Air and Darkness (46 page)

As in a normal library, short pillars at regular intervals supported busts of philosophers. Though they were not labeled, Varus recognized each face at which he happened to glance, even those when—as with ben Adhem, Kropotkin, and scores of others—his conscious self had never heard of the man.

“Even if I die…,” he said to the ancestor, “I will have learned a great deal by this experience. I suppose it's worthwhile either way.”

The old Indian looked at him with a sneer. “Govinda has chosen a madman to carry out his errand,” the ancestor said. “A powerful madman, though.”

He cackled and added, “Perhaps more powerful than Govinda realizes. Govinda is sane, so greed for wealth and power blinds him to the risk. He thinks he shields himself by sending you and me back to Anti-Thule instead of going himself, but the Blight is not his only danger.”

On both sides of the corridor, the wall above the shelf of ranked codices was painted with scenes of Anti-Thule. When Varus concentrated on the decorations, he saw that the figures moved. The center of the panorama was always the white-furred Tylon wizard, the Godspeaker, but in many he was flanked by a pair of humans. The swarthy man in a cotton tunic must be the ancestor.

“Why were you on Anti-Thule?” Varus said. He had other questions, but that was the basic one.

“The Godspeaker took me,” the ancestor said. “He had the power of the tablet which he brought from beneath the northern glaciers. It made him greater than me and greater than Mamurcus, the Etruscan wizard whom he took also. We were to help him against the Blight, but the Blight was stronger even than we three combined.”

“Does Govinda think he can defeat the Blight if he has the complete tablet?” Varus asked.

His lips were dry. He had seen images of the spreading foulness. The discussion reminded him that he was going to the place where the Blight was.
I'm not afraid of death, but I'm afraid of dying
that
way.

“The Blight was scoured in the catastrophe,” the ancestor said, “and Govinda cares for nothing but his own wealth and power anyway. When the tablet was broken, I fled home with half. I was a great king while I lived and my descendents were great kings. Govinda thinks to become the greatest yet, the greatest king of all time, but he cannot do that while Bacchus reigns in India.”

“When we bring Govinda the remainder of the tablet…,” Varus said, “will he use it to drive Bacchus out of India?”

Varus smiled faintly at his presumption in believing that he would succeed, but he
did
assume that. Anyway, there was no point in assuming he would shortly—and perhaps horribly—die.

The ancestor laughed. “Bacchus is a god,” he said. “How can a magician, any magician, stand against a god? But Govinda will open a route to Italy, and Ampelos will lead the god his lover there for the sake of Ampelos' own honor. Or so Govinda and Ampelos think in their pride.”

Ahead of the ancestor and Varus the corridor seemed to end in a doorway filled with cold gray light. “Is that Anti-Thule?” Varus said.

“That is Anti-Thule,” agreed the ancestor. “That is our destiny.”

He laughed. He was still laughing when he and Varus stepped into the windswept ruins of Anti-Thule. The sun was low on the horizon, and the cold was like nothing Varus had ever felt.

*   *   *

H
EDIA WAS ADRIFT IN TIME.
She had no physical being; there
was
no physical being. There was no duration. There was only a present that encompassed all past and all future.

Many people thought of me as only a body,
she thought.
A very supple, willing body.
The humor of the situation would have made her smile if she had had physical presence.

Hedia's whole life was before her in minutest detail. She viewed it as though she were picking up each grain of sand on a beach, examining it, and going on to the next.

There were no surprises. It was because Hedia was self-aware that she had made so few concessions to society and its rules. Someone who saw herself and her world less clearly would have tried harder to fit in … and would have failed.

Hedia had made mistakes—thousands of mistakes—over the years. Fewer as she gained knowledge and experience, but—she would have smiled again—much worse ones as time went on also.

Hedia didn't regret even the bad ones, the mistakes that could have killed her. She had learned from each one.
If I hadn't done that, I would have done something worse later. I survived, and another time I might not have been so lucky.

