Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (38 page)

He pointed.

“—and stand beside that bloody yew tree. There’s no danger at all, but I don’t want a bunch of yobs disturbing what I’m trying to do. And if you wonder if I mean you when I say a bunch of yobs, I bloody well do!”

Lycos chuckled like pottery breaking. “Yes,
sir,
Prefect,” he said. He plucked Pulto’s sleeve with the hand that didn’t hold his narrow-bladed spade. “Come on, trooper. You heard
that
tone before, same as I done.”

Pandareus watched the two old soldiers moving away, talking to each other in low voices. “I don’t understand what your driver meant,” he said.

“Lycos told Pulto that I remind him of my father,” Corylus said, also watching the men. His eyes were threatening to go blurry. “Under the circumstances, there is no greater compliment.”

He blinked and focused on Pandareus again. Before he could speak, the scholar said, “Master Corylus, I realize that I can’t help in what you plan to do; but if it were possible, I would like to walk to the tree with you. For knowledge’s sake.”

Corylus paused. He’d planned to send Pandareus away also, but the scholar had nothing in common with anyone but him of the hundred or so people in the immediate vicinity.

“Of course, teacher,” he said. “I’m not sure that there’ll be anything for you to see, but your company is welcome.”

They walked up the slope together. Corylus chuckled. Before the scholar could turn and raise an eyebrow in question, Corylus said, “I feel safer having you with me now than I would having Pulto. Than I would with the whole Third Batavians.”

“While I agree that the army is unlikely to be much help in the present circumstances,” Pandareus said with a dry smile, “I fail to see that I’m any better. I asked to accompany you for my own purposes, not because I could imagine my presence being of any benefit.”

“Master?” said Corylus. “Are you afraid?”

Pandareus looked puzzled. “Well, I don’t wish to die, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “But I’m not a young man, so my death is inevitable in the not too distant future no matter what I do.”

They had reached the yew tree. Corylus grinned at his teacher and said, “Master, you probably live too much in your own world to understand how refreshing your example is to someone who is of a less philosophical bent. Someone like myself.”

Pandareus pursed his lips. “So long as you don’t count on me to stop a charge of screaming Germans,” he said. “Or, in the present circumstances, Ethiopes.”

Corylus reached for the tree trunk, laughing for the first time since they had arrived at Ceutus’ estate. Before he quite touched the thin, ragged bark, the dryad stepped into view.

She was smiling, but Corylus noticed that she kept him between herself and Pandareus. “I suppose with all the magic from the priest’s spell,” she said, “your friend can see me as easily as you can, Cousin?”

“Yes, mistress,” the scholar said, bowing. “I am Pandareus of Athens. In normal times I teach rhetoric to Master Corylus, here; but more recently, he has been teaching me.”

“Taxus,” Corylus said, using the dryad’s name, “Pandareus is my friend and a friend to all those who wish to preserve life on Earth’s surface. We wish to find—to rescue—the young lady who vanished recently with the priest whom you mentioned. Can you help us?”

Because the tree was over fifty feet tall and six feet in diameter, very large for a yew, Corylus had expected the dryad to be as aged as the spirit of the pine behind Melino’s dwelling. Instead, Taxus looked to be only a few years older than Hedia—and equally beautiful, though in a lusher, riper fashion. Her hair was a flowing black, and her lips were a red as vibrant as that of Serian lacquerware.

Yews are very long-lived trees,
Corylus thought. Then he thought,
I wonder if her lips would poison me if I kissed them?

Taxus gave him a slow smile. She reached out with her right hand, running her fingertips over his cheek as lightly as the touch of a butterfly’s wing. “You are a
very
pretty boy, Cousin,” she murmured.

Corylus took her hand between both of his. He squeezed it, then firmly lowered her arm to her side again.

“Please, Cousin,” he said. “The girl is the sister of my closest friend. Can you help us find her?”

Dryads were whimsical, even beyond what Corylus had learned to expect from human women, but this yew spirit had an apparent presence that set her apart from her sisters.
She could be cruel,
he thought,
but as a matter of cold deliberation—not whim
.

