David Drake - Out of the waters

"I am Marcus Sempronius Tardus, Senator and Commissioner for the Sacred Rites," he said. His voice was reedy but seemed calm. "Why are you here, Tribune?"

Have we made a mistake? Corylus thought. He held out the document and said, "We're here to release one Pandareus of Athens. This is our authority."

"The teacher?" Tardus said. "Why ever do you think he's here? I've heard him lecture in the Forum, but we have never spoken."

You were at dinner with Pandareus two nights ago! Corylus thought. At least Varus had said that Tardus forced his way into the dinner.

He glanced at his friend. Varus, in the same ancient voice as before, said, "Oh grant thou to me a path!" and started toward the alcove at the back of the room where stairs led upward.

"I don't understand," Tardus said. He sounded confused and irritated, but Corylus didn't hear any hint that he was afraid. "Why did he say that?"

Lenatus strode forward and went up the stairs ahead of his master. He didn't draw his sword, but he cocked back the swagger stick in his right hand to use for a cudgel if the need arose.

Corylus followed Varus, wishing that he had something to fill his hand also. Only the "common soldiers" had shields. That had been the correct decision, but it increased Corylus' sense of disquiet. It really felt as though he was going into action.

They reached the second floor landing. Lenatus paused. Varus started to push by without speaking. The trainer hopped sideways up the next two steps to take the lead again, then turned and stepped quickly to the top of the staircase. He moved on his toes, skipping up the last six steps two at a time.

If he takes a spear through the belly when he turns into the third-floor corridor, Corylus thought, I'll have time to get Varus out of the way, even if it means tripping him and jerking him backward.

Which was probably what Lenatus was thinking also. That was a soldier's job, after all: putting himself between possible violence and the civilians who were paying him. This just happened to be a direct example of something that was performed by hundreds of thousands of men on the frontiers.

Only the central section of Tardus' house had a third floor; the wings, reaching back on either side, had two. Corylus expected this top level would be servant's quarters, but the decoration all the way along the stairwell was of the same high quality: a continuous rural landscape in which winged cupids plowed, sowed, and reaped on the left side and on the right tended vines and olive trees. At the top was a harvest feast which extended around the wall behind the head of the stairs.

Corylus heard Tardus protesting from some distance back. He had apparently started up the stairs but the armed servants directly on "the tribune's" heels prevented him from joining the leaders by. Doing that to the householder-and a senator besides-would have been insanely foolhardy under most circumstances, but every soul of them would be crucified if this went wrong anyway.

No one was in the upper corridor. Given the number of servants in Tardus' household, that was in itself remarkable enough to arouse suspicion. As with the stairwell, the decoration was expensively complete. The corridor floor had a simple white pebble background broken into squares by lines of black pebbles, but there were mosaic cartouches in front of the stairs-in which pigmies rode cranes and battled with winged serpents-and at the far end under a skylight.

"Sir, what do we do now?" Lenatus said, speaking to Corylus. He gave his master a sidelong glance that showed a degree of concern.

"Grant thou me a path!" Varus said and started down the corridor.

"I'll lead," Corylus said. He drew his sword without being conscious of what he was doing; it seemed the natural thing, like taking a deep breath after surfacing from a plunge into the sea. Varus walked at a measured pace, so it was easy to get ahead of him.

The door on the left side at the end of the corridor was open. That room held a profusion of books: baskets of scrolls, each tagged, and codices lying flat with their cut pages turned outward so that the titles written on the fore-edges could be read.

The doorway to the room across the hall was closed with a light panel that didn't quite reach either the lintel or the floor. Herbal smoke drifted over and under it, tickling Corylus' nose. Several people were speaking-droning a chant-on the other side, but he couldn't make out the words.

He poised, starting to try the latch but deciding instead to kick the panel. Varus tried to walk past, seemingly oblivious of the naked sword. Lenatus caught his shoulder and dragged him back by main force.

Corylus smiled, though mostly in his mind. If Lenatus hadn't had to grab his master, he'd have tried to nudge me out of the way and go through first himself-just like he'd do across the Rhine if a young tribune decided to be a hero.

When Corylus looked down at the gap at the bottom of the door, he noticed for the first time the mosaic cartouche he was standing on. It showed the priest Laocoon and his two sons wrapped in the coils of sea monsters, punishing him for trying to prevent his fellow Trojans from dragging the wooden horse within the walls of their city.

Memory of the vision of Typhon almost made him jump to the side, but there was a better way to get off the image. He lifted his hobnailed boot and kicked the latch and the panel around it into splinters. What was left of the door slapped the wall as Corylus strode into the room.

It was the mirror image of the library across the hall but fitted out with a couch and a writing desk instead of shelves and book baskets. Originally it must have been intended as a reading room to which Tardus would bring the chosen volume.

The lower two-thirds of the walls were dark red divided into panels by slender golden pillars. In the center of each panel was one of the Olympian gods, also painted in gold.

The upper register was a frieze of the wanderings of Odysseus. The Cyclops Polyphemus stood on a crag facing the door, holding a huge rock over his head to fling at the ship sailing toward the horizon with the hero in the stern. On the shore below the monster were wrecked vessels and the scattered bodies of men.

Corylus sneezed violently; there was much more smoke inside, welling from a murrhine tube like the one in Saxa's collection. If they haven't somehow stolen Saxa's, Corylus thought, they already had the other one of a pair.

"They" were the three servants that Persica said were controlling Tardus. They were squatting on the floor, facing inward, but they looked up when Corylus burst through the door. The North African had his mouth to one end of a reed; the murrhine tube was cemented to the other end.

Pandareus sat opposite to the North African, his back to Corylus. He didn't move when the door banged open.

One of the servants reached for the dagger in his sash; the hilt was fashioned from deer antler. Corylus kicked the fellow's arm.

The North African blew a ring of smoke toward Corylus and grunted a word.

The amulet from the Etruscan tomb burned like a hot coal. Corylus plunged through darkness into bright sunlight.

He stood on top of a crag, facing a Cyclops. The creature was easily twice his height and weighed as much as an elephant.

David Drake

Out of the Waters-ARC

Corylus staggered. His feet were still planted firmly, but now they were on gritty soil with a slight downward slope instead of a flat mosaic floor. That had thrown him off balance.

The Cyclops was thirty feet away. It turned its head toward him with a bellow; the sound was like a huge wave smashing into the shore. At the same time it shuffled awkwardly to bring its body around, like a duck trying to rotate in tight quarters. Over its head, the boulder quivered.