When she was fourteen, she had found herself alone with a colleague of her father—alone in the sense that the score of others present were slaves who couldn't and wouldn't give evidence against a senator. Most of them had been his slaves besides, though that didn't matter.

Her mistake had been in trying to fight. The senator had beaten her unconscious—and might well have killed her—and then had his way. Hedia had no virtue to lose even at fourteen.

A month later the senator had visited again in response to a note saying that Hedia couldn't forget him and that her body was raging for his touch. She thought he might have too much sense than to believe her, but men are arrogant and the senator was rather more so than most.

Hedia had smiled as she knelt before him and lifted the hem of his tunic. He screamed a moment later as she jumped to her feet. She spat his member onto the mosaic floor and slipped from the room while her outside escort waited grinning in the doorway to deal with any of the senator's servants who might try to follow.

The victim himself wasn't running after anyone.

Fighting the first time had been a mistake, but Hedia had learned from it.

There was other existence in Eternity: Hedia felt glowing, pulsing hunger.

She examined the hunger as she did her life, facet by identical facet. At the core of it she found the tiny savage mind of a spider. She remembered the brush of a web across her shoulders as she plunged from the Waking World into this.

Its life is nothing but hunger,
she mused.

“A
RE YOU SO VERY DIFFERENT,
H
EDIA?
” said a presence in this limbo. Like the spider, like Hedia, the presence
was
but had no separate being.

Hedia tried to examine the presence as she had the spider's hunger. Instead of separate instants like grains of sand, this was Eternal and all encompassing—drops of water in an ocean, infinitely mixing and changing.

“Who are you?” Hedia said/thought. “What are you?”

“W
E ARE
E
TERNAL,
” said the presence. “W
E ARE CONNECTIONS.
W
E ARE ALL THE CONNECTIONS BUT ONE, AND WE CHOSE TO REMOVE OURSELVES FROM THE
C
OSMOS BEFORE WE BECAME THAT CONNECTION ALSO AND THE
C
OSMOS ENDED.
”

There was no duration. All time was one time. Hedia
was
and the spider
was
and the Eternals
were
.

“You were trapped here?” Hedia said.
As I am,
she thought, but thought was all existence in Eternity.

“W
E ARE NOT TRAPPED,
” the Eternals said. “W
E HAVE WITHDRAWN OURSELVES FROM THE
C
OSMOS SO THAT WE WILL NOT DESTROY THE
C
OSMOS.
W
E CANNOT LEAVE THIS EXISTENCE AND NO ONE CAN JOIN US HERE.
”

The laughter was cool and, like everything else in this limbo, all encompassing.

“Y
OU HAVE JOINED US,
” the Eternals said, “
AND YOU HAVE BROUGHT A SPIDER.
”

“There must be a way out,” said Hedia. She was not afraid—there could be no fear or other emotion here—but she had grown up as a woman in a world of powerful men. She always looked for the way out, the way around. There had
always
been a way out.

“W
E CREATED A PLACE WHICH WE COULD NOT LEAVE,
H
EDIA,
” the Eternals said. “I
F YOUR MIND SEES A CONNECTION THAT WE COULD NOT, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO LEAVE.
”

The cool laughter filled Hedia's existence. Eternally.

 

CHAPTER
XV

Hedia existed.

None of the details—brightness, a crackle like lightning dancing along a water pipe, the ground pitching—mattered compared to the fact that she had a physical body and she controlled it.

She stood on a flagstone plaza facing scores of Tyla with headdresses, each decorated with a pair of long black feathers. In the center, on the lowest step of a round temple, was the white-furred Godspeaker. He held up in both hands a soapstone tablet. All that was familiar to Hedia from the scenes the Spring of True Answers had showed her.

Flanking the Godspeaker but standing just beyond the temple steps were two humans: an Indian clad in cotton and a squat, powerful man in a wool tunic with his hair bound with a fillet. The latter looked like an Italian countryman, but he had the presence of someone used to being obeyed.

