Air and Darkness (54 page)

The fish was very close. Its pectoral fins lifted the creature up several feet and thrust it forward. Every time the body flopped down, the dense rock jolted like the deck of a skiff in a storm.

The beam pointed up at a shallow angle, but it was the best they could do. Corylus drew his sword and hacked at the upper end, shaping the broken wood into a better point. It was a crime to treat the tulwar this way, but it was what he had. The fine steel held its edge remarkably well despite being used for a task that should have been done by an axe.

Alphena was chopping with a curved dagger.
At the other end of the beam,
Corylus thought, wondering why but too focused to care.

As the fish loomed above Corylus, he jumped onto the beam to brace it. Alphena had dug a notch in the soil behind the makeshift harpoon. She couldn't chip the basalt, but she had worked a depression between a pair of column heads. It wasn't much, but—

The fish lifted, then rocked down toward Corylus. It was like watching Cleopatra's obelisk in the Campus Martius topple toward him. Despite his weight, the beam skidded backward into the notch—and caught, tilting upward as the fish tried to tear itself away from the pain that was driving up through its throat and into its brain. The monster's own mass was destroying it.

When the beam flexed, it flung Corylus backward onto the ground. He tried to roll to his feet, but the shock had numbed the lower part of his body. He
had
to lift the comatose Varus and run back to save him from the fish skidding forward on inertia.

In the convulsions of death, the fish arched up higher than before. It teetered with its spine curved like a ship's sternpost; then its huge white belly started down.

Alphena grasped Corylus by the shoulders and started dragging him to the side. He shouted. “Not me! Get your brother!”

But it didn't matter, because the death was going to crash onto all three of them and wipe them from existence.

Golden light flooded the bleak landscape. The sky had opened and through it raced Bacchus and his entourage.

A goat-legged satyr caught Alphena around the waist and bounded off with her; her mouth was open with shock. As a centaur ran by, the Maenad on his back caught the motionless Varus with a lasso of flowers and pulled him into her arms.

They're safe,
Corylus thought. He smiled, realizing that a moment before he hadn't expected to die with a smile.

A chariot drawn by a pair of huge leopards swung to a halt beside Corylus. “There's no time!” he shouted.

The driver was Bacchus, golden and resplendent. He held up his thyrsus. At its touch the fish froze as though it had become a sculpture firmly locked on to its base. Hedia sprang out of the chariot and lifted Corylus with a lithe twist of her shoulders, then stepped back into the vehicle.

Bacchus laughed. The chariot sprang forward. The body of the catfish crashed down, sending a ripple across the grim landscape.

Corylus flexed his knees and got them under him again. The numbness was wearing off. “How did you pick me up?” he said to Hedia.

They were curving in a broad sweep across the black plain. Behind them the bare rock bloomed and burgeoned with flowers and vines. The clouds were scattering under the weight of warm sunlight.

“I have a good deal of experience moving men who can't walk by themselves,” Hedia said. She chuckled and added, “You weren't drunk, so that was a little different.”

Corylus stood. The leopards bunched their bodies, then extended so fully that their backs curved concave. They covered the waste in huge bounds. Like the wake of a racing warship, a vee of foliage spread behind the vehicle. Members of the god's train followed to either side, each of them bringing the rock to green life as they passed.

The chariot was tight quarters for three. Corylus was even more loath to press against Hedia than he was to touch the god, but fortunately the vehicle was as solid as the Capitolium, so he didn't sway into his companions. Furthermore, Hedia stayed as close to Bacchus as a grapevine to the olive tree planted to shade it.

“Your Lordship?” Corylus said. Or should he have said
Lord Bacchus
? Well, it was done now. “My friend Varus is, that is, you've saved his body, but his soul is fighting the Blight. Somehow, I mean. Can you…?”

“Of course my lord can!” said Hedia. “But he'll do it in his own way, Corylus dear.”

They had reached the outskirts of the Tyla community, now scraps of wood and paper with occasional lumps that had been stone structures before the catastrophe. Bacchus reined his team to a halt and turned his attention briefly to Hedia.

“May all the gods smile on you to honor me,” Bacchus said as he kissed her.

