Air and Darkness (27 page)

The commander of the troop of horse rode back from the front of the column with several of his officers. Varus said, “I hoped that Hanwant would be in charge or would at least come along with us. He's … not exactly a friend, but by now he's at least something of a retainer.”

“I'm sure he's happier remaining in Lal's palace,” Bhiku said. “As a philosopher, I will endeavor to be pleased at his good fortune.”

The horsemen rode past Varus and Bhiku, then turned and walked their horses alongside. The leader—no one had told Varus his name—looked down and said in harsh Greek, “The path Lord Ramsa Lal had cut to the garden is right up here. We'll wait in the road. Don't think that you can run off into the jungle, because we'll be watching you the whole way.”

“What do you mean ‘the path Lal had cut?'” said Varus.

“The demon built his lair in that patch of jungle,” another officer said. He spoke Greek of a sort, but his Macedonian accent made him very difficult to understand. “The peasants heard something and went to look. They found the garden, but the demon came to the gates and threatened them if they tried to enter.”

“
Did
someone enter?” Varus said. They had continued walking; now he could see a hole hacked in the yellow-green wall of bamboo ahead at the edge of the empty fields. The other horsemen waited, still mounted, across the road from the opening.

“I prodded a footman through the gates,” the commander said. “The demon has six arms. He pulled the fellow's limbs off and flung the parts at me. I was covered with blood.”

The commander grimaced. His hand picked at his silken sleeve as if he were trying to pluck away memories.

Varus looked at the man in disgust. It was a moment before he considered that the demon would presumably do the same to anyone else who entered the garden as Gaius Alphenus Varus intended to do in a moment.

“How many human sacrifices do you think you'll have to make before the demon releases Lady Teji, Lord Varus?” Bhiku asked. He was speaking loudly enough that all four officers could hear.

“I told Lord Ramsa Lal to send fifty men with me for a start,” Varus said, also in a carrying voice. “He assures me that he'll willingly sacrifice his entire army if necessary to get his daughter back, though.”

Varus looked at the commander, then eyed the bulk of the troop nearby. “Remind me that we'll want to save one of this first batch to send back for more.”

“What do you mean?” the commander said. Two of his aides had jerked away; the fourth officer looked at his companions in surprise and asked a question in Indian. “We're here to make sure that you do as you've been ordered and go into the garden.”

Bhiku cackled. “Is that what you thought?” he said. He shouted a burst of Indian in the direction of the main body of horsemen. The puzzled-looking aide gaped at him.

“Lord Ramsa Lal ordered you to help us in whatever fashion we required, didn't he?” said Varus. “I suppose we'll have to rob you of your will to get you to walk into the garden, but that's merely a wave of the hand.”

He raised his left hand, holding the commander's eyes.

The commander and the aide who didn't speak Greek spurred their horses and raced up the road. Their hooves kicked divots from the hard clay beneath the layer of dust. The other two aides were only heartbeats behind. The common troopers were riding off before their officers reached them.

“
Very
well done, Master Bhiku,” Varus said.

“And may I congratulate you, Lord Varus,” the sage said, “for the way you responded to my cue?”

He coughed into his cupped hand, then said, “Do you wish to go to Lord Raguram, now? I think we can get out of Lal's territory before any of our former escort reports about what happened here. If they ever do.”

Varus grimaced. “Bhiku, this is very foolish,” he said, “and I certainly don't mean to involve you, but I am going to enter the garden.”

“You don't believe in the demon?” Bhiku said, raising an eyebrow.

Varus laughed grimly. “I found the commander to have been quite believable when he described having body parts flung at him.”

Varus grimaced and continued, “The problem from my standpoint is that I also believe that the demon is holding a young girl inside. I'm going to try to get her out.”

“Ah,” said Bhiku mildly. “Do you have a plan for accomplishing that, Lord Varus?”

“I have excellent rhetorical training,” Varus said. He frowned and added, “Do demons have better natures, do you think?”

Bhiku shrugged. “This will be the first demon of my acquaintance,” he said. “I'll know better shortly, I presume. Shall we go?”

Varus took the older man's hands. “Friend, this is my decision,” he said. “You are not to come with me. I'm being foolish.”

Bhiku clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Being torn limb from limb may be exactly the martyrdom I need to achieve a higher stage in my next life,” he said. “In any case, it will be a
new
experience. And Teji is, after all, a young girl—however regrettable a person her father may be.”

“Yes, all right,” said Varus.

The path hacked through the bamboo was narrow, but by brushing the bordering stems the two philosophers were able to walk side by side to the gate in the garden's sheer glassy walls.

*   *   *

S
O FAR AS
H
EDIA WAS CONCERNED,
the woods were no different from those near Polymartium. She had no idea what the trees were, but she wasn't interested in trees. The only reason she knew that the tree in Saxa's back garden was a peach was because she had seen peaches hanging from the branches.

She saw movement behind a screen of leaves thirty feet ahead of her and decided that a breeze had riffled the branches of a hawthorn in front of a boulder. Then the gray mass shoved forward slightly: it was the head of a turtle far larger than the sea turtles sometimes landed by fishermen in the Bay of Puteoli.

Hedia stutter-stepped in surprise, then resumed walking. She didn't think turtles were dangerous, though being stepped on by one the size of an elephant would be, well, as bad as being stepped on by an elephant.

I should be able to outrun it if it charges me,
she thought with a grim smile. If she was wrong, it would be an embarrassing way to die, but it didn't appear that anyone was around to report it back in Carce. Hedia had been in situations that would have been even more embarrassing had they turned out to be fatal.

The turtle withdrew its head. She heard it crashing off into the woods—not a spurt of noise, but an ongoing process.

