The Book of the Beast Read online

  Vusca turned his head and saw, across the streaming night, the dim glows of the easterly town, the spark of Dis Light on the Light Tower. He felt together a dismal sense of futility and a raw pride. He had come to care for it, this outcast place. Perhaps, when Rome was only a pile of rubble, Par Dis in exile might survive.

  More rain went down his neck like a cold lesson. Remember you are mortal.

  So much for the whore's amulet. Even now, like a dolt, he had it in a pouch round his neck. It surely failed to keep him dry.

  And then the world blew up.

  There was just a dot of white and then a drench like fire. As he flew, turning, falling, he thought, quite distinctly, he had known something like it before, but he did not know where or when - an earthquake maybe, or a nightmare.

  He landed hard, bruised on the metal of his armour. He lay and thought about this, and then he found a heap of armoured men tumbling over him like clanking puppies.

  He pulled himself out and to his knees, and saw the mason running in a circle screaming. He was naked, and his body smoked.

  "By the bowels of the Bull," said Vusca, standing up.

  He seemed to be lightheaded. Drunk after .all? He fought the urge to laugh. He lifted his hands. They were scalded. He put up these scalded hands, and touched his singed hair and brows.

  The mason fell down.

  Beyond, three sentries were pelting up the wall towards them. The terrible rumbling was only thunder.

  Something was on fire.

  Something was burning there, just past the mason, between him and the running soldiers.

  It was all that was left of the Pilum Commander. "Jupiter, Father Jupiter," moaned one of the Velites. Vusca had the urge to laugh again. He held it down.

  "It will be yours," said the Centurion Secundo. "Not a man here doubts it."

  Vusca did not want to seem like some blushing virgin. But he was afraid too of what had always happened in the past.

  "It may be you," he said.

  "You've seen more service than I. I'm content."

  The authority would not come from Rome. There was, at the moment, power enough in Gallia to settle this. A few more days, and he would know.

  The Velites carried on as if they already did know. How not, when Father Jupiter himself had made the choice? He had struck down the Pilum with his own divine thunderbolt, and left Retullus Vusca and his men unscathed but for a memento of crisped hair. (The mason, though he lived, did not count.)

  The authority came at the end of the month, slipshod as things always were now, all language. But the seal was the correct one.

  Vusca went out to look at his troops.

  They cheered their new Pilum with willing lungs.

  He was surprised. He had never thought himself popular, had been sure he was not. His heart was in his mouth. That moment, perhaps, was the apex of his life.

  Lavinia wrote him a letter, and for days he put off reading it, for she seemed only able to say, think, accomplish one thing: misery, complaints, and tears on paper were little improvement on the personal hand-to-hand variety. Eventually he did read the letter. It was very simple.

  She had been a poor wife to him. She regretted this. She wanted to go and live in the villa. If he preferred to divorce her, she acceded. On his advancement she praised him. It was only as he deserved.

  He had come to realise there would be monetary complications if they divorced. Besides, he had no plan to remarry. He doubted that Lavinia had. She did not mention it.

  He pondered his answer. At last, he preferred not to put anything into writing. He would go to visit her instead, at the Insula Juna. If she really was contrite, she might be quiet. Perhaps she would not cry. He could tell her she could live at the villa, he made no demands. He was sorry for her, and did not want her always on his conscience. He had not seen her for months.

  In the dream, he recognised the bearded man, his kilt and oiled muscular body. They walked as if physically together along a white platform, under the leaning wall of a white building. The sky was the

  drum-skin sky Vusca had seen before, but smooring into darkness. Stars came out. The white glazing caught the starlight, and Vusca saw three shadows falling before them. He was astonished to cast a shadow himself, more curious as to the third. He turned to see who made the third shadow, which was of an odd shape. No one was there.

  She had done something different to the room. It looked brighter, even in that dull daylight. A bowl of purple grapes had white flowers wreathed among them; a local shawl he had never seen before was draped prettily across a couch.

  Lavinia came to greet him. For a minute, he did not know her. "How well you're looking," he said lamely, staring.

  She had gained weight. Her skin was fresh, her forearms, her throat, were rounded as they had not been since she was sixteen. The linear cuts in her face had filled out and were gone. She wore her hair a new way, not Roman, more Greek, with a ribbon across her forehead. She was not old, ten years his junior. Suddenly he remembered.

  She waited on him as she had been used to do when they were first together, sending the slave away. She was very soft. She said very little. She left it all to him.

  In the end he was lost for words.

  Then she said, "Do you think I've changed?" He looked. He said, "Yes."

  She told him why.

