Crusaders in Hell

SPRINGS ETERNAL David Drake

"Here we have hope," said Sulla to Sulla's Luck who lounged across the table from him. Either of the two could have been the other's mirror image, except that Sulla's Luck wore a peculiar smile. "As they do not anywhere in this - cosmos - except for this Pompeii we have founded."

"They have the hope we bring them, my Lucius," said Sulla's Luck in a tone too mild to be an objection. His thumb and forefinger pinched powder from the heap on the low table, raised it in the air, and brushed it off again.

Illumination from the roof opening of the adjacent reception court entered Sulla's Office through a latticework door. The light of Paradise was usually a murky red from piercing the clouds which covered even this place that could almost be home - but now, for an instant, a shaft of clear light pierced the sky to scatter from the decorative pond in the center of the court.

The powder drifted down, as white and pure as an infant's soul.

"Hope," repeated Sulla's Luck.

Sulla stood up, a motion that began abruptly but hitched as the ghost of a pain reminded him of the gout he once had. He thought that agony was over, now

- here, wherever here might be. Still, the memory hid somewhere in Sulla's mind or in the muscles themselves; and it seemed to recur whenever long absence had let him hope that it was gone forever.

Sulla walked to the window that opened onto the garden of his house and threw back the shutter. He favored his right foot, even though the twinge was gone and there had not been any real pain anyway. Behind him, he heard his Luck rise from the opposite couch, but the mirror figure did not join him at the window for the moment.

The plants in the walled garden grew well, though they tended to flower less fully than they should - than they would have in the sunlight and breezes of the real Pompeii. In the sky.

Paradise struggled with the lowering clouds and won through as nothing brighter than a baleful orange.

"Nearly perfect," said the man who was Dictator here, as he had been Dictator of Rome before he chose to abdicate and then a private citizen. "That I could found this town in this cosmos was your doing, my Luck."

"It's unusual in the Underworld," said Sulla's Luck, fingering the trophy that bung on the wall above boxes of scrolled accounts, "for the parameters of existence to seem as familiar to men as they do here on Adam's Isle. Elsewhere, they may be quite different."

The trophy was a bronze plate two inches thick. A bullet was imbedded in the bronze, a coppered-steel Jacket over a steel core. It had been shot from a weapon at velocities enormously greater than could have been achieved by a slinger in one of Sulla's armies in life, but the plate was thick enough to stop the missile and hold it in the center of an inch-wide crater in the softer metal.

Pompeian fishermen had cut the plate from the breast of a huge creature which actually flew, buoyed up by light gas in its belly, until it drifted across the shore of this place. Then, acted on by physics similar to those of the upper world, the huge mass of metal had crashed to utter ruin.

Sulla's Luck traced with an index finger the motto engraved on the plate: All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Dante had reported accurately, though of course he did not understand. Even now.

"They're happy, don't you think?" said the Dictator in a tone of harsh demand, though he did not turn his eyes from the window. He had not painted his garden walls with hunting scenes or foliage to expand the apparent space for planting. Instead, Sulla's walls bore a frescoed bird's-eye panorama of the town he ruled. The orange-red roof tiles glowed with a semblance of reality, but the shifted spectrum of Paradise turned the painted gardens into splotches of purple.

"No, I don't think they're happy, my Lucius," replied Sulla's Luck in a voice more wistful than ironic. "But they have hope."

"Why shouldn't they be happy?" snapped Sulla, turning his head with the jerky suddenness of a fish engulfing prey. "What do they lack that matters?"

"Has Theodora succeeded, then?" asked Sulla's Luck with a smile that would have brought anyone else's head from his shoulders as soon as the Dictator's guards arrived.

Sulla's complexion was mottled even at rest. Now the blotches of red and white stood out as distinctly as badly painted stage make-up, and his grip on the sill and jamb of the window made flecks of sand crumble from the stucco.

He turned his face deliberately toward the garden.

"And after all," continued. Sulla's Luck in a conciliatory tone, "they don't have what you have.

The opportunity to return to the upper world."

