T
hough he was half a mile from the river, Artile caught a whiff of the tainted breeze. Instinctively he dropped to the ground and rolled a short distance down the terraced slope. Yet even as he rolled, the stench followed him.
Twice before he had encountered a similar putrid chill. The first time had been when a Babylonian magus loosed a minor
utukki
, an
ummu
demon, on a caravan Artile was leading across the Great Sand Waste. The
utukki
's presence had been heralded by a foul, icy breeze. Artile had smelled the odor again many seasons later on the day he came upon the remains of a human sacrifice high in the Black Mountains. Although the day had been warm, the telltale chill had lingered around the butchered corpses.
The
purtani
said the foul wind slipped through whenever the fabric between the worlds was torn.
Lying flat on the ground, Artile raised his head cautiously and sniffed. The air around him smelt only of
loamy earth and healthy grapevines. The noxious odor had vanished.
And yet â¦
Artile fumbled for his pruning knife and got to his feet with the inadequate weapon clutched in his hand. He crouched like a man ready to run; there was no shame in running. In his youth he had been a mariner, a guide, and a mercenary warrior, surviving all three dangerous occupations because he had learned to trust his instincts ⦠and run when the occasion warranted.
His instincts were telling him now that something was wrong, terribly wrong.
Shading his eyes with one hand, he turned full circle. His vineyard spread out before him, vines laden with grapes just beginning to ripen. In the distance he could see some of the workers moving slowly along the rows and filling their baskets. None of them appeared uneasy.
Beyond his land a fold of hills sloped to meet the forest and the river. Nothing disturbed the scene. No spiral of smoke warned of fire among the trees. The Tiber was as placid as a snake basking in the sun.
Artile looked up. The birds that circled in the sky above, always hopeful of snatching some fruit, seemed equally untroubled.
Perhaps he was imagining things; were his aging senses at last beginning to betray him?
Tightening his lips, Artile gave a firm shake of his head. He could not accept the possibility; he had not imagined that odor. His nose was still sensitive enough to detect the first hint of rot upon the vine or the telltale sliminess of diseased soil. His other senses might fail, but that of smell would be reliable until the end.
Limping slightly, he walked the width of the vineyard terrace and climbed the hill beyond. His left thigh muscle had been torn by a Nubian spear eight seasons past. The
purtani
had healed the injury, but the residual awkwardness finally convinced him he was getting too old to be a mercenary. So using the small fortune he had secreted
away over the years, he purchased a vineyard with a modest but comfortable villa. There he had settled down to spend the rest of his life getting acquainted with peace.
The gods, Artile told everyone, had been good to him.
But the Ais were fickle; they could rescind their kindness at any time, as he knew.
At the top of the hill he paused to catch his breath. Automatically he glanced northward, in the direction where the new
spura
soon would rise almost on the boundary of his vineyards. Another gift of the gods, the opportunity to sell his wines so close to home. He would â¦
The man grunted in surprise. There was a moving splash of colorâgold and green and redâagainst the cleared earth. He rubbed his eyes, then looked again.
Someone was crossing unhallowed Sacred Space.
Keeping his eyes fixed on the distant
spura
, Artile hurried forward as swiftly as his game leg would allow. Those colors indicated a woman; the female costumes of the Rasne were famous for their exuberant hues.
Surely none of the Silver People would knowingly enter unhallowed Sacred Space!
Yet he was seeing a woman there, of that Artile was certain. His mobility was impaired, but the keen sight that had stood him in good stead for so many years was undiminished. Once it had been his proud boast that he could tell if the eyes of an eagle flying overhead were yellow or gray.
The woman seemed to be moving toward a dark form in the very center of the
spura
. The old man frowned, trying to make sense of the vaguely human shadow. Artile saw the woman pause, bend over ⦠then the path dipped and the scene was hidden from him by the next hill. Cursing under his breath, he hastened forward.
Before he reached the summit of the hill he heard her scream. The sound was high-pitched, terrified ⦠and abruptly cut off.
Without hesitation, Artile tried to run.
When he could see the
spura
again, only the figure in bright clothing lay on the cleared earth. The dark form she had been examining had vanished.
Artile's heart was pounding fearfully in his chest by the time he reached the margins of the
spura
. He hesitated, unwilling to enter until he realized that Sacred Space had already been compromised. No city would be built here now, he thought with a pang of disappointment. No market on his doorstep. Then he berated himself for his petty and selfish thoughts. Limping, he hurried across the foundations toward the area designated for the
templum.