Corylus swallowed, wondering what he should do. To his surprise, Hedia broke away from Bacchus. She took Corylus' hand, leading him out of the chariot.

“Good hunting, dear lord!” she called back to Bacchus. “You take my heart with you!”

Bacchus smiled like the sun breaking through clouds. A second chariot pulled up beside the god's. Ampelos, whom Corylus had met twice before, was driving it. The youth's face was set; he didn't look at Hedia and Corylus, nor did he seem to be watching the god.

Corylus looked into the sky where he had glimpsed the magnified figure of Varus when he first reached Govinda's palace. The sulfurous clouds had cleared and the air smelled clean, though the volcanoes continued to belch smoke and fire on the horizon. Corylus could see neither his friend nor the blackness that had thickened about him during the course of the battle.

“Don't worry,” said Hedia. “My lord has promised that Varus will be all right.”

She was still holding Corylus' hand. She squeezed it and then properly laced her fingers before her.

The satyr carrying Alphena trotted up to them. The girl was riding on his shoulders and held a skin of wine. Hedia and Corylus moved toward them, but the satyr twisted, gripped Alphena under the arms, and lifted her down onto the blossoming ground. The satyr stepped back, winked at Corylus, and joined the flood of his fellow Bacchus worshipers as they followed the chariots.

Alphena was flushed. “You look healthy, Daughter,” Hedia said calmly. “Though your wardrobe has suffered since I left you.”

“There were three of them at the same time,” she mumbled in sudden embarrassment. “We needed something to distract one of them.”

Corylus remembered the trio of frogs hunching toward them in a formation as tight—accidentally, no doubt, but quite real—as that of a troop of Sarmatian cavalry. It was early in the fight to protect Varus; Alphena was still using her double-edged legionary weapon. She had thrust through her tunic to get purchase and with her left hand ripped off the fabric upward from her sword belt.

The middle frog had lifted to snatch the cloth out of the air when it fluttered overhead. That had allowed Corylus to stab through its left eye with a backhand that continued the motion that withdrew his tulwar from the right eye of the frog he had first dispatched.

He had forgotten that incident: it had happened and it was over. There had been many incidents since that one, and they were all a blur in his mind.

“Yes, I was able to watch you,” Hedia said calmly. “It was very prettily done. I've seen dance troupes who couldn't have moved as gracefully as the two of you did.”

“Their lives didn't depend on it,” Corylus said, too tired to be respectful. He reached out; Alphena handed him the wineskin without either of them needing to speak. He drank, swirling the liquid around his mouth before swallowing. It was the nectar of the gods, a balm to tissues flayed by the sulfurous air.

The chariots had shrunk to specks with the distance. Corylus could follow them only because they were the apex of the wedge of green spreading across Anti-Thule, richer and brighter than the fields that the Godspeaker had protected from the ice before the Blight came.

“Look,” said Alphena. She pointed. “Look at the sky.”

When they had first arrived at Govinda's palace, Corylus and Hedia had not seen the semblance of Varus in the sky until Alphena had pointed him out. Now, as she spoke, Corylus saw the giant figure of Bacchus blazing with golden radiance from within. Facing the god was a shape, humanoid but featureless. Its blackness was an absence of color and an absence of life.

A centaur rode up beside Corylus. The Maenad riding on his back was blond and built like a wrestler, though she had a pretty face. Varus lay in her arms like a wooden statue. His arms were folded over his chest instead of holding on to the woman, and his legs stuck out straight as they had been when her rope of flowers had snatched him clear of the monstrous fish.

Corylus helped the Maenad lower Varus to the ground. Varus balanced upright, but Corylus suspected that his friend would topple in a strong breeze rather than adjusting his posture.

“What's wrong with him?” the Maenad said, leaning over to wipe Varus' hair out of his eyes.

“He'll be all right soon,” Corylus said. She seemed a nice girl, so he tried to sound reassuring. Besides, it was true if any of them were going to be all right.

The centaur had curly black hair and an olive complexion. He looked back at Varus and let his lip curl. Without speaking he moved off at a walk, which built swiftly to a canter, carrying away the woman on his back.