"It's always possible to come to an arrangement," said the Dictator. His voice was ragged and husky at first, but he gained control of it and his breathing by the time he had completed the sentence. "Even with an enemy. And I'm no enemy to the - powers there."

He would not say, "to the Gods," but he lifted his bead in a tiny jerk toward the cloud-wracked sky and Paradise beyond.

"I helped you make peace in life with Mithridates," said Sulla's Luck approvingly, "though the price was Asia where he had slaughtered a hundred and fifty thousand of your fellow citizens - and would kill more in the future. But the arrangement gave you peace, and the freedom to capture Rome from your enemies - with my help."

Sulla walked back from the window. He was calm again, but there was an expression of concern on the features which anger had left. "When I've handed over the shipment, on behalf of - " His fingers toyed with the white powder on the table, making a crater like the maw of a volcano in the smooth cone.

"On behalf of the powers who wish hope to be spread as widely as possible throughout this Underworld," Sulla's Luck encouraged, pausing then with tented fingers.

"Yes," said the Dictator and swallowed. He met his companion's eyes. "Will we leave this place?

Will you still be with me?"

Sulla's Luck laughed. "Oh, my Lurius," he said. "I'll always be with you. As I was on the day you, though only a youth, took the surrender of Jugurtha and Rome proclaimed you his conqueror - for anything Marius your commander could say in his own right."

"He never forgave me for that," Sulla said, smiling in relief and at the memory. He twisted the ring on his left little finger, a signet carved with the scene of Jugurtha's surrender. "But Marius died, didn't he? And I ruled Rome."

He met his companion's eyes.

"Of course," agreed his Luck. "Though all men - "

He laughed instead of finishing the caveat, as if oblivious to the shadow his words had drawn across the face dial had in life been that of the all-powerful Sulla.

"And now," Sulla's Luck resumed in a different vein, "the terms are quite clear. If the drugs are delivered today to the caravan you have arranged to distribute them, you - we, my Lucius - will return to the upper world. Perhaps even to Paradise." He smiled. "We can hope, after all."

"Yes," said the Dictator in forceful agreement. "They need have no concern ...

but let's go check the warehouse once more."

He strode out of the office, almost colliding with a servant who cringed away on an errand for his mistress.

"Benito!" Sulla was shouting. "Benito!"

Pausing for a moment in the office, Sulla's Luck murmured, "Oh, I'm sure they aren't concerned, my Lucius," as his fingers teased the powder back into a perfect cone.

The mirror in which Theodora watched her hairdresser work had an ivory handle carved with the figure of Chastity - right arm covering her breasts, left palm over her pudenda. Theodora's hand sweated every time she gripped the warm, slick carving, but she had never demanded that it be replaced.

Once she had attempted to masturbate herself with the statuette - just in case - but that hadn't worked.

Either.

Theodora's bedroom was on a front comer of the house, across the reception court from Sulla's office and the room they nominally shared at night. Through the pair of high windows, slits that flared into the room to admit light but nothing larger than a sparrow, she had heard a woman talking to the doorkeeper in a husky voice, but the sounds were empty of meaning.

Her hand squeezed the mirror until the peaks of her knuckles were as bloodless as the ivory. It was not a good idea to consider what things were empty of meaning. The list could become very long.

But it was not a complete surprise when Benito, the chamberlain, slipped into her bedroom, and said with a slobbery attempt at portentousness, "Mistress, there is a matter which may be of the greatest concern to you."

Theodora did not turn toward the fleshy eunuch immediately. Instead, she held the mirror out at an angle so that she could see Benito past her own face and the plaits of incredible delicacy into which her hair was being woven this morning and every morning.

The chamberlain's swarthy complexion was accentuated when viewed side by side with the alabaster of Theodora's own skin. He began to sweat under her scrutiny. The heavy brocades he had chosen for his robes of office could scarcely have been less comfortable if they were designed to torture him.

Benito continued to hope - against the evidence - that they would increase the honor in which other residents of this place held him.

