Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (20 page)

"But—"

"Go! Get out of my sight before my honor weakens and I hand you to a magistrate. Gaius Maximus Secundus, the man who made a fool of the emperor. Your head must be worth quite a lot."

"No! Please!"

"Then go. Askar!"

I winced at the pain that stabbed through my head from my own shout. Someone dressed like Askar hurried in.

"Take Maximus to the kitchen. Give him bread and a few coppers."

"Yes, master."

"Then return here."

I had to blot out all associations with Maximus. Were he caught he would certainly be tortured, and my name would spill from his lips as soon as the first hot iron touched his skin. Askar returned from the kitchen.

"Take Maximus to the Aventine," I began.

"Now? In the dark?"

"Yes! In daylight, only blind people won't recognize him."

"It's night—we'll be set upon. This is the Sabura!"

"You survived two years in the arena, you can handle the Sabura at night."

"Yes, master. To what house will I take him?"

"To the nearest sewer."

"I—oh."

"And report back to me when you return. I want to see the blood on your knife."

I waited, sitting up in bed with a lamp burning. An hour later, there was a tap on my bedroom door. It creaked a little as it was pushed open. I did not expect to recognize the slave who was standing there, and of course I did not.

"Is it done, Askar?" I whispered.

"Askar riding with ferryman. Gave coin."

The voice was Vishesti's. I swept up the pottery lamp and flung it at her, but she dodged out of sight and the lamp smashed against the wall beyond. A billow of flame erupted in the doorway. Now she would have no advantage from darkness and shadows. I unbarred the window shutter and tumbled out onto the grass of my tiny peristyle.

"Maximus must live, suffer."

I slashed out with my spatha but cut only bushes. Light from the fire within my house glowed through the window behind me. Already, distant voices were shouting about fire.

"Maximus owned market, where sell children. Ravindra, made eunuch. Pretty human statue."

The voice seemed to come from all around. She was above me! I leaped into the air and slashed up at the darkness, cut nothing, then fell heavily.

"Marhavi, is dancing toy."

The voice whispered in my ear, but when I slashed at a shape beside me the spatha struck sparks from a small statue.

"Takshar kills, for make crowd cheering."

This time I could make out a dim shape from the increasing glow coming from my house. I flung the spatha with all my strength, but the shape did not collapse. I realized that it was a tree. The blade snapped as I tried to pull it free.

"
Four
children, mine. Londar to die, forty days."

Londar. I knew the name only too well. Londar was the slave I had sliced open on the ship at Ocelis. I had hunted him down and killed him to make my reputation, but he had not died then and there. Forty days was the time it took to sail to Muziris.

"In my arms, Londar die."

The voice was behind me. Turning, I saw a dark shape in the bedchamber window, outlined against the flames. I dashed back and leaped through the window, my dagger in my hand, but Vishesti was gone and the doorway was a curtain of bright yellow flames. A leg was missing from my bed. It was the hollow leg, where I kept my gold coins.

Again I escaped through the window, then helped my neighbors break into my house to fight the fire. We threw pails of piss from the nearby laundry, water from my peristyle's pool, and dirt from the garden, we even beat at the flames with wet sacks, but the place burned like a shipload of tar. Perhaps Vishesti had splashed olive oil from my kitchen on the floors. Very soon the house was beyond saving, and people just made sure that the fire did not spread to their own buildings. I stood in the crowd, watching all my years of slave catching burn.

"To me, Londar tell everything."

I drew my dagger and stabbed back and up, in the direction of the voice. I turned to see a man beginning to collapse. Realizing my mistake, I sidled into the crowd before those around us began shouting and screaming. An old man with a stubbly beard looked me in the face.

"Everyone who slave, spoil, defile my children, must to suffer," he said.

His stare was blank. He did not know me. Suddenly I had it! Vishesti had enchanted the minds of other people to speak her words.

"But slaves are the foundation of Rome," I said to him. "There's not a Roman alive who would not have traded your children for a bag of sesterces."

He turned away without another word and pushed through the crowd. I looked back to my house. I was ruined. I had lost my gold and my house, but worst of all, I had lost faces. A boy tugged at my tunic. I looked down at him.

