerous.

  “Varus…,” Corylus said, his voice suddenly husky. “I, ah … That is, my father feels greatly honored that former consul Saxa has accepted his invitation to visit the compound. I don’t think Father cares greatly for himself, but it raises him in the eyes of his old friend Veturius. I, ah … I thank you on behalf of my father, and on my own behalf, because you’ve so pleased a man whom I love.”

  “I accept your thanks,” Varus said mildly. “I believe that’s your father waiting in the gateway, isn’t it? And I suppose that’s Veturius in the toga beside him.”

  Corylus already knew that Varus hadn’t encouraged Saxa to come with him to the animal compound, so there was no need to repeat the statement. Indeed, the whole expedition had grown of itself, the way a rolling pebble might trigger a landslide.

  The importer Marcus Veturius had told his friend Publius Cispius that he had brought back a group of unfamiliar animals from deep into Africa. Cispius had suggested he send for his son, Corylus, a student in Carce, who was learned and might be able to identify the creatures.

  Corylus had asked to bring along his friend and fellow student Gaius Varus, whom he said was even more learned. After a grimace of modesty, Varus could have agreed. Corylus was himself a real scholar as well as being a great deal more; but dispassionately, Varus knew that his own knowledge was exceptional.

  All that would have been a matter of academic interest, literally: a pair of students visiting an importer’s compound to view exotic animals. Everything changed because Saxa, Hedia, and Alphena were spending the month nearby at the family house on the Bay.

  Saxa was not only a former consul—which was merely a post of honor since all real power was in the hands of the Emperor and of the bureaucrats who had the Emperor’s ear—but also one of the richest men in the Senate. Anything Saxa did was done—had to be done—on a grand scale.

  Saxa had no political ambition, which was the only reason he had survived under a notably suspicious emperor, but he did desperately want to be seen as wise. Unfortunately, although he loved knowledge and knew many things, Saxa’s mind was as disorderly as a jackdaw’s nest.

  Varus, however, was a scholar. Despite his youth, he had gained the respect of some of the most learned men in Carce—including Pandareus of Athens, who taught him and Corylus. Instead of being envious, Saxa basked in his son’s successes.

  Saxa hadn’t been a harsh father, but he had scarcely seemed to notice his children until recently. Now he was making an effort to be part of his son’s life and so had asked to accompany Varus to view the strange animals.

  Varus hadn’t even considered asking his father to stay out of the way, but his presence had turned a scholarly visit into a major social undertaking. A younger senator named Quintus Macsturnas had bought the whole shipment of animals to be killed at a public spectacle in Carce to celebrate his election as aedile. When Macsturnas heard that Saxa planned to visit the compound, he had asked to accompany his senior
and even wealthier colleague.

  Varus smiled, though his lips scarcely moved. Courtesy aside, how could he—or his father—have denied Macsturnas permission to view the animals he himself had purchased?

  Besides which, the even greater pomp was certain to please Cispius and his old friend. The aedile’s attendants were added to those of Saxa and the separate establishments of Hedia, Alphena, and—because this was now a formal occasion—the ten servants accompanying Varus himself.

  “I wonder…,” said Corylus, looking at the following procession and returning Varus’ attention there also. “If there’ll be sufficient room in the compound, what with Veturius just getting in a big shipment?”

  He shrugged, then added, “I don’t suppose it matters if the servants wait in the street, though.”

  Varus consciously smoothed away his slight frown, but he continued to look back. Corylus will stop me if I’m about to run into something.

  A dozen servants walked directly behind the two youths. They were sturdy fellows who carried batons that would instantly become cudgels if there was a problem with local residents. Next were the two senators and their immediate family—in Saxa’s case—and aides.

  Varus faced front again. “The old man behind Macsturnas?” he said. “The barefoot old fellow. Do you recognize him, Publius?”

  Corylus looked back and shrugged. “Can’t say that I do,” he said. “Is there something wrong with him?” He coughed and glanced sidelong at Varus. “That is, he seems pretty harmless to me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong that I can see,” Varus said, feeling embarrassed. Because he was speaking to Corylus, however, a friend with whom Varus had gone through things that neither of them could explain, he added, “I caught his eyes for a moment when I looked back. He either hates me, or he’s a very angry man generally. And I don’t recall ever having seen him before in my life.”

  “He may be the aedile’s pet philosopher,” Corylus said equably. “Though Macsturnas strikes me as too plump to worry much about ascetic philosophy. And the fellow doesn’t have a beard.”