"Speak, then..." said Theodora softly. She left unspoken the promise - not a threat - of what she would have done to this cringing lickspittle unless the reason he interrupted her toilet were indeed of the greatest concern to her.

"Mistress, a woman has been admitted to the house," Benito blurted. His eyes, fixed on hers in the mirror, held the abject terror of a man who has learned the difference between bluster and an iron will - and who knows that he is only bluster.

"Do you think I care who my husband sees?" Theodora snapped, the pitch of her voice belying the intended content of her words. If Sulla's Luck ever procured him a woman who could do for him what his wife could not - and what he could not do for his wife - Theodora would...

Well, to begin with, there would be two eunuchs in this household. The hairdresser continued to work, weaving strand on strand into a lustrous black embroidery. It might have been worth her life - here - to leave off without being directed to do so; but more than that, her work was the only thing in which she could pretend to find meaning. Her fingers moved in patterns, though she knew her art was as empty as the motions of men drinking and gorging and flinging hollow boasts that led to hollow battles.

Nonetheless, she shifted to the left side of her seated mistress, in order to avoid the eyes that sparked with an anger which threatened to melt the mirror's polished silver face.

"Mistress," said the chamberlain, "it's not- - -that is, the woman wishes to see you. She has an offer for you that could, that could..."

Benito swallowed, then swallowed again. His concern went beyond the normal fear of talking to Theodora - and that went far enough for almost anything.

Theodora laid the mirror flat on her lap and turned to look at the sweating eunuch Over the bronze-sheathed wooden back of her chair. Her loins gave an anticipatory stir, though there was no reason as yet for the hopeful warmth.

"What offer, Benito?" she said in a voice that was almost calm.

"Mistress," replied the chamberlain, no less terrified by the woman's present aspect than he had been by her former one, "I really think it better that she discuss the matter with you alone."

Benito glanced around the painted wall of the bedroom with the skittering panic of a rat in an endless maze. At last, he locked his eyes with Theodora's. A rope of saliva started to drool from the corner of his mouth, but he recalled it through an effort of will.

"Mistress," the chamberlain went on. "I think you should know that this woman once had a child with her. Here."

For a moment, Theodora's mouth and eyes were open. They gave no sign to the outside because of the pressure of what remained within. Then she said, "Perhaps I can arrange she go where the brat is. But send her in. Perhaps..."

She waved imperiously to the hairdresser as Mussolini bowed and backed himself from the room. "Leave me, Penelope," Theodora said. "I may want you later, for a touch-up."

She was surveying herself critically in the hand-mirror as the chamberlain and the hairdresser disappeared together.

Instead of ushering the woman properly into Theodora's presence, Benito stood in the reception court and waved the visitor through. He clacked shut the slatted wooden door loudly, but Theodora knew he would hover near it, listening to whatever went on in the bedroom.

That was desirable. The chamberlain would keep away all lesser servants and would provide a warning if Sulla himself approached.

And she had nothing to hide from Benito, who had been her go-between in the only part of the business which she might wish to conceal from others.

The visitor who entered Theodora's bedroom was short, swarthy; plain even without the pockmarks sprinkled across the nose and right cheek. She had survived that disease and presumably childbirth as well, but her features were more youthful than the look in her eyes.

Well, appearance was not a trustworthy guide to age in this place.

"Lady?" said the visitor. Her fingers played tremulously with the knotted fringe of her shawl, but she kept her voice clear, albeit respectful.

"You have business with me, then?" Theodora asked dully. She squeezed all emotion but mild distaste from her voice so as to give away nothing.

"I didn't come until I had something to offer you," said the older woman softly. She laced her fingers together, but her thumbs continued to toy with her drab garment, "The caravan that just arrived, it - a friend of mine in it, he's procured a gift for you, lady. From - not here."

Her tongue dabbed her lips, not so much a nervous gesture as a practical one, moistening the dry skin so that it would pass the next syllables flawlessly.

"A couch, lady," she concluded.

"A couch?" Theodora repeated, surprised out of her pose of nonchalance. She had expected an elixir, possibly, or an amulet. Not a couch...