Hedia took a deep breath. She hadn't been in danger, but it was a reminder that these were not the woods north of Carce, however much they might resemble them. She knew that, of course, but exchanging stares with a giant turtle brought reality to intellectual knowledge.

The path split to the right and sharply left. Hedia looked in the direction she would be going, but before she resumed walking she turned her head to look also to the left.

An arbor arched over the path a few feet from where Hedia stood. Its interlocked branches framed a scene that was not part of this portion of the Otherworld and did not resemble anything familiar to Hedia from the Waking World.

She saw within the arbor a slice of verdant landscape, viewed from slightly above. The sea was one boundary, while walls of ice pressed high on the other three sides. Above the whole was blackness, picked out occasionally by jets of silver.

The land was laid out in fields, and there was a sizable town on the coast. It didn't seem to Hedia that the figures moving between houses and doing farm labor were human.

This is the Anti-Thule of which philosophers speculate,
said the gurgling voice of the spring. Hedia looked around quickly, but no one else was visible—not even a puddle. The words must have formed in her own mind.

The image in the arbor expanded. Hedia saw—or seemed to see; the image was probably as unreal as the voice—the town from close above. The inhabitants walked on two legs, but they were lightly furred and their ears were pointed like those of cats. They wore loose clothing, but the pouches in which a few carried infants appeared to be part of their own bodies.

The Tyla inhabited Anti-Thule,
the spring said.
They were an ancient race, far older than human beings.

“Why are you showing me this?” Hedia said. She wished she had a face to speak to, though it didn't really matter.

Watch and learn,
the voice said.

It was using the same tone of amused superiority with which the voice had directed her to find Boest. That was irritating; but the business with Boest had worked out well, and meeting Gilise had been particularly worth the walk.

The houses of the Tyla were on stone foundations, but their walls and roofs seemed to be made of fabric. The material was so thin that Hedia could see figures moving within.

She watched without asking more questions that the voice would ignore.
No doubt that was the true answer; the spring's other answers have been.

The scene in the arbor shifted again to the only completely stone building Hedia had seen on Anti-Thule. It was a round temple—a tholos—like the Temple of Vesta in the Forum of Carce. Instead of walls, a dozen pillars carried its domed roof.

A Tylon with pure white fur stood on the first of the temple's three steps, holding a rectangular soapstone tablet. He spoke or chanted, probably the latter. Though Hedia couldn't hear sounds from the image, forty Tyla wearing albatross-plume headdresses faced the one with the tablet and responded together whenever he paused.

This is the Godspeaker of the Tyla, on the Temple of the Moon,
said the spring.
He is conducting the morning ceremony with the Priests of the Moon. Without these rites morning and evening, the ice would cover Anti-Thule.

Hedia's apparent viewpoint drew back to what it had been when she first glanced toward the arbor: a panorama of the green enclave and the ice cliffs lowering above it. At this scale the Tyla were moving flecks, not figures.

The streaks of light you see in the sky,
said the spring,
are meteors: pieces of stone and metal from beyond your world. Some of them come from far away even by the standards of the cosmos.

Hedia frowned, trying to understand what “beyond your world” meant. “Do you mean they come from India?” she said. She couldn't fathom how that could be, but she had already seen many things she couldn't understand.

India is part of your world, Hedia,
said the voice.
These objects are from farther away than even Gaius Varus knows.

I'm imagining the sneer,
Hedia thought, but she wasn't sure that was true.

Most meteors burn up or at least break up when they hit the atmosphere of your world,
the voice said.
A very few of them, however, are so large and solid that—

The streak in Anti-Thule's black sky was so bright that Hedia blinked. It ended where the ice cliffs met the Tyla's green fields. Steam blasted skyward and red sparks also sprayed in all directions from the impact. Where the sparks landed on ice they kicked up additional puffs of steam, but those that struck among the houses started fires.

Ripples spread in circles from the impact, throwing down sheds and other structures in the fields and leaving boundary lines twisted. The soil had settled somewhat by the time the shock waves reached the town, but the Temple of the Moon rocked and some of the houses lifted off their foundations.

—they reach the ground intact,
the spring said.

The imagery vanished. The arbor remained, but the path ended in brush not far beyond it.

Hedia swallowed. She said, “What am I to do now, Spring?”

I told you to follow the path, taking each right turn,
the voice said. This time its tone was one that Hedia remembered using on men occasionally. Very, very stupid men, or so it had seemed to her at the time.

“Yes,” Hedia said. Her voice was calm, but her lips were in a firm line.

She resumed walking. After a few steps she glanced over her shoulder, but the arbor was as empty as she would have expected it to be a few months ago.

It was amazing what a human being could become used to in a few months. What she had become used to, at any rate.

Something flitted across the path just ahead, followed by another of the same things. “Things” because as best Hedia could tell, they were winged horses about the size of sparrows.

They certainly weren't dangerous, nor had the turtle been dangerous. It made Hedia wonder what other creatures lived in this woodland, but she didn't suppose the voice had sent her here to die.

It was a more comfortable trek than that across the dry valley in which she had found Boest. Though she could use another drink by now.

The intersection at the end of this stretch of path appeared identical to the first. Hedia now knew to look down the left-hand branch immediately and saw an arbor, woven like the first from living laurels. Again it framed Anti-Thule.

What would happen if I walked through the arbor?
Hedia thought. But the landscape of Anti-Thule hadn't been one she wanted to visit even when she first saw it. This was a later view of the place, and the changes made it horrible.

There was a water-filled crater where Hedia had seen the meteor strike. Wisps of vapor rose from its surface, and the ice cliffs appeared to have retreated instead of glazing over the vestiges of the impact.

A hundred feet of the fields surrounding the crater had become barren except for a smudgy blackness like the ashes of burned wool. When Hedia looked at the black surface closely, she saw that it moved the way a frog's throat pulses as the animal breathes.