  "I'm not a Christian any more."

  She said she had failed all the Christian precepts, although she had tried so hard. She went around with her heart withering, blaming him, blaming God. Then, on the forum, she saw a procession from the Isis Temple. That afternoon she went there. It was not, she assured him, a hive of orgiastic rites. The religion had altered. It had to do with Woman. Lavinia had found herself at the cool feet of the statue. She said that suddenly the terrible gnawing, which had been feeding on her for years, was lifted out of her. She made an offering and joined the prayers. After this, she went regularly to the temple. She had not forgotten the Christos, she said, but it was a religion she was too weak to follow. Isis, who understood, had redeemed her. She could be at peace, now.

  She could let him go, now.

  Vusca hesitated. Then he said, "It isn't necessary. A divorce."

  "But Retullus," she said, "you have an important command. You'll want to marry again. Get children. Your name can become illustrious."

  "Who should I marry here?" he said. "Some native girl, or a harlot?" Lavinia lowered her eyes. "Let's leave things as they are," he said. "We needn't bother each other."

  "My dear," she said, Til always love you. But let me go to the villa. Then I won't be in your way." He was embarrassed, but not displeased.

  "Of course," he said, "except - why not keep here until spring? The winter's nearly on us, snow, wolves -

  you'll winter better in the town."

  "If you wish," she said. She smiled. "Whatever you say."

  Her eyes were limpid. He longed suddenly to embrace her, kiss her lips. She was the girl he had seen in the orchard, or the woman that girl had never before become.

  But he did not kiss or embrace Lavinia. He stayed only as long as courtesy required. When he left, she did not cry.

  The winter truly was a harsh one. The snows came sweeping down; the river froze. All night the wolves howled in the voices of lost souls that could not find the way back to Avernus.

  Added to the normal duties of the Fort were the tasks of winter. The roads were kept clear, the surrounding stations open in case horses might be needed. Even during the blizzards, Dis Light unlidded its nocturnal eye.

  In the Commander's quarters above the Praetorium, Vusca relentlessly attended to the business of the outpost Empire. There was no time to think of anything much beyond work.

  Only once or twice he took the amethyst out of the pouch around his neck, and set it down in the brazier light, to study.

  Had it changed his fortune?

  Had it invited the Thunderer to strike? Had it whispered to the musing powers in Gallia until i
t brought him the staff of office? And had it borne Lavinia to the feet of Isis?

  One twilit day, going over the bridge near the Fort gate, back from a successful winter hunt, Vusca's

  horse slid on the ice. He should have gone off, into the iron water, maybe under the panes of the ice itself, from which probably he would never have surfaced. But somehow neither he nor the mare fell.

  He played dice now and then, with his centurions, to see. He got a reputation for winning. Perhaps they only let him.

  Sometimes there were the strange dreams. He had become used to the platforms and corridors, the court above the lotus water. To the bearded man, a Semite of some variety, conceivably a priest or prince, for Vusca had seen him now both naked, and decorated in silver and jewels, a kilt with fringes, a diadem.

  He performed rituals at the altar in the court, or in an underground space where something towered

  away, dark into darkness, and only the offering fire gave any clue. Nothing spectacular or significant ever occurred.

  When he dreamed of the man, the priest-prince or magician, or of the places he inhabited, Vusca went armed with memory. He knew, even asleep, he had been there before.

  The dreams did not worry him, at first. Then only the recurrence disturbed him. As soon as time allowed, he meant to seek a diviner at the temple of the Father and Mother. But that winter there was not much time, except for sleep.

  He did pay a few visits to his wife. His intention was to ensure she had not suffered by staying in the town, that she lacked for nothing. Sometimes he lingered. He got into the way of dining with her, of spending an evening with her. Their conversations were neutral. He spoke of the Fort and its management, or they discussed aspects of the town. He found these interludes to be comfortable, pleasing. She did her best for him. She had learned how to be gracious. They never slept together, as if

  such things did not exist. He preferred that. It was sex that seemed to have upset the equilibrium before, along with Christianity. Now she had Isis, and for him there were always the she-wolves. But he did not want a woman very often; he supposed that even Lililla would have palled, she had been only a novelty.

  As the year turned over towards spring, and the tall clepsydra in the Praetorium began once again to drip and to tell time, Vusca, who had been feeling a little done in, was laid up a day and a night with mild

  fever. He put the amethyst under his bolster, to keep it out of the way, for the Fort physician was a busy old boy.

  Near morning, Vusca thought he dreamed how the amulet was made.