Instead of answering the implied question, the visitor looked at her thumbs and said "Lady, they tell me you might be able to help me find my child."

"Who tells you?"

"Lady," said the visitor, raising her steadfast eyes to Theodora's fury. "I would do anything to get my child back. The couch I offer you will serve your needs."

Theodora had been an empress in life, while here she was in name and appearance wife to a dictator of unbridled power. She had learned haughtiness

"as she struggled to eminence from her beginnings as a child prostitute, and it was with regal grandeur that she rose and sneered at the other woman, "What do you know of my needs?"

"Lady," the visitor repeated, "the couch will serve your needs."

Theodora rested her left palm lightly on the lathe-turned bar of the chair back, but her sweat marked the bronze slickly. In this place there were few children and no infants, she had thought, until the morning a cry in the street outside had driven her to the door half-dressed -

And reminded that this place was Hell.

"It wasn't his fault that he was here," continued the visitor as if making a prayer of contrition. "I brought him, the innocent, because I loved him too much..."

"He should not have been..." whispered Theodora as her mind stared in horror at its memory of the child she had carried to term while she was an actress.

Its face, uglier than a monkey's and smeared with blood - her blood - had scrunched up as the brat wailed. It was a boy, but that didn't matter: she would have paid her doorman an extra gold solidus to drop the infant over the seawall in a weighted bag whichever its sex. She had never in her whole existence hated a thing as much.

Until she heard the wail of the child in the street: this woman's child.

"I have no reason to believe you," Theodora said in a distant tone as her mind began to recover.

"What can a couch do?" She walked -toward -the one on which she slept, a mattress of firm horsehair on a low frame of curly maple.

Movement gave her an excuse for breaking eye contact with her visitor.

Theodora had become empress - and died in that rank - because she fought, no matter what the odds or the means she had to use to even them. She had not lost that ruthless will when Fate placed her here. Benito had his instructions within minutes ... and by that night, he had shown his mistress a tiny hand, to prove those instructions had been carried out.

Death was not necessarily final here; but thus far, it had proved final enough for Theodora's purpose. No infant had bawled outside her window since.

That permitted her to hope that the cries in her mind would one day be stilled as well.

"Lady," said her visitor softly, "I will have the couch brought to you. All I ask is that when you succeed, you return my child to me."

The dead did not come back in this Pompeii. At least Theodora could hope so.

Aloud she said, "If the couch has the virtue you claim for it, woman, I will - use my authority to have your brat located. If the couch - "

Theodora shuddered and broke off, shocked by a leering recollection of the one to whom she had been married in life.

"My husband was a demon," she blurted, trying to dear the thought by spilling it out in words to this nonentity. "Justinian, the emperor. I think that's why I came to be here. My - my life was hard, but not so very evil.... Except for wedding a demon."

"Lady," said the visitor with a gentle smile, "they thought that of Solomon, too; many did. He was quick-minded and so shy that he covered it with pride hugely greater than that of other men.

But Solomon was a man. Lady; I knew him. And your husband was a man. Men aren't demons."

"No, but demons can wear the faces of men," replied Theodora in a ragged voice, for the face in her mind, was again that other own squawling infant.

She shook herself, empress again and a dictator's wife. "Go on, then," she said clearly and with open disdain. "If you care so much about your child, then - provide me with this couch that suits my needs and get him back."

The cries echoed in Theodora's mind as her visitor bowed deeply and left the room.

In the kitchen located in the other front corner of the house, Apicius worked with something closer to happiness than he had managed to achieve for - who knew how long? Not that he had any real confidence in the way things would turn out; but the situation was so unusual - even for here - that he couldn't help feeling at least a little hopeful.

Hopeful enough to keep a pot of seasoned water simmering on the range while he began to crush the available spices in his mortar: pepper, mint, rue; a little vinegar to moisten it; cumin, coriander -

"Wak!" screeched a voice at the grated window. "Laser root! Laser root! Said I would, wawk! Said I would!"