"Every Roman, am making suffer," said the boy, picking his nose.

"Not possible!" I exclaimed at him. "Even your magic can't defeat the might of Rome."

He ran off into the crowd. I thought to follow him, but Vishesti was sure to have planned for something like that. The roof of my house collapsed, sending a cloud of sparks into the night sky. The men and boys on the neighboring roofs went into a frenzy of beating and dousing.

"Yourself knowing, brain fevers twist brains. Easily cast."

The speaker had one arm that ended at an iron hook where the elbow had been. Suddenly I had it, and the sheer boldness of Vishesti's scheme made me giddy. The emperor! She had twisted the mind of the most powerful man in all the world. There was no doubt that our just and generous emperor had suffered a brain fever like the one that had robbed faces from me. Would it have been any harder to warp the emperor's mind so that cruelty replaced his goodwill and generosity? All Romans were in danger. Maximus had just been the first to cross the path of our newly insane ruler.

What Vishesti had done was magnificent, a far greater feat than growing navitars, or making astounding devices from lemon juice or drops of water. Reluctantly, I made a very important admission to myself.

"Whatever you are, I salute you as Rome's conqueror," I said, saluting the one-armed man. "It may not sound like much, but we Romans do not give salutes lightly."

His face remained blank, but he turned away and left me.

I wondered if Vishesti had seen my salute. I wondered if she cared. It mattered to me. A woman came up to me and spoke another message. Was it Vishesti herself? It no longer mattered.

"See, only, Flavius. Dancing master." I nodded. Flavius had tutored Marhavi. "See, only, Seresta. Physician." The man had castrated Ravindra.

Now I understood. I had been given Maximus's face to teach me a lesson. These two faces came with orders.

 
NOW I WORK on the Aventine docks, alongside slaves, loading and unloading. Everyone knows that I have lost everything, including faces. Without wealth, I must work. Without faces, I have nothing but my muscles to sell. Still, there is something to live for, because I have been given the faces of Flavius and Seresta. I shall cut off Flavius's feet, because they are most precious to a dancer. Seresta will lose the first joint of every finger and never again wield a scalpel. After all, what else is left to me but to serve Rome's conqueror?

Some must suffer quite specifically for what happened to the ifryt's children, but all Rome will be punished. Such is the might of Rome's army and navy that we had felt invincible, yet now the man who has absolute power over us all has been fashioned into a murderous, deluded maniac.

It is the tenth month of the reign of Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Caligula.

Sean Lynch has been writing fiction for decades and his work has appeared in
Thought Magazine, Cold Drill, The Coe Review,
and
Boise Weekly.
He says, "A couple years ago, when I started writing this story, I decided research was called for. Ergo, a family trip to Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument. My twin sons, who were ten at the time, rollicked in 'the tubes,' devouring every moment. For me, the experience was a tad claustrophobic." He thinks the research was superfluous, but your editor suspects that the experience—like much of this story—had more going on below the surface.

THE BOY TOSSED A STONE into the darkness.

"One…two…three," he whispered. "Four, five, six." From somewhere far below came a faint splash.

The boy stepped back and looked at the bearded man.

"Let's go the other way," the man said.

He whirled and swung the torch in the opposite direction. A narrow tunnel loomed.

Their breaths cleaved the silence.

"I can scout it," the boy volunteered.

"Alone?"

"I'll be careful, Papa."

The man—his name was Aaron—considered this. He could hear his own heart beating.

"Besides," the boy added, "a rest will do you well."

"I suppose I can't argue," the man said, kneading his beard. "My legs don't feel…the same."

"Then it's settled," the boy said. "Give me the fire."

The man handed over the torch.

"Just remember." He paused. "Last time you were gone—"

The boy sighed. "I know—"

A rumbling emanated from far off, a stirring from deep in the earth, and then it was gone.

He touched the boy's shoulder. "Go with God. If you see the devil.…"

"Papa?"

"Give him my best!"

The boy's eyes sparkled; he nearly smiled. He hugged the man quickly and then, with the torch, crouched and entered the passage.

