Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth Read online

  “He could be a clever trickster,” Alphena said. “I don’t think so. It’s not just that his trick, the scene he showed us, was so real.…”

  She raised her head. When she realized that her companions were staring at her, her expression hardened with embarrassment, but she didn’t look away.

  “I can feel magic,” she said. “I felt it last night. I felt it when I met Melino.”

  “Lucinus said that a magician named Melino had been Vergil’s assistant before he, Lucinus, was,” Varus said. “Melino betrayed Vergil and stayed in the Otherworld for a hundred years. When he returned, he had become a demon.”

  “Oh, that can’t be the same,” Alphena said in obvious relief. “This Melino is a young man. Not much older than I am, in fact. Certainly younger than Mother!”

  “That would not be unprecedented if one were to believe stories about men who have entered the Otherworld,” Pandareus said carefully. “Time supposedly proceeds differently there.”

  He coughed and added, “That requires as a prerequisite that one believe in the Otherworld, of course. Which I personally am more willing to do since I appeared to enter the Otherworld than would have been the case earlier.”

  Varus pursed his lips. Corylus looked at him, then said to the group, “I think Gaius and I need to visit Lucinus again. And the sooner the better.”

  “Yes,” said Varus, getting to his feet. “Publius? Can we leave at once?”

  “We can leave as soon as I borrow the mule cart again,” Corylus said, rising also. “The factory’s only two streets over, so that won’t take very long.”

  “Sister, please take the entire escort back,” Varus said, covering the last practical question. “And assure Mother that I’m in the care of Publius Corylus, who will keep me as safe as one can be in this doubtful world.”

  The others were standing also. Alphena turned to Pandareus and said, “Master Pandareus? Before I leave, might I ask you about a private matter?”

  “Of course,” Pandareus said. “We can stay here—that is…?”

  “Yes, of course,” Corylus said. He started for the gate in the back wall rather than the street in front of the house. “Come along then, Gaius. And we’ll find you a proper broad-brimmed hat so that you won’t look quite so much out of place if we meet anybody on the road.”

  Varus followed without comment. He wondered what his sister needed to discuss with Pandareus … but there were more important questions before him just now.

  * * *

  ALPHENA SAT DOWN, wondering how to start. She reached for her wine cup, realized that it was empty—and noticed that the maids began gabbling to one another in consternation.

  They’d started to clear the wine when they thought we were leaving. Now Pandareus and I have sat down again and they’re wondering if they ought to refill my cup.

  We’re not here to drink.

  “You may wait,” Alphena said to the maids. They do understand Latin, don’t they? “We’ll let you know if we need anything further.”

  The women subsided onto the portico. Alphena took a deep breath. Pandareus was watching her with a smile.

  “Ah, master?” she said, wondering how she was supposed to address this man who wasn’t her teacher but whom her brother and Corylus greatly respected. “You’re amused?”

  “You were observant, which I would expect of the sister of Lord Varus,” the teacher said. “And you were thoughtful of a stranger’s servants, which surprises me in a person of your rank in society. You were remarkably thoughtful, in fact.”

  Alphena looked at her hands and coughed to clear her throat. “I’ve been trying to behave better,” she said. “Mother has been, well, explaining things. Even behaving better to servants.”

  She looked up and tried to smile at Pandareus. “I’m mostly around servants, after all.”

  “Lady Hedia is very wise,” Pandareus said, bobbing his chin. “My conversations with her are always illuminating. But you had matters to discuss, Lady Alphena?”

  Alphena pressed her fingertips tightly together, then folded her hands neatly in her lap. “I’ve been dreaming of three women dancing around an egg that hangs in the air,” she said. “Last night Melino showed us—the whole dinner party—a vision of those women and the egg. I hadn’t said anything about the dream to anyone. Not anyone!”

  “What sort of an egg?” Pandareus asked in a quietly interested tone, much like the tone of all his other questions. Alphena realized that the teacher had been merely stating the truth when he said that he lived to learn new things.