The parrot, a large blue and red Macaw, squirmed through the grating with the grace of tumbler executing a trick. For a moment he paused with his body in the kitchen, left leg clutching something to his gorgeous scarlet breast and the other clawed foot gripping a bar. Then the parrot hopped so that his tail, red and blue and as long as his body, cleared the bars.

"Wak!" he repeated as he landed on the counter in front of Apicius. "Laser root!"

His left foot opened and dropped a scrap of something vegetable onto the tiled counter.

There were gods. And they had found him, Marcus Gabius Apicius, even in this place.

"You let me go," the bird squawked. "I bring you laser root from caravan. Wawk! Laser root!"

Apicius picked up the bit of root with a care that he would not have wasted on the most delicately-worked gold filigree. He sniffed, still afraid to believe.

It really was what the parrot had promised; Cyrenean laser - silphium to the Greeks - and of first quality besides. Laser was the king of spices, and the one spice which Apicius had been unable to locate throughout his bleak sojourn in this Underworld.

The bird strutted down the counter, clicking his beak and preening himself.

When he turned, he flicked up his beautiful tail to keep from singeing it in the fire beneath the pot of seasoned water. "Said I would," he muttered. "Said I would."

Apicius had thought he was being a fool - his master would have been furious if matters had not worked out, and Sulla's fury was never something to discount. But the parrot had spoken to him, real speech and not just the miming of syllables.

The parrot had promised to bring laser root from the caravan which had just arrived to pick up the shipment of drugs that Apicius knew his master had procured.

Men could eat and drink on this island, and the food passed through them in normal enough fashion - the smell of the houses open privy, here beside the kitchen range, was proof enough of that. But meals didn't have a real savor.

Even the ignorant commons knew that, while to educated palates like those of Apicius and his master; well ... one might as well have been eating sawdust.

Pine sawdust, reeking of turpentine.

Now, with the crucial spice which had been missing, it was possible that Apicius could construct a truly perfect dish. If he could burst that dam of frustration, his whole existence here took on new meaning.

The parrot dipped his torso over the edge of the counter, balancing himself with a flick of his tail which nearly avoided the leeks and coriander waiting for a later stage in the meal's preparation. "Well," he said as he hung upside down. "Well. I go to Hollywood. Beautiful! Beautiful!"

He hopped upright again and spread his wings, twisting his head so that he could see the way they took the sun through the grated window. The feathers of the parrot's head and shoulders were orange-red and separated from the royal blue of his wingtips by a band of yellow as pure and distinct as the decoration of an Egyptian tomb.

"Well!" repeated the bird. "I go - "

Apicius, flawless in his timing here as in any other phase of cooking, shot out his hand.

"Wawk!"

The bird's beak was an ivory white above and black beneath. It looked powerful enough to disjoint a man's hand, and it was certainly capable of drawing blood. Apicius pinned the halves safely closed with his index and middle finger while his thumb clamped firmly around the lustrous throat.

"But our bargain!" cried the parrot, its shrieks muffled but surprisingly distinct. Its wings buffeted Apicius' wrists, but the cook was holding his captive out at arm's length where its struggles could do no real harm.

"But our - "

Apicius snapped the bird's body in a quick are while his fingers kept its neck from rotating normally.

"Wak!"

Humming to himself, Apicius set the gorgeous corpse down on the counter and fed some more kindling to the fire. He wanted the seasoned water to be at a full boil before he scalded the parrot. Quite an unusual creature, that one.

But while the laser root was necessary to the preparation - so was the full-flavored meat around which the entree was designed.

Additional primping could add nothing to Theodora's . toilet by the time she heard Sulla return to the house. She was ready - almost too ready: the muscles of her lower belly had, by working against themselves, brought her to a state of almost unbearable lubricity.

As Benito greeted his master with his usual slobbery exaggeration, Theodora stepped once more to the new couch and touched it with a thrill of hope. The couch was like nothing she had ever seen before; and, now that it had been delivered to her bedroom, she found it easy to believe that a piece of furniture had the virtue which the stranger had claimed for this one.