  It was not the underground place, though it seemed the priest-prince had come from there. He was walking in the starlight back across the platform, white as the snow of Par Dis in that boiling Eastern night, that had the whiff both of marsh and desert. Together, they entered the low door, passed through the fox-run of the corridor, and came into the court of painted walls.

  Going down the stair to the river, the native of the dream took Vusca with him, and gave him a first - and as it transpired, final - glimpse, through the palms, over the water, to the distant bank. Other buildings arose there, raised on platforms as was this, and one ascending in a series of terraces, a pyramid of seven steps. Huge clumps of reeds grew beneath the further bank, and something swam there, some colossal snake it looked, but the priest paid it no heed.

  Leaning down, he drew up from the water a sort of basket, and in the basket lay a fish. It had been dead some while, and at a touch, its belly parted to disgorge a lilac-tinted counter.

  The purpose of the fish, if it had been made to ingest the jewel, or miraculously had been caught with it already swallowed, Vusca did not ascertain.

  The priest plucked the amethyst and carried it to the altar with the creatures carved around.

  There the jewel was anointed with oils, beer, milk, and other liquids, and words spoken above it (a sluggish murmuring and chanting Vusca had heard the man give vent to previously). At last the priest moved away, right against the wall, as if to become one with the paintings on it.

  The jewel lay on the altar.

  It lay there a long while. Then it began to glow. It was like a lilac flame, balanced on the altar stone. One flame - then three. Just above, two other lights had kindled.

  In the dream, Vusca, pressed back to the wall with the priest, experienced a gust of fear. It was the correct terror of holy and profane things he had no right to witness. But he was trapped and had no choice.

  What burned above the jewel were the eyes of one of the beasts carved in the altar. He could not see which it was, and did not need to. The shape was on the amulet.

  The jewel blazed and the eyes of the bird-thing blazed, and there was otherwise a deepening darkness and a terrific silence that seemed to shriek.

  Presently the three lights faded. As starshine returned into the court, Vusca thought he saw, for a moment, a shadow cast up against the wall, thrown by a third figure that was not there.

  The fever had broken in a sweat. When he could, he shifted the amulet away from him. It felt hot from contact with him, even through the pouch. That was the beginning of his unease.

  When he came into his quarters on the third occasion and felt that someone else had recently been there, he went to the door and called the sentry in.

  "Who's been here in my absence?" The sentry looked surprised.

  "No one, sir."

  Vusca's soldier's instinct, the same that had made him able once or twice to sense ambush or treachery, told him flatly that, though the sentry did not He, neither did the ambience of the rooms. The smell was even wrong. Not of men and a man's belongings, leather, metal, papers, the charcoal and logs in the brazier. Something - almost female.

  "Concentrate," said Vusca to the sentry. "Now." The sentry began to roll his eyes.

  "Yes, sir. Something's been in."

  Vusca crossed to the window. The glazed pane was in place and below the drop ran down sheer thirteen feet to the yard. A sentry on the adjacent tower stood alert and unmoved.

  There was no explanation, and being inexplicable, it was put aside. Nothing had been damaged, there was no theft. The sense of a presence evaporated quickly.

  Thereafter it would happen, or not, apparently as it chose. Once the guard on the door himself reported he had caught a noise inside, during the Commander's absence. He went to see, and investigated the two rooms, finding them vacant. He admitted that it might have been a rat or mouse. It was a kind of soft scratching he had heard, as if something clawed stole over the floor.

  Vusca was tired. He awoke tired, and at night, lying down exhausted, could not sleep, hearing the trumpets through the hours till it was nearly dawn. Something nagged at him. He did not know what it was. It was as if he had forgotten some vital task. He would get up and light the lamp, and check his itinerary at the table. It was nothing to do with the Fort, this forgotten matter. It oppressed him. It never went away. If he slept he even dreamed of it (the other dreams seemed to have come to an end). He dreamed of worrying at forgetting, of trying to remember. He roused agitated, still trying. There was nothing to remember. He had seen to it all.

  He hoped spring would lift the malaise. Spring did not. He could not consult the Fort physician, since then word would be round the barracks in half a morning, that he was sick. He visited a healer on the town's west side, who prescribed an oily draught. It made him sleep. He could scarcely wake up at all. And the nagging, the non-existent forgotten thing, went on nibbling away at him.

  Something had made him take off the amethyst. He stored it in a box of bits and pieces, wrapped in its pouch.

  One pale evening, as the days began perceptibly to lengthen, his Centurion Secundo, coming in to make some report, was obviously curious at finding Vusca alone. When pressed, the centurion said he had seen, so he thought, two figures at the window above the Praetorium, and meeting no one on the stair -