David Drake - Out of the waters

Varus heard the bull again, this time behind him, and glanced over his shoulder. The fog had cleared enough for him to see a figure that would have been a giant if its human body had not supported the horned head of a bull. It snorted angrily.

A voluptuous woman reclined on the stony ground behind the creature. She caught Varus' startled expression and smiled lazily.

He stepped into sunlight. The Sibyl held a small glass bottle in her left hand, the sort of container in which perfume was sold. Something moved inside it, but the glass was iridescent and Varus couldn't be sure he was seeing a tiny figure rather than the sloshing of liquid.

He bowed formally to the old woman. "Sibyl," he said. "My father has entered the house of Sempronius Tardus, but the senator denies there is a chapel of Serapis in the property. Will you help me find the chapel, please?"

The old woman's laughter was like the rasping of cicadas. She pointed with her right hand, down the craggy reverse slope of the ridge.

"Why do you ask me to tell you things you already know, Lord Magician?" she said. "You stand beside the entrance now."

Varus followed her gesture. He saw himself in the garden behind Tardus' house. The plantings were unusually extensive, covering a greater area than the building itself. Palms grew on either side, and water flowed down and back along a pair of lotus-filled channels in the center. The gazebo where Varus stood was between them, reached by small bridges to either side.

Pandareus was on his right; his father was to the left. Tardus was with them, but all the other people visible in the garden were members of the consul's entourage. The household servants had vanished into corners of the house where they hoped to escape attention.

"How…?" Varus said. Then he said, "Thank you, Sib-"

As the final word came out of his mouth, he was again with his companions, beneath a dome supported by thick wooden columns shaped like papyrus stalks. Tardus stared at him numbly.

"-yl."

Varus blinked. His father and Pandareus were staring at him also: Saxa in concern, the teacher with keen interest.

"I'm sorry," Varus said. He coughed, because his throat was raw. "I've been daydreaming, I'm afraid."

"You have been repeating, 'There is a certain dear land, a nurturer for men,' Lord Varus," Pandareus said. "Repeating it quite loudly, in fact."

"Shouting, my son," Saxa said. "I was rather worried about you."

"And you led us here to this pavilion," said Pandareus, who beamed with cheerful satisfaction. Turning, he added to the waxen looking householder, "The motif is interesting, Lord Tardus."

Varus looked at the gazebo into which he had walked unknowing. The domed ceiling had an opening in the center, but around that was a frieze of men in boats in a landscape of tall reeds. Some were hunting ducks with throwing sticks; others were trying to net the variety of fish shown swimming on a bottom register which was painted sea-green.

"If that's meant to be the Nile," Pandareus said, musing aloud, "and I suppose it is, I would suggest that brown would have been a more suitable color. I recall thinking that it seemed thick enough to walk on."

Varus grinned; neither of the other men reacted.

The floor was a pavement of jasper chips in concrete, but in the center was round frame about a mosaic of a priest with a bronze rattle. Varus looked at it, then raised his eyes to Tardus.

"There's a catch here," Tardus said, sounding as though he had received a death sentence. He opened a concealed panel in one of the columns, disclosing a lever. "You'll need to step off the mosaic."

Varus, Pandareus, and a moment later Saxa as well stepped back between pairs of pillars.

Tardus threw the lever. The circular mosaic sank into the darkness with a faint squeal. It must have been counterweighted, because it had not required more effort on the lever than to draw a bolt. Broad steps led downward; Varus couldn't see the bottom in the shadows.

"I had forgotten this old grotto existed, Consul," Tardus said, looking distinctly ill. "I suppose it's been here for many years. Since my father's time, no doubt, or even longer."

Tardus is an old man, thought Varus. That was true, of course, but in simple years he was younger than Pandareus. Official discovery of a banned chapel on his property seemed to have ripped all the sinews out of his limbs.

"The worship of Serapis is legal nowadays, of course," said Saxa, apparently trying to calm his fellow senator.

"There are now official temples of Sarapis in Carce, Lord Saxa," Pandareus said. "Note, however, that they have not been permitted within the religious boundary of the city. This chapel-"

He gestured rhetorically. He was in his professorial mode again and probably didn't, Varus realized, notice the effect that his words were having on Tardus.

"-could not be erected today or at any time after the Senatorial edict when Aemillius and Claudius were consuls."

One of Saxa's footmen trotted out of the house, carrying a lighted lantern. Candidus waddled quickly behind him.

Varus nodded approval. The deputy steward wouldn't demean himself by actually lifting an object, but he had thought far enough ahead to get lights as soon as he saw his master would be entering a crypt.

The footman crossed the short bridge but stopped at the gazebo and held the lantern out. Saxa started to reach for it but paused and looked at his son.

"I think I had best go down," Varus said, taking the lantern. "Ah, your Lordship. I will return with a report."

At any rate, I hope to return.

"With your permission, Lord Varus," Pandareus said, "I'll accompany you."

"Yes," Varus said. "That might be helpful, Teacher."

They started down into the crypt side by side. Varus held the lantern out in front of them.

If it hadn't been for the Sibyl's roundabout direction, Varus would have been pleased and excited to enter a Serapeum. It was a link to Carce's past; not so ancient as the crypt in which the Sibylline Books were stored, but old and part of a mystery cult besides.

The Sibyl had sent him here, however. Therefore, more was involved than viewing the decoration and appointments of a secret chapel.

"I doubt," said Pandareus in a mild, musing tone, "that we will encounter Apis in the form of an angry bull. Though I'll admit that I'm less confident than I once was at my ability to predict events."

"I was thinking more along the lines of the goddess Isis loosing cobras on us," Varus said. "Unlikely, but less unlikely than other things that have occurred recently. Or that I imagined happened."

They reached the bottom of the stairs: only twelve steps down. It had looked deeper. There was no door at the base of the staircase, but the archway there was too narrow for more than one person to pass at a time.

Varus, holding the lantern high, stepped into what was clearly an anteroom. There was a doorway in the opposite wall with a niche on either side. To the left was a statuette of a male figure with a bull's head; on the right stood a female figure with a cow's head and a crescent moon rocking between her horns.

"If this were an Egyptian temple," Pandareus said, looking past Varus' shoulder, "I would describe them as Apis and Isis. The Ptolemies were eclectic when they created the cult, however, and they may have made other choices."

He sighed. "My friend Priscus-" Senator Marcus Atilius Priscus "-would know that sort of thing without having to look it up, but I didn't think it would be right to involve him in this matter."

"If the question becomes important," Varus said, "we can answer it at leisure when we return. Unless we're arrested for some political crime, as you suggest."

Varus would have said he was the least political of men, unless that honor was due his father. Yet here they both were, invading the house of another senator under consular authority, an action that could easily be described as rebellion or insult to the Emperor as head of state.