In shape, the couch was normal enough - a low frame with a mattress. The coverlet of silk, striped red and yellow on a blue ground, came from Theodora's original bed, as did the down-filled cushion at the head.

But the mattress was sprung instead of being stuffed like the one it replaced, and there were additional springs of coiled steel in the bedframe where the other had rigid wooden slats.

Details like that shouldn't have mattered. In her youth, Theodora and her partners had reached climax often enough while standing in an alley or even bending over the starting gate after a horse race, roughly. screened by a dozen or so happy men awaiting their turn.

Here, though, everything mattered. And perhaps this one detail, resiliance instead of softness beneath the buttocks or thighs, meeting and then redoubling the gentle shock of the thrust - It should work. Theodora had been so close, so many times and in so many ways, that she knew this would be the final step to the heights of splendid orgasm.

With a smile that could have meant anything but weakness of purpose, Theodora strode to the bedroom door to greet her husband.

Sulla had just entered the reception court. Servants bowed obsequiously in front of the walls painted with false columns, and Mussolini continued to babble in terrified cheerfulness despite the obvious attempts of his master to brush him away.

Sulla's Luck had paused at the ornately carven marble table beside the ornamental pond, waiting for the Dictator to free himself from the rancid emptiness of his chamberlain. There was a faint smile on the face of Sulla's Luck. By now, the expression was as familiar to Theodora as the ache of failed climax - and almost as unpleasant.

Good evening, little heart," called Theodora from her doorway. "May I speak with you for a moment?"

Sulla turned, scowling. His mouth was poised to say something devastating enough to silence Benito. He saw his wife, and his eyes lost their distraction while the planes of his face cleared.

The only make-up which Theodora wore was the rouge which turned her lips into a Cupid's-bow of brilliant carmine. Her outer tunic was of black silk with a rippled pattern which echoed her hair and set off the perfect white of her skin.

Her undertunic was silk as well, but diaphanous. Theodora stood with her left arm raised on the door jamb and her right hip shot out so that only the toes of that gilded slipper touched the mosiac floor. Her right hand rested on her hipbone aid it tugged the upper tunic just high enough to hint at her pubic triangle as well as displaying the marvelously-detailed muscles of her dancers' thighs.

"I - " said the Dictator. No one else spoke or moved, though Theodora glimpsed the cook, Apicius, poised at the kitchen door like a squirrel frozen in uncertainty as to which way to jump.

Sulla turned.

His Luck shrugged and smiled more broadly. "Who knows?" said Sulla s Luck to the question that need not be spoken to be asked. "So long as one tries, there's hope."

"Begone, then," Sulla barked to his retainers as he stepped toward the bedroom with a haste he had not shown in ages, as time was reckoned here.

Apicius hopped back into the kitchen to lower the fire beneath his braising pan. The rest of the servants would wait and titter hopefully, in comers of the reception court and leaning over the rail of the loggia above, but the Dictator cared as little about that as Theodora did.

She closed the door as Sulla stepped past her, but she eluded his grasp with a band and a pirouette which made his face darken at what he thought was ill-timed coquetry. He had already Shrugged off his toga and flung it to the top of a clothes press.

"First, little heart," the woman whispered huskily as she guided Sulla to the new couch, "let me show you what came with your caravan."

"What?" said the Dictator in amazement. Emotion left his face again as his mind grappled coldly with the new data and decided how to respond. "I was just at the warehouse. Why haven't I been informed?"

The curse that Theodora's mind ripped out at her verbal misstep would have been enough by itself to threaten her soul's salvation, but she kept her lips smiling as she protested aloud,

"There'll be time for that later, dearest Sit here for just a moment."

"Woman," snapped the Dictator, "this is important!"

"So," said the woman, her eyes sparking like flint and black steel, "is this."

She had already undone the clasp of the filigreed pin which fastened her upper tunic. When she twitched her shoulders now, the black silk cascaded to her feet, licking across the surface of the transparent undergarment.

Paradise was setting with a creamy, almost golden glow beneath the cloudbanks.