The still figure within was lying on her stomach with her head twisted to one side. What he could see of her face was puffed and bruised; dark hair was matted to her skull by blood. Torn from her body and strewn on the ground beside her were the tatters of her bright clothing.
Artile's fist closed with the index and little fingers extended. He brought his hand to his mouth and breathed an ancient prayer into the fingers, warding off evil.
Kneeling beside the woman, he gently turned her over. The breath caught in his throat. He knew her. She was Vesi, a maiden, a daring girl who played games and ran races like a boy, a girl filled with spirit and courage. Of all the children of the Rasne, Vesi was among the brightest. Watching her had made him long for a daughter of his own, though Fate and old war wounds had decreed he had none. Now to see her like this ⦠!
Artile had traveled far and fought in many battles, and more than once had observed what men inflamed by blood lust could do to a woman. Yet never had he seen a woman so peculiarly mutilated.
Deep parallel gouges ran the length of the girl's body, slicing open her breasts and cutting deeply into the soft flesh of her belly. On closer inspection, they looked as if they had begun low on her abdomen and ripped
upward.
He measured them with his broad hands. There were
four cuts spaced wider than the span of human fingers. More blood stained her thighs.
Making sympathetic noises deep in his throat, Artile removed his cloak. She was a strong girl and well-nourished; with his bad leg he would not be able to carry her all the way back to his villa. He must go for help. But he could not leave her naked amid the gaudy ruins of her dress.
As he was tucking his cloak around her, the crushed remains of a bird fluttered from her hands. From the feathers Artile identified the corpse as that of an owl.
The old man picked up a feather and turned it in his gnarled fingers. A white owl, in a land without white owls.
L
ong before consciousness returned, Vesi could hear voices. Dream voices circled and spun around her, some murmuring almost inaudibly in a misty distance, others loud and immediate. A few she recognized. Her mother's was suffused with anger. The
purtan
was soft-spoken in counterpoint, conciliatory.
There was another whose words were like the crack of a whip, Pepan, Lord of the Rasne.
Vesi grew dimly aware of the hiss of candle flame somewhere nearby, of water tinkling from a fountain a little farther away, of the particular ambient sound of space embraced by stuccoed walls. From beyond those walls came a low buzz, as of a distant crowd.
Through ears that never slept, such details informed that level of Vesi's mind that also never slept. The sounds created a pattern she recognized. She knew this place by heart, was familiar with each crack in the plaster and every tile on the floor.
As with most Etruscan houses, the structure was a hollow square with stone foundations and walls of unfired brick, built around a roofless courtyard that provided both light and air to the interior. The rooms that comprised three sides of the house gave onto this space. At the rear a solid wall formed the fourth side of the square. A fountain in the courtyard kept the house filled with the delicate tinkle of water music, and the air was perfumed by flowering plants growing in terra-cotta tubs. Beyond the entrance door at the front of the dwelling lay the
spura
of Vesi's birth. She was in the main room of the house she had lived in for all of her fourteen years. She was ⦠home.
Safe.
Following that first conscious thought, her other senses began to awaken one by one. She caught a whiff of the herbs and spices used in Etruscan cooking, then the lush fragrance of the flowers blooming in the courtyard. Gradually, feeling began to return to her nerve endings. At first she was but dimly aware that she lay on a couch piled high with cushions, but then â¦
⦠with the restoration of total tactile sensation came
pain
, an explosion of agony that enfolded her body like a sheet of flame!
Vesi screamed.
“I tell you no man could have done this,” Repana was saying angrily to Caile, the
purtan.
A big-boned, middle-aged woman in a sky blue gown of elaborately pleated linen, Repana prided herself on being considered still handsome. Surely someday Pepan would notice.
But her own appearance had become irrelevant. She fixed her eyes on the
purtan
's face rather than look any longer at the damage that had been done to her daughter's body.
