The Worm in Every Heart

He knew it should have repulsed him; knew it didn’t. And tried, with all his strength—

(faintest of all faint hopes)

—never to allow himself to wonder, explicitly . . . why.

“Sent down,” she repeated. “Where was, is, will be. She sends she. Shows she.”

“And then you show me.”

“A-true, Roman.”

“Arcturus. My name, girl: Say it.” She looked at him. “Say it.”

“A . . . rrr . . . ”

(a ha, you savage bitch)

“ . . . rrrRoman.”

He took her again that very night, as they’d both known he would, for all he’d sworn not to. Lucian kept guard, stirring the fire; the others watched hungrily, from a discreet distance. Arcturus and his nameless seer lay together in the shadow of a chalk-cliff, meanwhile—under the empty skeletal gaze of some flat, long-jawed, long-dead beast-fish: A shark from ancient times, doomed to forever swim the dead sea of this rock’s rain-slimed face. Sharp grin agape, ribs scattered and splayed, spine unstrung like a harlot’s snapped necklace . . .

She tried to slip away from him in the midst of it, to send herself down that wet red spiral, but he kept her anchored with his prick—dug deep enough to force her back, and clutched her to him as they arrived together. When they finally severed, he glanced down to see himself painted similarly red from glans to thatch, dripping; blood sleeked the insides of her thighs like open wings, a bird crushed in mid-flight. Lips, widespread, on a second, deeper mouth.

And oh, but this was an awful place he’d come to at the end of all his ambitions, full of cold and dread. A place where the gods were bloody as Tarsan Diana, secret as Mithras, strange as Isis and unknowable—in the end—as the Jew heretics’ one-god. A place where the land melted and fell away to mist, where people melted and fell away with it. Where a blue-cheeked girl had only to cast him one glance under her too-pale lashes for him to feel himself surge like the sea against his leather kilt, like rot in an unclean wound.

Dragging him down into herself, part by part: The soles of her bare feet, rinded with callus. Her cracked, black-rimmed nails. Her sly, colorless eyes, washed empty with strange gods’ thoughts. Her bloody, red-lipped core.

Witchery. Necromancy. The road to Hades, or whatever name this girl—and Lucian—had for their particular version of Hell eternal.

This much Arcturus still knew: In Greece, in Roma—here, even—the dead drank blood, always. No matter where you called them from.

* * *

A week earlier, then, back at the Wall: Arcturus and his Tribune, immersed to their waists in the mineral-green, stone-warmed main tank of their home-fort’s cramped lavarium. A reward for good service, supposedly—though far less so in practice than in theory, what with extended field duty amongst barbarians seemingly having left Arcturus rendered permanently uncomfortable even in the midst of most “civilized” comforts. Still, the bath’s waters did hide most of his worst scars, aside from those which swam pale and knotted as mating sea-snakes just beneath the surface.

“If the Tribune might care to bring such a tedious matter back to mind, momentarily,” Arcturus had begun, eking his words out between grit teeth, “the fact does remain, however annoying and irrelevant—”

“—that ‘your’ numeri still haven’t been paid.” The Tribune barely bothered to meet Arcturus’ eyes, gesturing instead at the nearest slave, who came running with scraper at the ready. “Yes, Centurion, I do recall it. But really: What would they do with good Roman coin, those savages? They barter with each other for everything they need. A pig here, a woman there . . . ”

“Then buy them something to barter with, if you don’t want them thinking they’re Citizens anymore. Or would you prefer to prove the Empire only honors its promises when it stands to gain something by doing so?”

Brave words, albeit foolish. To which the Tribune merely gave a dry smile, replying:

“But it’s that very lesson they must learn sometime, Arcturus. Is it not?”

Especially now.

“Your feeling for them does you credit. Still, facts must be faced—where Caesar speaks, we answer. And Caesar wants us gone from here, at least for the moment.”

“Do they know that?”

“Not unless you tell them. Which I . . . of course . . . order you not to.”

(Typical.)

Arcturus strove to keep his disgust well-hid, though probably not as much so as might have been best to his advantage; the Tribune’s shrewd glance seemed to grow ever-colder as the bath progressed through its ritual phases: Soaking, slathering, scraping—steamed and salted like vegetables for the cooking, in this hubristic cocoon of pseudo-Mediterranean heat. By the time Arcturus stepped back out into the usual Northumbrian light drizzle of oncreeping dusk, an artificially hot fog rose from his pores to greet the night; the joints of his carapace, smoking like an ill-banked fire wherever his wolf-skins didn’t quite reach.

Lucian fell into lock-step beside him as he broached the hill, glancing down at the freshly-polished Medusa-head on his commanding officer’s breastplate. Venturing, at last: “Some rare thing, she, wi’ such teeth and snakes. Thy guardian, is’t?”