  She forced herself to breathe deeply, getting her emotions under control. I’d be useless in a sword fight if I got into this state! The thought made her smile, which calmed her where concentration had failed.

  “I don’t think it can have been a real egg because it’s too big,” Alphena said. “It was the size of your head—but egg shaped, I mean. And it was all colors. But I found a tiara for Mother, for Lady Hedia, with a stone that was the same color and changed the same ways, and the dancing women were wearing belts of stones like that strung on twine. And—”

  Pandareus watched silently. His gaze didn’t imply a threat the way similar close attention by most people—certainly by most men—would have done.

  “I thought about the tiara,” Alphena said, simply letting the words out to stand or fall on their own. “And the jewel in it could be a bit of cracked eggshell. And I know, it’s all colors and it’s too hard to scratch with a diamond, but it looks like shell. And—”

  Blurting it, saying the thing she had said only to Hedia.

  “—the dream makes me afraid and the jewel makes me afraid and there isn’t any reason why they should.”

  “If I may correct you,” Pandareus said, “as I would correct one of my students…?”

  He raised an eyebrow. He really means it as a question.

  “Yes,” Alphena said. “Treat me the way you treat my brother. If my brother had become very ignorant, I mean.”

  Pandareus smiled too slightly to be noticed by anyone less used than Alphena to reading the tiny cues on a gladiator’s face. “Rather than say simply, ‘There’s no reason to be afraid,’” he said, “I would say that we don’t yet know why you are afraid of the Egg. I have seen enough examples of your good judgment, Your Ladyship, to dispose me to assume that you’re right this time too.”

  “Oh,” said Alphena. That means I’m right to be afraid, which should bother me. But I really knew I was right, so I’m just relieved that he believes me.

  “Tell me about this large egg,” Pandareus said. “Is it in a framework of some sort? Perhaps suspended in a cage?”

  “No,” Alphena said, dipping her chin. “It just hung there, all moving colors with nothing else around it.”

  “I ask,” said the teacher, “because the Etruscans used to hang the eggs of ostriches in their tombs, held in metal frames. They thought they were gryphon eggs and that the gryphon would carry the soul of the deceased to his eternal rest. We know better, of course.”

  “I’ve seen ostriches in the arena,” Alphena said, thinking about a matter that she hadn’t given much attention to until now. “And I’ve seen the eggs. Father served one to his guests one night, himself and his eight guests altogether, and I saw the shell. That could be right!”

  She pursed her lips. “But the ostrich egg was just cream colored and rough. It can’t be what I saw in the vision. It can’t be what the diadem came from, either.”

  “I understand,” Pandareus said in a tone that implied to Alphena that he understood a great deal more than she did. “I mention the practice of hanging eggs in tombs because recently an Etruscan landowner named Aulus Collinus Ceutus asked me to edit the letters of an ancestor who was a near contemporary of Scipio the Younger.”

  Either Alphena looked blank or Pandareus knew that she must feel blank, because he smiled faintly and added, “A hundred and fifty years ago, give or take. I looked at the letters and declined the task.”


  Alphena swallowed the protest that she would have shouted a few months ago. Because she was a girl, she hadn’t been taught history and literature; she couldn’t be blamed for not knowing who Scipio the Younger was.

  On the other hand, Pandareus hadn’t blamed her. He had just made sure that she understood what he was saying. And though Alphena would have had to fight to get the kind of education her brother had as the right of his gender, she had fought to learn swordsmanship. The other would have been open to her if she’d cared.

  “Go on, master,” she said primly. She didn’t ask why Pandareus had turned down the job; he would tell her if he thought it mattered.

  “The period was one of great importance—to Carce and to Greece, which joined the Republic in a junior capacity at the time,” Pandareus said. Even Alphena could hear the delicate humor with which he described the way Carce’s legions had conquered the Greek world from which he sprang.

  “Unfortunately,” he continued, “the ancestral Collinus, Sextus, was wholly concerned with his opinions on the literature of his day. There’s room to differ on the merits of Pacuvius, but no room, I think, to find Collinus’ opinions on Pacuvius to be anything but deadly dull.”