The paunchy priest was an easterner, not a full-blooded Etruscan, and excessively fond of the pleasures of the vine and the table. His thick lips were still glistening with grease from his most recent meal as he replied, “The man who found your daughter is a former mercenary, and we all know what they're like. I feel quite certain he was the one who ⦔
Pepan dropped his hand onto the
purtan
's shoulder as lightly as if the touch might soil his fingers. A slender man with long-lidded eyes and a thrusting, aquiline nose, the Lord of the Rasne moved with the deceptive languor common to his race. He could be identified as a prince of Etruria by the way he wore his beard. All facial hair was plucked from his cheeks and upper lip, but from his chin hung a precisely coiled pair of dark brown curls. His clothing consisted of a narrow, short-sleeved white robe with a red border over which he wore a triangle of darker red, finely woven wool, drawn to one side and fastened high on the shoulder with a silver brooch set with lapis and carnelians.
“The man who found Vesi is Artile the winemaker,” Pepan told the priest in crisp tones, “and is well known to me. A man of impeccable honor. I trust him implicitly, and on his behalf I resent your slander.”
Caile widened his eyes. “I meant no harm, my lord! Certainly not! It was just a suggestion ⦠one looks first at the most obvious ⦔
Pepan locked his hands on either side of Caile's head before the other man had time to flinch. He forced him to bend over the young woman lying on the bed. “Then look at the obvious!” Pepan commanded.
Roughly he thrust the
purtan
down, holding his face just above the girl's torn breasts. When the priest squeezed his eyes shut, pressure from Pepan's thumbs made him open them again. “Look, you coward,” snarled the Lord of the Rasne. “Does this damage resemble the work of any human weapon ⦠or human hand?”
The
purtan
focused his eyes to find himself a mere finger's length from mutilated flesh. He wrinkled his nose at the scent of blood and a smell as foul as excrement. His stomach heaved.
“Repana is right, no man did this,” Pepan asserted, satisfied to have made his point. “We must seek elsewhere for Vesi's attacker.” He released the
purtan
and stepped back, deliberately wiping his fingers on the red wool as if the touch of the priest's flesh had insulted him. “I need some fresh air.” Folding his arms across his chest, he stalked into the courtyard and stared up at the twilight sky.
The evening was sweet with summer, the first stars a handful of jewels flung against a peacock blue dome. Normally such beauty enthralled Etruscans. They composed countless poems to celebrate the first star, the warm night wind, the constantly changing hues of the heavens.
But this evening Pepan's outraged senses took no pleasure from beauty.
A widower, he had long admired the widowed Repana. At the most unexpected moments he found himself thinking of her warm smile, her long-fingered hands. His sons and daughters were grown, and his house and his heart were lonely. He could not simply take Repana as wife however. Under the law, first the spirits of his own dead mate and Repana's would have to be located in the Netherworld and propitiated, and these arrangements took time. The Lord of the Rasne had many responsibilities and put his responsibility to himself at the bottom of the list, something he would get around to ⦠in the future.
So he had done nothing as yet about his feelings for Repana. But he had developed a paternal affection for her daughter; ifâwhenâhe wed Repana, Vesi would become his child. He could taste, as bitter as bile on his tongue, fury at the wanton damage that had been inflicted upon the lovely young woman.
“If no man is responsible, then the girl must have been mauled by a beast,” Caile was saying in an effort to regain his dignity. “That stench, that wild smell, could come from a bear or ⦔
Repana uttered such an exclamation of disgust that the
purtan
backed away from her, fearing she might strike him. “Look around, what do you see?” she demanded to know, making a graceful gesture that included the entire house. “The fur rugs underfoot, the tusks of boar and horns of aurochs that hang on the walls ⦠every one of those trophies was taken by my husband. He prided himself on his skill with the spear; it was an art form, he said.
“Usually he killed his prey and made a sacrifice of propitiation to its spirit. But sometimes the beasts left their mark on him. I have tended and stitched many such wounds, including the one that ultimately proved fatal when a bear ripped off the top of his skull. I also saw the damage done by the pack of wild boar that killed my sons when they tried to follow in his footsteps as a matter of family pride. You might say I am an expert on hunting injuries,” she added, with a bitter twist of her mouth.
Pointing toward the four terrible raking wounds on her daughter's body, she concluded, “I tell you, priest, there is no wild animal in Etruria that leaves marks like these.”
“If it was neither man nor animal, it must have been some monster that strayed into our territory,” Caile suggested. “Perhaps a creature from the Darklands, one of those things with the head of a boar and the body of a lion and great leathery wings. We know such monsters live there.”