Corylus put an arm around his friend's shoulders to make sure he stayed upright. There was nothing else they could do for him. Varus felt warm and his arms had the usual firm plasticity of the muscles of a living animal.

In the sky, Bacchus pointed his thyrsus at the Blight. The animate blackness held up the Godspeaker's tablet in response. Flashes and fireballs sizzled from the soapstone. Corylus thought—hoped—that they would glance off the god's gleaming figure. The reality was better yet: the missiles vanished midway, like fog above a hot fire.

Bacchus laughed, a cheerful sound like the chuckle of an adult watching a boy putting on grown-up airs. The god stepped forward, ignoring the Blight's fiery threats. Instead of thrusting, he dipped the pinecone top of his thyrsus and lightly tapped the lump that served the black humanoid for a head.

Bacchus stepped back. Corylus expected a flash or a fire, wondering what the violent destruction of the Blight would mean for Varus' soul. He squeezed his friend's body a little tighter.

A vine shoot poked from the filthy blackness, then another. As suddenly as if it were a green blaze, the humanoid slumped into a mound crawling with vines and flowers. It looked like gourds springing from a manure heap.

The Blight settled away from the spirit of Gaius Varus, leaving him draped in grapevines and surrounded by a profusion of blossoms. He turned his head—

And vanished. There was nothing in the sky but sunlight, and Varus stirred in Corylus' arms.

Anti-Thule was a verdant paradise through which caroled the laughter of the God of Wine and Love.

 

E
PILOGUE

Corylus eased back from Varus, but he kept a hand for a moment on his friend's shoulder to make sure he was steady on his feet. “Feeling all right?” Corylus said.

Varus smiled wanly. “I've never been so tired in my life,” he said, “but I couldn't sleep now if I had to. I was battling the ancestor, or anyway he'd
been
Govinda's ancestor, but then he buried me and I couldn't get free. What happened?”

“You fought the Blight until the god Bacchus arrived to destroy it,” Corylus said. “Disperse it, perhaps. He ended it, anyway.”

Trees and flowers were growing everywhere under a bright sun. It was hard to imagine that this had been a poisoned wasteland only minutes before.

Corylus rubbed his temples. Had it only been minutes? It felt like a dream when he tried to remember what had happened. In his memory the immediate past seemed to have been painted on a sheet of glass that had then shattered. Tiny, vividly colored shards flashed before him in no particular order.

“Bacchus destroyed him?” Varus said, frowning. “Why? Why Bacchus, I mean?”

Corylus glanced at Hedia. She looked radiantly beautiful. Her gauzy clothing had received stains and tears in the ruins of Dreaming Hill where he and Alphena had met her, but those garments had been repaired or replaced since she climbed the ancient vine in Govinda's courtyard.

“I don't know,” Corylus said. “I think your mother may know something about that, but you should ask her.”

“Ah,” Varus said in understanding. He smiled very faintly. They were both embarrassed. “I don't think I'll do that, but I will thank her. It was very … unpleasant when I was surrounded by that.”

He walked to where Hedia stood, holding against her cheek a rose that she had plucked. She seemed in a reverie.

Corylus looked for Alphena and found her lying on her back on the sod. She had twisted her sword belt around so that the long tulwar lay between her legs where it wasn't in the way, but she hadn't taken it off.

“You need to get up,” Corylus said. “We've both got to move or we'll cramp like old folk with arthritis.”

“I don't want to move,” Alphena said, but she tried to get an elbow under her.

Corylus bent over, offering a hand. She took it and rose with a groan, only half-joking.

“Believe me, I do know how you're feeling,” he said. “But it's better to walk it out while we can.”

Not only had vegetation sprouted instantly across Anti-Thule; the roots of the flowers and grasses had broken the basalt and grit into rich black soil also. Trees had sprouted also. Corylus saw a pair of poplars not far away. He thought of walking to the trees and chatting with the dryads but after consideration decided that he wouldn't.

Alphena hadn't let go of his hand. “What do we do next?” she said. “Can we get home?”

Corylus shrugged. “I have a line on where we entered Anti-Thule, I think,” he said. “We can walk in that direction. I'm not sure what we'll find when we get there, though. I suspect more has changed than just the landscape.”