  “But they’d have paid you, wouldn’t they?” Alphena said in puzzlement.

  “Yes, Your Ladyship,” Pandareus said. “And the public executioner is paid also, I’m sure. Given a choice, I would prefer to avoid starving by executing my fellow men to mixing my love of literature into Collinus’ prose. The man had neither intelligence nor discernment.”

  Alphena had grown up believing that human beings outside her family—Saxa was possibly the richest man in the Senate—would do anything for money. She had already seen this wasn’t true: certainly Publius Corylus couldn’t be paid enough to make him do something that was against his principles.

  On the other hand, Corylus was in comfortable circumstances already. Hearing Pandareus, who was poor by the standards of Cispius’ free servants, bluntly dismiss money was a shock.

  She bobbed agreement. “Go on,” she repeated.

  “Most of the documents were copies of letters, as I said,” Pandareus said, “transcribed by a skilled copyist. They were on papyrus of good quality, as you would expect. I suspect Collinus intended to publish the letters himself, but he died before he did so. I do not believe that posterity lost a great deal.”

  A faint smile touched his lips. It vanished as he continued, “There was also a notebook made of waxed boards. The notebook was old enough that the thongs binding the boards together had rotted away, so the notebook was quite old. It would be pure conjecture to say that it was written by Sextus Collinus like the letters, however. I didn’t think I’d be able to read something so old written on wax, but the bottom of the chest in which the documents had been stored was damp. That was bad for the lower margins of the papyrus scrolls, but very good for wax on elm boards.”

  This fascinates him the way a sword of Indian steel does me, Alphena realized. And it would fascinate Varus. Perhaps my brother and I are more alike than I thought; we’re just interested in different things.

  She giggled, surprising herself as much as she did the teacher. “Your Ladyship?” Pandareus said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Varus and I are different sexes,” Alphena said, swallowing. “So it’s natural that we would have different interests.”

  Pandareus smiled so broadly that he must have understood her unstated point. “I have not heard your brother mention an interest in spinning or embroidery,” he said. “But I’ll begin to watch him.”

  Pandareus cleared his throat, then continued, “The writer was an antiquarian. The notebook is his account of opening an ancestral tomb. His slaves dug the earth away from the entrance and removed the stone panels which closed the tomb itself. He led the way into the corridor beyond, holding an oil lamp. There was an angle in the corridor, which I should note—”

  He gave Alphena a sharp look, as if to see that a student was listening to the lecture. She gestured with her left hand to show that she was paying attention.

  “—is quite unusual in Etruscan tombs.”

  Pandareus smiled, perhaps realizing that he wasn’t in class. He duplicated her gesture in apology.

  “Around the corner,” he said, “was a richly dressed man seated on a stone throne. He vanished into dust the instant the writer saw him. The writer sneezed violently and dropped his lamp, which went out. At this point, from somewhere above him—”

  Pandareus grimaced and opened both hands. “The writer’s script isn’t good at the best of times,” he said, “and he was becoming increasingly agitated the farther he got into his account. He says ‘above,’ but it isn’t clear to me what he means. He described a rock-cut tomb, but he appears to mean something well above what should be a low stone ceiling. In any case, above him he saw a giant egg glowing in all colors. He was terrified and fled back outside, driving the slaves ahead of him.”

  “Why was he frightened?” Alphena said. “Was there something more than the Egg?”

  “Not that he mentioned,” Pandareus said, smiling again. “Just a giant glowing egg. But it frightened him. He had his slaves close up the tomb; then he sold them all to a contractor supplying labor to silver mines in Spain.”

  “A death sentence,” Alphena said. Slaves in a large household rarely had much work to do. Slaves on small farms worked with their owners and worked very hard indeed. Slaves in a mine, particularly the deep silver mines in Spain, worked a few months or possibly a year till they died—and were replaced by more slaves.

