Lucius barely heard the whispered gasp above Tigran’s shouts and the howling of the wind. “Tigran, a cave. Hurry.”
He hefted Mylitos up, their armor grinding and clacking. Turning into the rock face, he found the cave. If Mylitos’s head hadn’t fallen to the side, they would have missed it, since the opening faced the same way they were trudging. Sidling sideways, Lucius guided Mylitos through the narrow opening. Once they made it in a few yards, the cavern opened up. Lucius found an out of the way nook and set down the last surviving man of his command, then limped back to the entrance. Gasping, he stared at a solid rock wall. The entrance to the cave was now filled with impregnable stone.
Lucius’s eyes darted around as his breath shuddered in and out of his chest. They were trapped, and Tigran wasn’t with him. Leaving Mylitos slumped against the stone wall, Lucius stepped closer to the where the entrance had been. The boy darted by, firing off a few more shots. From this angle, the stone plugging the entrance was partially transparent.
“Tigran!” Lucius shouted.
The boy’s head turned, looking for the sound. He shouldn’t have been able to hear through the stone, nor should have Lucius been able to see through rock. He reached toward the stone separating himself from Tigran. His hand trembled as he held it just above the surface before touching what should have been stone. Holding his breath, he pushed forward, feeling resistance, as if he were reaching through water instead of stone.
Tigran screamed as a hand emerged from what looked like a solid stone wall. Lucius grabbed the boy’s coat before he could scramble away and pulled him back through the mystical wall. The boy struggled as Lucius pulled him through the stone. When the Lucius yanked him all the way through, Tigran’s eyes looked twice as large as normal. After a few moments, he recognized Lucius and slumped to the ground, panting heavily. Stepping over the boy’s legs, Lucius found solid stone to lean against to take some pressure off his wounded leg. The Parthians moved about outside, hunched over, following the messy trail of blood Lucius and Mylitos had left.
Reaching down to his left hip, he pulled his gladius from its scabbard. Soon, they’d find the rock that wasn’t and push their way through, following the trail of blood.
“Tigran, draw your sword, we’re going to have company soon,” Lucius whispered.
The boy whimpered but scrambled up. Lucius stepped back. The entrance was narrow. He’d be able to face them one or two at a time, at least until they overwhelmed him. Trying to calm his breathing, he waited and waited… The Parthians seemed stumped as they pushed against solid rock, feeling for an entrance that wasn’t there. As far as Lucius could tell, the Parthians couldn’t see them, looking in every direction but where Lucius stood.
“Lucius, what’s going on? Why can’t they get through?” Tigran whispered.
The confusion evident in the boy’s voice matched the thoughts swirling through Lucius’s mind. “I don’t know, Tigran.”
Lucius slid down, keeping any eye on the semi-transparent stone, and rested on a boulder. Cutting the edge of his cloak, he tied it tightly around his thigh and the nub of the arrow shaft, grunting as he cinched it.
“Mylitos, how are you doing over there?” Lucius asked, letting his wounded leg stretch out to take some pressure off it.
Mylitos groaned and coughed. “Not good.”
Lucius waved Tigran closer. “See if you can bandage his wounds. Cut up some of the clothes from the packs. Do what you can for him. I’m going to make sure there’s not another way in. I don’t fancy having company.”
Tigran’s eyes flashed to the injured legionnaire, the blood draining from his young face. Nodding nervously, he swallowed and knelt next to Mylitos. Lucius set his gladius down, needing both hands, and pushed himself up, steadying himself with a hand against the wall. He grabbed the sword, shook his head at the nicks on the edge. The blade had taken a lot of hard use since he’d entered the mountains of Armenia. If he couldn’t get some time to care for it, he’d have to take it to a smith. With a sigh, he slid it back into its scabbard and hobbled deeper into the cavern that, for now, was their sanctuary.
After fifteen paces, the cavern took a sharp turn to the right, deeper into the mountain. Looking up, he tried to find the fissures or cracks letting the light in, but instead, the cavern walls disappeared into the darkness. The cavern glowed with enough luminescence to see, but he couldn’t determine the source. His nerves, which were already on edge, ratcheted up toward the border of fear. Magical walls, unknown light sources. All the stories he’d heard throughout his life said mixing up with gods never ended well for mortals.