“
We
know?” Pepan called scornfully from the courtyard, not even deigning to look over his shoulder at the purtan. “Who is this âwe,' priest? You never venture outside the
tular spural
, the city boundaries. I have scouted the forests and mountains and found them inhabited by
debased tribes one could scarcely call human, yet they fear us more than we fear them. In all my travels I have seen no such monster as you describe. Nor have I seen anything like what has been done to this girl.”
“But if you eliminate man and beast and monster,” the
purtan
argued, throwing up his hands, “what does that leave? What else is there?”
“
Hia
,” breathed Repana. Suddenly her courage failed her.
“Hia!”
To the terror of all, occasionally some corrupted
hia
would break through from the Otherworld or, more terribly, from the Netherworld. Ravening and uncontrollable, the thing might fasten upon a living person. Once it had selected a victim, it would use its malign influence to drive the unfortunate to commit the most appalling acts, even self-mutilation. But Vesi could not possibly have done this to herself ⦠and Artile had seen another ⦠if the old man had not disturbed her attacker, Vesi might have endured a fate beyond imagining. The thought sickened Repana.
But as she shuddered with horror, a cracked whisper said, “No, this is not the deed of a mere
hia.
”
Repana whirled around as Caile dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor. In the courtyard, Pepan did the same. A slight, bent figure stood in the doorway of the house, ignoring the men who prostrated themselves in reverence.
“Not
hia?
” Repana asked hoarsely.
“No. Something worse, I suspect. Much worse.” The shape at the door moved and an old woman hobbled into the room. She was almost hairless with age, her skin taut across the bones of her face, giving the impression of a skull.
“Uni Ati,” Repana murmured. She attempted to kneel, but the old woman placed a restraining hand on her arm.
“Stand with me, daughter. Lend me your support while I examine the child.”
In silence the two women gazed down upon the suffering girl. After her one scream Vesi had made no further sound. Tears seeped from beneath her closed eyelids however.
“Leave us,” the old woman ordered the men. “We have no need of you now. I can do whatever needs to be done for this girl.”
Without protest, the
purtan
and the Lord of the Rasne scrambled to their feet and left the house to join the crowd gathered outside. Not only the Rasne, but even the humblest of their slaves had been drawn by news of Vesi's injuryâand the more astonishing and unprecedented visit of the Uni Ati to a private residence.
The Uni Ati, whose title meant First Mother, was the oldest of all the Silver People. She had been the senior elder of the Council for as long as anyone could remember. The most serious disputes of the Rasne were referred to her; her judgment was final and irrevocable. In addition, she was a skillful healer, and many who had been given up as hopeless by the
purtani
were taken to her and subsequently cured.
It was claimed that she never changed the rags she wore nor left the hillside cave that was her only home. Yet she had come to Repana's house this evening.
“No
hia
caused this,” the old woman repeated. Extending her left hand palm downward, she rotated it in a sunwise circle above Vesi's torn body. Her knuckles and joints were so knotted with age as to resemble the mangled claws of birds. But when she moved her fingers through the air, the bones glowed through her skin with an eerie green light.
Vesi convulsed.
Repana tried to gather her daughter in her arms but the old woman blocked her with her own body. “No!” she cried, continuing to make gestures above the girl's torso. “These are not fatal injuries,” she remarked after a time, “only very painful ones. But ⦔ She drew a deep breath and moved her hand in a different pattern, allowing
it to rest for a moment above Vesi's torn belly. Once she darted a glance at Repana and swiftly looked away. Moments later, she grunted as if confirming some suspicion.
With a sigh, the Uni Ati folded her hands and withdrew them into the sleeves of her tattered robe. “Your daughter was attacked and violated by a
siu
,” she told Repana. “That is demon's stink on her flesh.” One hand reemerged from the sleeve of her robe holding a ceremonial knife with a curved bronze blade. “She would be better off dead”
“No!” Repana gasped. “No, First Mother, she is everything to me! I gave birth to four children: three boys and this girl. Over the years I have attended the dying not only of my husband but also my beloved sons. I am not ready to put my last child into her tomb. Can you understand? I want to enjoy her living. Please! Why do you want to do this?”
Still holding the knife aloft, the old woman replied, “I tell you your daughter has been impregnated by a siu. Even now the demon's seed swells within her; she will give birth to an abomination. Is that what you want for her? Do you wish her to be feared and loathed by the rest of the Rasne? Do you think they will even allow the two of you to remain in this
spura?
”