The light turned Theodora's skin to ivory and darkened the cones other fiercely erect nipples.

Sulla allowed himself to be guided to a seat on the end of the couch. His mouth was slightly open, and his left hand fumbled repeatedly as it undid the sash of his tunic.

"What?" he muttered as the springs lifted with a soft moan beneath him.

"It's from Paradise, my heart, my dearest dear," said Theodora, embroidering what she knew with what she believed. She lifted both hands to the throat of her tunic and ripped the garment with deliberate strength. Her breasts were firm here as they had remained throughout her life.

The nipples described a pair of flat arcs as the muscles beneath them tensed to tear the silk.

Sulla reached for her breasts, half rising and subsiding again, charmed by the springs, as the woman knelt and lifted the hem of the tunic he still wore. His member was erect, and the head of it was fiery red as she stripped back his foreskin.

"Little heart," Theodora murmured; licked the tip of the penis; and changed the angle other head slightly so that she could engulf most of the thick shaft in her mouth while her fingernails tickled Sulla's scrotum.

The couch whispered, and gave, and gave back. Such a little thing, but the visitor had been right...

Sulla was kneading one breast with a harshness that many women - other women - would have found painful, while the fingers of his right hand were buried in the shimmering hair which alone covered Theodora now. His muscles were matching the rhythms of his body and hers and the softly creaking springs.

Theodora's flared nostrils caught the sudden hormonal change other partner's odor into something goatish and male and intensely aphrodisiac to her. A vein at the base of his penis throbbed.

She lifted her head away and stood, her eyes filled with rapture.

"No, no," cried the man in dizzy amazement. The twist of her head had freed it from his fingers, so that they closed only on her black, rippling hair.

"Not that way," said Theodora in a voice that was a promise, guiding Sulla to his feet by leaning back and clamping his hand to her breast more savagely than he had done himself.

She twisted, then rose onto her toes and arched her pelvis forward to receive him. The tunic flapped, a momentary obstacle, but both of them together snatched the hem out of the way.

He would have the garment off before the next time - but there could be any number of 'next times,' now, and this was delight mounting to a bliss greater than godhead.

Theodora tipped them back onto the couch, her buttocks sliding on the warm, slick fabric while Sulla's member thrust as deeply within her as a man could reach and the springs squealed like a terrified infant.

Theodora's scream overwhelmed the other sound everywhere but in her mind. It was at the wizened face in her memory, streaked with placental blood, that she clawed -

But it was Sulla who leaped upright, howling in fury and amazement. His left hand covered his eye and cheek, but the reddened triple scratches extended well across his forehead.

The Dictator leaned forward again and slapped the vacant-eyed woman as she started to rise.

Then he swept out of the room, bellowing for his Luck.

Theodora lay sobbing on the couch whose springs chuckled beneath her.

Benito was the only servant visible when the Dictator tore from his wife's bedroom. The chamberlain was sweating so furiously that the breast of his cloth-of-gold outer robe bore dark stains. Through the lattice screen of the office, Sulla saw with his good eye that his Luck was standing with a concerned expression. Benito tried to say something, but the Dictator brushed past him.

Apicius strode from the-kitchen into his path. The cook carried a covered silver serving-dish by its handles, and his face was wreathed with an ecstatic smile. "Master - " he began.

"Idiot!" shouted the Dictator as the two men collided.

Apicius' shriek was too much like the cry Theodora had given as she lashed out. Sulla struck the cook with his clenched left fist as the man hobbled the platter desperately.

Apicius sprawled. The lid rang like a bell on the stone flooring, and the platter itself jounced from his hands despite his despairing wail. The fowl skidded over the up of the ornamental pool. It floated there, cooling and staining the water with the flavorful sauce with which it was to have been eaten.

Water seeping into the body cavity made the bird chuckle.

Benito was so distraught that his right hand reached out as if to pluck his master's sleeve. The chamberlain wasn't quite in such a state as to touch

Sulla as he knocked down the cook, but Benito did trail the Dictator unbidden into his office.