Taxus licked her lips as she considered him. “I don’t know where the female went,” she said at last. “I’m not a magician myself. But I can take you to a magician’s garden, and from there you can go to him. He can help you further—if he chooses.”

A number of questions ran through Corylus’ mind, starting with,
Who is the magician?

He didn’t ask them, because it didn’t matter. The dryad had offered a way of—possibly—reaching Alphena. That was more than he had expected, and much more than he would wind up with if he tried to press Taxus.

“Thank you, Cousin,” he said. “I would appreciate that kindness on your part.”

Taxus laughed. Her expression chilled. She said, “Does your friend come too?”

“Yes, mistress,” Pandareus said. “If I may.”

He looked at Corylus and added with a crooked smile, “For the same reason as before, of course.”

“I don’t know a better reason than the pursuit of knowledge,” Corylus said. “Yes, Cousin. Both of us will go.”

The dryad smiled again. She took each man by a hand and with them walked into a greenish fog.

*   *   *

V
ARUS HUDDLED IN THE BOW
as the boat trembled through the dusk. They were nearing another island, but he felt as though his brain had turned to sludge; he had no interest in what would happen next nor in what was happening now. He was very tired.

Varus didn’t feel hungry or thirsty, though he had eaten only his usual slight breakfast of bread soaked in wine lees before he joined Lucinus three days ago. He should be ravenous by now if they really had been at sea that long.

Was this a dream while his body slept in Sulla’s garden? Or lay dead in Sulla’s garden? In the latter case his soul might journey for eternity like a more literate version of Tantalus, in search of an island and a book that it would never reach. Varus smiled at the speculation.

The island was forested down to the sand beach, rosy in the sunset. The foliage of the trees themselves was ragged and dangling, like that of cypresses, but vines and other plants and even other trees grew on the branches. Fruit hung from some of the vines, rotating slowly in a breeze that Varus couldn’t feel.

Those weren’t fruit: they were human heads hanging by their long hair. They stared at Varus with empty eyes.

“Lucinus!” Varus cried. He stood and immediately toppled to his knees because his feet had grown numb while he hunched motionless. He crawled to the stern through the hooped deckhouse. He had previously avoided the shelter for no reason he could explain, but he had no time to waste now.

The bow crunched up the beach, throwing Varus backward. Perhaps there was still time to get to another island.

“Lucinus, look at the heads in the trees!” he said. He grabbed the magician by the shoulders and shook him to keep him from lapsing into unconsciousness. “We’ve got to get out of here while we still can!”

Lucinus looked at him with a dull expression. His lips moved.

“What did you say?” Varus said. “I can’t hear you!”

“They won’t bother us…,” Lucinus whispered. He went limp in Varus’ arms.

Varus carried him up the sand to just below the trees. He chose a location at the base of a palm. The scattered palms didn’t seem to have hanging heads, perhaps because they didn’t have proper branches.

Lucinus should know whether the heads were dangerous. At any rate, there was nothing Varus could do about it if the magician was wrong.

Varus pulled the boat a little farther up the beach. Seeing the hanging heads at least had the benefit of shocking him into greater alertness than he had risen to since boarding the vessel in Carce a lifetime ago.

The faces had no thought or even life in them, but their sightless eyes followed him as he moved. A heliotrope followed the sun, of course, but that didn’t mean the flower had any hostile intent.

It was a pity that there was no one with whom Varus could discuss the wonders he was seeing. Perhaps after they had found Zabulon’s
Book
and returned he could question Lucinus about the heads, about the bronze giant, about the sea on which they traveled, and about so much more.

And perhaps one or both of them would be dead.

Varus lay on his back beside the magician, sharing the rolled cloak again as a pillow. As the sunset faded, stars began to come out.

Varus wasn’t a real astronomer, but he had as good a grasp of the heavens as anyone who didn’t depend on the stars for his livelihood or for his life: a farmer, say, or a sailor. To his surprise he recognized the constellations. They were the normal ones of home—but they were the stars of early spring, not the fall in which he had left Carce.

As he pondered the sky, Varus felt another existence slowly envelop him. He was at the base of a hill. He began climbing the rocky path, knowing who he would find at the top.