Aaron stooped over his walking stick and watched the flare of the torch illuminate the tan-colored tunnel, and he saw the shadow of the boy larger than life, and then gradually the torch-light withered and his son's presence could only be ascertained by the crunching clomps of bootsteps against gravel or rock and the splashing of puddled water.

Then there was silence, utter and complete.

Letting out a long breath, Aaron shrugged off his knapsack. He raised a half-full bota bag to his lips and drained a meager amount before gingerly lowering himself to the cave's floor. The ground was dry where he sat and he traced his fingers just beyond his body's perimeter. Without a torch, visibility was nil. One could be standing inches from a calcite dagger or on the icy ledge of a two-hundred-foot-deep chasm and feel no discernible difference. Sometimes the temperature gave a clue. The ravines, the abysses, the nether depths—they were often cooler.

From somewhere far off, another rumble boomed, a deep sound felt as much as heard. When they were younger, the cave's rumblings made the boy cringe and huddle up to his father—but the boy, Kaleb, had outgrown that.

He wiped his muddy fingers against his pants and stroked his beard. His back ached.

Sitting, tailbone against solid ground, didn't help.

He wanted more than anything to rest, to lie down, but he feared the consequences of sleep in this cave—how seemingly you fell asleep one man and woke up another, possibly not in mind, but in body. The flesh. And whether this was true or not—how could it be?—he did not want to risk it.

He lay, knees bent, head on the blanket.

Ahh, better. I'll just lie here and relax.… Kaleb will be back soon. And the news he brings, for better or for worse…either way it will be the truth…and better than doing nothing. One has to move forward, one has to try. Sometimes all you have is the trying.

 
BEFORE THEY EVER SET FOOT in the monstrosity—back when Kaleb was an infant—a starving man had stumbled into their hamlet. He was pale and old, his skin pocked and scabbed, and although many villagers feared he carried the plague, he was allowed a bed in a remote barn. For a week they took him water and hearty meals, and surprisingly he regained some vigor, and the villagers' fears were greatly lessened if not entirely banished.

The night before his departure, everyone gathered in the town hall. There were fireplaces and oil lamps, while outside it rained. The villagers dined on the autumn harvest: vegetables, mutton, quail, and bread. For dessert there were pies and pudding and, afterward, music and dance. Women and children sang; men told stories and drank. Aaron and a few others sat at a long table with the outsider. His face had recaptured some color and a few of the scabs were healing. Moving slowly and deliberately, he produced from a small pouch a shining gold nugget and pushed it across the table to the mayor. He expressed gratitude to the villagers for saving his life. The mayor examined the nugget, as a dozen others looked on, and shook his head, saying: "We have done what anyone would do—what our Maker would have us do."

"You've saved my life!" the old-timer replied.

The mayor pushed the nugget back across the table.

The old-timer returned the gold to the pouch and more spirits were brought to the table, and after a while he shared a curious tale that later some attributed either to drink or delirium—although his somber expression and stony delivery made Aaron wonder if the embellishment contained elements of truth.

He said he was a prospector who had traveled far and wide in search of treasure, though rarely discovering enough to pay for more than a few weeks' lodging.

Producing a wrinkled piece of parchment paper, he explained it was a map to a cavern with passages inside that an ancient race had mined, though it had long since been abandoned. For a small price, he'd bought it, he said, from a dying man.

The villagers snatched the paper and passed it between them, shaking their heads. The ink had long since faded. Someone cussed softly.

The prospector insisted it had once been legible. It had brought him to this village. Eventually he'd discovered a cavern. He added that he'd stayed in the village a fortnight—less than a month ago.

A few of the men laughed.

One said: "Stranger, how is it that you were 'ere—in our little parish—a month ago and not one of us 'ere remembers ye?"

The stranger's weary gaze circled the onlookers. Face flushed, he poured himself more drink and imbibed. Breathing heavily, he said, "For me a month has passed. I marked the days off on me calendar. But I spent twenty days in that hole. When I walked in I was a young man twenty-two years old. And now you see me—I must look seventy if I look a day."