The streets beyond the temple were packed with watching Tyla, some of them carrying their offspring in pouches that were part of their belly fur. Their faces were taut with fear; that was obvious even on features so unhuman.

In the distance, beyond the last of the flimsy houses, the air steamed. A fish the size of a warship lifted itself on its fins and flopped forward. One of its barbels had curled about a Tylon; in the instant Hedia watched, the barbel swung its victim into the flat mouth. In the low sun, the smooth skin of the fish gleamed like pus.

What am I doing here? Why am I anywhere?

Hedia wore the clothing in which she had run into the jungle. No one, neither the Tyla nor even the two other humans, seemed to notice her. They were looking at—

There was a flash so bright that the thunder accompanying it went unheard.

The Eternals hung in the air above the plaza. They were not made of light; rather, they were a complete absence of color or density. They filled the sky or replaced it, and they had no shape or limit.

The Godspeaker threw up his hands and shouted, putting the soapstone tablet between him and the presence. A prismatic cone enveloped him. The tablet dropped and bounced when the hands holding it vanished in drifting dust motes like the rest of the Tylon.

The human wizards dodged away from the destruction. The Tyla priests either fell to their knees or tried to flee, though the packed spectators blocked them.

The rainbow light sprang from the crater, bathing the swelling ulcer. Stones and white-hot iron erupted like balls of lava from Vesuvius to fall as burning hail. Fires burst out all over the community. Tyla screamed even louder.

A blob of iron the size of a fist struck in front of Hedia and splashed over the cobblestones; a tiny fleck touched the back of her wrist like a hot needle. She would have a blister the size of her thumbnail tomorrow—if she was alive, if there was a tomorrow.

Water that had seeped to fill the bowl now flashed into steam, popping and sparkling. It mounted in a mile-high column before spreading like a thunderhead. Snow and swirling ice crystals drifted back to earth.

As suddenly as they had appeared, the Eternals vanished with a crash. It knocked Hedia to the ground. Houses lifted off their foundations and slammed back awry.

Moments later an icy wind struck the community from all directions, tearing apart the dwellings and throwing down those Tyla who were still on their feet. Hedia had planted her hands to lift herself; she flattened till the initial blast spent itself. Shreds of paper houses lifted in circles above the plaza where the winds had met.

The Temple of the Moon toppled forward, breaking apart even before it hit the ground. It had probably been falling since the shock of the Eternals' departure, but its weight had made the process ponderously slow compared to the rush of the wind. It covered the place where the Godspeaker had stood.

The blocks tumbled outward, one of them landing on the soapstone tablet and breaking it in half. The outer portion flipped into the air. Before it could hit the ground again, the Indian wizard caught it. He ran past Hedia in a crouch, the tablet clutched to his chest and his face set in a rictus.

She turned her head and saw a rosy disk like the one that she had entered at Polymartium. She didn't know what was on the other side this time, but it probably wasn't Anti-Thule. That was good enough.

Hedia scuttled half the distance on all fours before she got her feet properly under her. As she dived toward the glow she looked back. The remaining human wizard snatched something from the cobblestones: the pointed ear clipped off when the rush of fire destroyed the rest of the Godspeaker.

Then Hedia was through the portal.

*   *   *

C
ORYLUS PEERED THROUGH THE SPARSE
foliage of a myrtle bush toward the entrance of the cave a hundred feet away. The dragons chained there were curled on the barren ground.

“They're breathing!” said Bion, crouching beside him. The bush wasn't big enough to hide two men, but the dragons seemed as somnolent as the cliff face. “They're not dead!”

And why in the name of Hercules would you think they
might
be dead?
Corylus thought. Though clearly the sailor must have extremely sharp eyes to detect the rise and fall of the beasts' chests, if that was what he had done.

Aura stepped out around them without even pretending to try to conceal herself. “Publius Corylus, I promised to bring you to the Cave of Zagreus. Have I carried out my promise?”

Well, I won't know that until I enter the cave,
Corylus thought. But that was thinking as a student of logic, and right now he needed to think like a Batavian Scout.