  “A death sentence,” the teacher agreed. “There was no more information in the notebook.”

  “We can get the information ourselves, if we can find the tomb,” Alphena said. “Can we find it, Master Pandareus?”

  “Collinus Ceutus has a house in Baiae,” Pandareus said, grinning very broadly. “I believe that if the scholar Pandareus of Athens and the daughter of Gaius Alphenus Saxa ask him, he will give us directions to his country estate and a letter to his manager there to help us.”

  “Then,” said Alphena, rising to her feet, “tomorrow we will go there. When my brother and Corylus come back from their excursion, we’ll see who has the more interesting information!”

  * * *

  “I’LL BE HERE,” the driver said as he stopped the mule cart in front of Vergil’s farm. Corylus knew Lycos would turn the vehicle around as soon as his passengers had gotten down. They would be ready to leave quickly—if necessary.

  “Thank you, Lycos,” Corylus said. He hopped to the ground, then raised his arms to support Varus as he in turn dismounted from the high seat. “I regret that you were called back to duty at such short notice.”

  The driver’s expression was probably a grin. “D’ye think this was the first time I got waked up for an operation, lad?” he said. “You handle your end and I’ll take care of mine.”

  He was clucking the mule into a half circle as Corylus and his friend started for the house. Lucinus stood in the doorway, but he didn’t come out to greet them this time.

  “Do you really think there’ll be trouble?” Varus said. He sounded puzzled but not concerned.

  “Not at all,” Corylus said. “But there would be even less point in saying that to Lycos than there would be in trying to convince my father. And—”

  He looked at Varus and grinned broadly.

  “—since both of them have a great deal more experience with ambushes than I do, who am I to object?”

  Midway to the house blackberries grew over the flagstones of the path, so he moved to the left. The canes were lovely earlier in spring when they were covered with white flowers, but their barbs made as good a barrier as any horse of cedar trees laid with their branches facing outward around a marching camp.

  Lucinus waited with a smile. Corylus didn’t want to describe the magician as looking self-satisfied—if not triumphant—but he couldn’t think of more accurate terms.

  He and Varus
had decided that returning to Lucinus was the best choice under the circumstances, just as the magician himself had claimed it was. Corylus had no right to think slapping the expression off the fellow’s face would feel good … but it would.

  “I’m glad to see you so promptly, Corylus, Lord Varus,” Lucinus said. “I fear that there is even less time to waste than I had already believed.”

  He turned, adding over his shoulder, “Come in and I’ll show you.”

  He led the way through the half-ruined house again. There was no need of small talk if the fate of the world depended on quick action, but Corylus realized that because he didn’t trust Lucinus, he didn’t take the prediction of imminent disaster seriously. He supposed he should, since it echoed the vision Varus had described.

  He smiled. Because he distrusted—and disliked—the messenger with bad news, he was less worried than would otherwise have been the case. That was good, since it wouldn’t prevent him from dealing to the best of his strength and ability with whatever did happen.

  The garden in back looked the same as when they had seen it the day before. Varus looked around and said, “Where are the goats, Lucinus?”

  “What does it—,” Lucinus said, then remembered who he was snarling at, and remembered how willing the target’s friend was to respond physically. The magician swallowed and said, “I had Charax pen them up before he left ahead of your arrival. I’ll need them later, or one of them.”

  Corylus smiled faintly. Varus had struck Lucinus off-balance in a socially proper, even courteous fashion as ably as Corylus could have done by slapping the fellow. The courts of Carce were losing an effective advocate by Varus’ disinclination to enter the profession.

  Corylus stroked the bark of the peach tree. The dryad huddled within the trunk, a nervous shape within the shadows of his mind. You’ll be all right, he thought. The sprite couldn’t hear him, but the touch of his hand seemed to soothe her.

  Corylus’ mother had been a hazel sprite, or so Pulto had told him; he’d never discussed it with his father. He had been born with an affinity for trees, and the magic bathing Carce in recent months brought Corylus increasingly closer to that half of his ancestry.