"What have you heard about the - " Sulla shouted to his Luck before motion and the gleam of gold cloth spun him again.

"What are you doing here?" the Dictator asked with anger the more terrifying for being offered in a voice of normal volume. He pointed with his whole right hand, palm down and trembling with eagerness to clutch the fat throat before it.

Sulla's left eye was bloodshot. The scratches traced scarlet furrows across a visage otherwise the complexion of mulberries in clotted cream.

"Ma - " stammered the chamberlain. "Ma-ma - " The fingers and thumb of his left hand were pinching the air, miming the nervous emptiness of his lips.

Sulla balled a fist to strike him. Then he would summon guards and have them -

"I'm afraid you'd best listen to him, my Lucius," said Sulla's Luck in a voice that was the Dictators in every particular save in the mouth from which it issued.

"No time for that!" said Sulla harshly, but the voice of his alter ego relaxed him. He turned again, lowering his arm and letting his face smooth into the gender contours of normal intercourse. "The caravan's come in, and - "

"The caravan's been destroyed," squeaked the chamberlain in a voice that could have summoned bats, "Everything's burned, everyone's dead. The guides you sent to meet them, they saw it all happen, everyone dead."

The Dictator did not look back at his servant. His left hand began very carefully to rub his stinging, tear-streaming eye.

"I'm afraid he's right, my Lucius," said Sulla's Luck. "The guides reported here while you were - otherwise occupied. There can't be any doubt about what happened ... though why, of course, that will require a great deal of sorting out"

"You may go, Benito," Sulla said quietly.

The chamberlain bolted, but he reached an arm back to slide the door lattice closed before disappearing toward a staircase and a place to keep out of sight on the second floor.

"How does this," said Sulla, watching his fingers extend toward the white powder heaped on the table, "affect our agreement?"

His Luck shrugged. "The terms were very rigid, you know," he said. By today, the shipment was to be placed m specified hands for distribution. I can only presume that there is no agreement any mere."

"I couldn't help that!" shouted the Dictator, animated again. He would have stuck out at any face that showed itself at the moment, but the only features he could see were his own.

"Well, of course I can inform them of that, my Lucius," said Sulla's Luck, turning his head tactfully so as not to watch the Dictator being reduced to puling incapacity, "But - well, you must realize that results rather than intentions are the, ah, coin they require."

"Wait, wait," blurted Sulla, raising his hands as if to grip the other figure by the shoulders but sliding them away from the touch at the last instant.

"Tell them I will put the shipment out. It's all safe, all safe. I'll go right now and start to make arrangements!"

He sprinted to the door; but as his fingers touched the wood, his body convulsed with a great shudder. Sulla looked back at his Luck and said, "A few days, a week perhaps - it shouldn't matter. But it does, doesn't it?"

Sulla's Luck smiled regretfully. "Well, my Lucius, he said. "I'll pass on your offer. Who knows?

Perhaps in time they might be willing to come to another arrangement with you, on the former terms." He shrugged.

Sulla moaned and rested his forehead in the crook of his elbow for a dozen heartbeats. Then he slid the lattice open and staggered across the reception court. He was muttering, "I m sure they'll be reasonable. After all...

Sulla's Luck closed the lattice again and walked back to the table. The filtered light of Paradise was a red as deep as pulsing anger. It would not have been sufficient to limn the writing on the bronze plate for human eyes - but anyway, Sulla's Luck knew it very Well.

They had never understood, the damned souls or the living - Dante as little as the rest. All hope abandon - because if you have no hope, you cannot be tortured. Only the possibility of release can make interminable pain interminably painful.

Sulla's Luck reached slowly toward the heap of white powder. The latticework through which the light seeped distorted his shadow, making it seem now that of a woman hunched within her shawl, now that of a bird with a great clacking bill.

He lifted a pinch of the powder.

Hope for success, thought Sulla's Luck. Hope for surcease, hope for something besides damnation to a place where he knew well he did not reign.

He snorted the powder of hope into one upturned nostril. Horns quivered on his shadow.

Where his eyes should have been were two glowing drops of hellfire.