The old woman had been facing the other way as Varus reached the top, but she immediately turned to greet him. She wore a long white tunic without ornamentation, under a blue wrapper that covered her head like the hood of a cape. She said, “Greetings, Lord Varus.”

“Greetings, Sibyl,” Varus said. He walked across the narrow crest of the ridge to stand with the old woman on the other side. “Mistress, why have you called me to you this time?”

The Sibyl laughed in a cracked voice. “I cannot call you, Lord,” she said. “I am only a whim of your mind.”

She looked over the precipice before them. Though she did not gesture, Varus followed her eyes as he was meant to do. Below was the beach on which he had landed.

The stern of the boat was still in the water; he thought he had drawn it onto dry sand. It probably didn’t matter, because this sea appeared to be tideless. And in any case, he had done the best his body could manage at the time.

Varus examined his own wan, lifeless face. It reminded him of the heads hanging from the trees, not the pleasant features he was used to seeing when he looked into still water or the polished bronze surface of a mirror.

A scum of foam and flotsam bobbed minusculely at the edge of the sea. A shadow rose from it. Farther down the beach, a similar shadow rose or perhaps coalesced from the air.

The shadows had no form. To the eye of Varus’ mind, they were merely palpable darkness.

“Sibyl?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. The darknesses were drifting slowly in the direction of the sleeping men. “What are those things? The mist, the blackness.”

“They are Elementals,” the Sibyl said. “They are ageless and soulless, and they hate men.”

“What are they doing?” Varus said as the Elementals drifted toward the sleeping humans.

He wondered how his mouth could become dry. After all, his body wasn’t really here. He wasn’t sure it was below on the sand, either.

“They have sucked existence out of men who landed here in the past,” the Sibyl said with the same calm certainty, “and they have hung the heads from the trees. They will do the same with newcomers, if they can.”

“I’ve got to wake Lucinus!” Varus said. By now the blurs of foulness were on either side of the sleepers. “He must not have known about the Elementals when he said the heads wouldn’t harm us!”

“Lucinus is a magician,” the Sibyl said. “He knows the Elementals will not try to harm magicians.”

Varus shouted, “
I’m
not a magician! What do
I
do?”

“Are you not a magician, Lord Varus?” the Sibyl said, her voice rising into a cackle of laughter. “Are you not?”

“Let a burning power come through the sea to the land!”
Varus said. There was a flash of light so intense that for an instant the water and sand were transparent.

Varus’ spirit spiraled back into his body; he lurched upright.

Lucinus still slept. The Elementals had vanished without a trace. Strands of hair dangled from a few branches when Varus looked around, but the heads were gone.

I hope they’ve found peace.

Varus lay back on the sand. He slept like a dead man.

*   *   *

H
EDIA WAS SO SUDDENLY
in another place that she swayed, though she hadn’t moved in any fashion that should make her stumble. She spread her left leg wider, as much to steady her nerves as for any physical need.

Melino bent forward, bracing his wrists on his bent knees for support. Because he still held both staff and
Book,
he couldn’t use his hands. The demon ignored him and Hedia, facing the surrounding forest of what seemed to be giant grass stems. She wore an expression of either disdain or disinterest.

The landscape was grayed out; the sky glimpsed through the vegetation was as featureless as a coat of indigo paint. Daisies wobbled twenty feet overhead, but there were monstrous trees as well. The ground was littered with dead leaves six feet long and chestnuts the size of grain baskets, some still in their husks.

Hedia could hear music, but at first she couldn’t see where it was coming from. She jerked quickly around at seeing movement in the corner of her eye, but there was nothing but a giant fern where she looked.

Frowning, she turned back. On a log that had been empty sat a youth with a feathered cap and a long smock, playing a coiled horn. Beside him sat a man-sized grasshopper with the head of a fox. It plucked the strings of a lute whose sound box was the shell of a river turtle. They were the source of the music Hedia was hearing. The turtle’s limbs, still attached, wriggled.

The horn player watched her; the fox eyes did not, not openly at least. The notes of the lute ran around and through the soft waves of sound from the horn.