He would have liked that. Instead, he found himself standing in a cave vast as an amphitheatre, with passageways stretching in five directions. He could smell water. Yes, that was right. He had passed over the Styx, had he not? He glanced quickly, a soldier’s wary glance, at the other rock-hewn passageways.
He dared to touch his head. No helm. Yes, that was right. The voice of—Rufus, wasn’t it?—in the waking dream that had been his life had said his helm would never be of use to anyone. It had saved his life for the moment. Waste of a good helm, perhaps?
His hair was crusted with what he decided must be blood. It was still wet, but the wetness was cool. Moving slowly, like an old man, he walked over to one of the passageways. His caution was well-founded: “Live” he might be, here in this anteroom to eternity, but he had not the strength he always had taken for granted. A few wounds and sprains—nothing compared with the devouring agony of the head-blow he had taken—ached. He ignored them and started down the passage.
Wailing rang out from the passageway, and he recoiled. Not that way. With more haste than he would have thought possible, he found himself back in the main cave. Red light flickered over its rocky ceiling and reflected from the huge gems, set into the living rock, that lit it.
The light came from yet another passageway. He started down it. Heat lashed at him, hungry as fire. Shadows leapt against the walls and were themselves consumed, as the white heat at a flame’s core overpowers the reds and yellows that surround it. He looked down: Not sand but grit lay underfoot. He kicked at it, and saw more clearly: bones, calcined almost to powder by the heat that lay before him. He had suffered, when he first came to the East, from exposure to the desert. He had suffered at Carrhae, standing fully armed and afraid in the square, pressed in among the Eagles, as arrows, not rain, fell from the sky. And yet, compared with the heat that roared like a bellows through the passageway, that might have been a vision of Thule. Neither man nor shade could pass much further along that corridor, let alone cross the river, and emerge in any recognizable form. This was not forgetfulness: It was utter annihilation.
The flame shadows—red on gold on white—flickered up like The Surena’s deadly banners. They formed into a figure that danced for Quintus, bearing inexhaustible torches. His hand went to his breast and withdrew his bronze talisman. It caught the light and glowed as if its metal had just been cast. Tiny fires sprang up on its palms, upheld forever in the motion of a funeral dance. A fire brushed against his own hand, and he stepped back. Warned again? Carefully, he brushed his boots against the rock, that no trace of burnt bone cling to the sturdy nails. Let the dead keep their own. What lay at the end of the passageway was Phlegethon, river of fire. What emerged from that crossing would be unrecognizable as man or shade. His head whirled at how closely his thoughts brushed the unthinkable, and he reeled back into the anteroom.
He was a Roman. The great ceremonies and great names of the gods were for the priests and senators, not the likes of him. He had come here to die and to be judged. Get on with it. Bad enough to be kept waiting, like a Legionary found drunk and sent in for discipline.
Air and darkness brushed his face like cool hands. Quintus sighed. Before common sense could tell him that there were no hands, there was no touch in this place, he reached to grasp what had soothed his parched brow and cheeks with that flicker of sensation. A ripple of sound in the air taunted his failure, drew him forward to yet another passageway.
“I ought to wait here until… whatever … comes to summon me,” he muttered.
But the air rippled again, a sound so sweet that he followed it. No white powder of ancient bone lay underfoot. Gradually the rock took on a familiar feel. He liked this path. Why did he like this path? Why did it feel as if he had always known it? It looked no different from any other cave floor. He shut his eyes. Now he had it: It was the pattern of stones and roots, the very shape of the path he had taken during his childhood to his favorite riverside lair.
Moving eagerly, a scout returning home after perils, he moved down the corridor and into his memories. The drowsy breeze that had fanned him asleep on the bank of the Tiber soothed him once again. The air was heavy with bees and birdsong. Leaves closed in overhead.
Light rippled on the walls and the roof of the caveway, glinting up from the river Quintus knew lay at the end of the passage. Surely no flowing water had ever smelled so sweet, and no summer sun had shone so kindly. How did sunlight pierce the earth to shine upon a river in the Underworld? He puzzled that question for a moment, then moved on.
He was a farmer and a soldier, not one of his Legion’s engineers. It was not for him to say. He sighed again, then yawned, as he emerged from the passageway. Here the cave widened. He had the impression of a vast space through which a river ran. It looked like his river valley. Even the feel of the rock and earth underfoot was familiar—he knew, at this point in the path, to turn his foot this way because of a boulder; at that fork between the overhanging bushes, there was a slight depression in the earth so he didn’t have to duck.
Merciful gods, was he home? Had he slept, unaware, and been judged in his sleep? Beyond him lay the river, glistening in the bright… it could not be sunlight, could it, striking down through a fissure in the very bones of the earth? This could not be the Underworld, could it? It looked so innocent, so peaceful.
He came out upon the bank from which he had so often fished as a boy and looked down into the summer haze. Here he sat and leaned against his favorite tree. His hand brushed something smooth, and he brought it, dappled with gold powder, up to his face. He rested not only on grass, but oh lilies, the very asphodels of Hades such as Achilles had strode upon. For a moment, he wanted to giggle like a boy: to think of him, lolling among flowers. He sniffed at the pollen. It smelled sweeter than the clovers and violets from which he had sucked the syrup on hot afternoons.
Tender amusement stroked his thoughts. His eyes filled. He was home. Even the genius loci had come out to greet him. “I thought I’d lost you forever,” he told the voice. He thought he heard a rippling laugh, but it might have been a fish, leaping back into a blindingly bright circle at the middle of the river.
“Did you? So foolish, so tired—and dearest of all to me,” the voice murmured.
Like a child who grasps everything to taste it, he raised his fingers to his lips.
“You must be hungry and thirsty. Here is food. Here is water. Never leave me.”
The last time he had heard that voice, he had been a grieving boy, struggling to behave like a man as he went into exile. Now, against all hopes, he had returned. In death, perhaps; but he was home again. Here was the genius loci. She would take care of him. Cool hands touched his temples, eased the ache that had never left him since Crassus marched his legions at a cavalry pace and he began to know that he was not only mad but doomed.
The genius loci made a wordless sound of pain as those cool, cool hands stroked his face and hair. It was pain for him, for what he had suffered. He could feel even the hurt from the last blow from the signum, the one that had cast him into the Underworld, easing. Yes, it was an indignity to have been struck by one of the Eagles he was trying to defend. But it was so long ago; and he was here; and none of it needed to mean anything from now on.
It would be good to be young again. It would be good to forget all that had passed since the day that the stem-faced man had come to his grandfather and announced his father’s death. And if he could not forget, well, then, he was man, not boy; and the genius loci’s voice reminded him of that, too. His eyes filled once again, and he wept for the first time since he and his grandfather had been forced from their home. Wept without shame for sheer relief that the pressure was gone, that he was home again, loved again, protected once again.