His commanding officer had been ordered by the imperator, who’d been told of the god’s will by his pater patrum, to march into Armenia and find the temple of Mithras. Now Lucius stood in a gentle twilight, wondering where the light was coming from while he avoided thinking about what might be through the jagged opening going deeper into the cavern. Closing his eyes, he took a slow breath in through his nose and released it as he opened his eyes and stepped through the rough, narrow gap.
Keeping his head down, he pressed his hand on the rough cavern wall as the light disappeared, plunging him into a lightless terror. He stuck out his other arm and touched other cavern wall—he didn’t even need to extend his arms fully to their six-foot span. As long as he had his hands on the cavern walls, and he didn’t find any side paths, he would be fine. He could turn around and get back to the lighted cave. At least that’s what he repeated to himself in his mind. He’d never particularly had a problem with caves, but since he’d witnessed the brutal death of his best friend Cassius in a cave in Dacia, he’d found his neutrality severely challenged. The dark tunnel felt like he might descend into the underworld. But whose underworld?
He sniffed tentatively, seeing if he could pick up any hints of sulfur that might indicate he’d taken a wrong turn. He had no desire to meet one of the gods of the underworld, not until he passed from this life, and even then, he’d prefer the otherworld of his Gallic people. When it was his time, he hoped to step onto Bag Noz and be carried to Albios to live in the light of the upperworld, in heaven. His body and mind served the Romans, but he had no desire for his eternal soul to reside in their afterlives. Nor did he want the cavern to dump him into the dark world of Dubnos.
It was said that all people, at least all Gauls, came from Dubnos, emerging from the darkness, from the earth, and that they still contained elements of the darkness within but were often blinded by the light of Albios as they walked in the middle world of Bitu. Surrounded by the total absence of light, Lucius felt Dubnos within him, the call to the earth. As a boy, he’d yearned for the sky, the clouds, and the sun, seeking the realm of Albios as he lay on his back in the forest staring upward.
Living in Bitu, the middle world, he explored the light of Albios, giving few thoughts to Dubnos. He’d ignored his threefold nature. Here, deprived entirely of the upperworld and stumbling away from the middle world his mother birthed him onto, he had no choice but to explore the third aspect of his nature, of a Gaul’s nature, as he wandered through this in-between place surrounded by Bitu above and Dubnos below.
“Fuck.” He’d banged his shin on a boulder. At least it wasn’t his bad leg; he had no idea what added pain would do to the throbbing. His curse echoed around him, fading as it slowly bounced into the deeper recesses of the cavern.
Breathing out through his nose and trying to contain his growing panic, he sank onto the boulder, ostensibly to rest his leg but also to bring himself closer to the ground. He closed his eyes. Calming his breath, he tried to put aside the aches and pains, the nagging wounds and the exhaustion, his growing fear of the dark. He set aside the cold and the death of his friends and comrades along with those who’d perpetrated those deaths—the Parthians and whatever the brutal monsters were who looked like humans but feasted on the blood and flesh of the living.
After shoving aside the panic—he couldn’t give in and crumble into himself after everything he’d gone through—he managed to reduce everything from a dull roar to whispers in the back of his mind. He let his contact with earth ground and center him. He couldn’t quit. Not now. It wasn’t in his nature. Selene had seen something in him that had brought her favor down upon him. He couldn’t let her down. He’d started his journey in the forests of Gaul far to the west and traveled across the Danuvius River in his first years in the legions and then across the deserts and rivers of Syria and Mesopotamia and the mountains of Armenia. In his short life, he’d seen half the lands of the Roman Empire and been recognized and rewarded by its imperator. Few could say they’d done that much with their time in Bitu. Surely such deeds would allow him to ascend to Albios.
From the earth and water and darkness he was birthed, and now he would return to the embrace of the earth. The stone felt cool under his hand, firm and solid. It was just a cave—a place of the mortal realm, nothing to fear. The cool air smelled of stone and dirt and vague hints of life. It had been a while since he’d visited any of the temples of his people’s gods that had cropped up as his people had been Romanized. He’d never visited one of the old groves that persisted in the deeper, darker woods where the authorities didn’t go. Even if he had, it would do him no good as he sat, trying to will himself to restart his journey. This wasn’t their mountain.
He’d been raised in the Romanized Gaulish religion that dominated the province. It wasn’t until he joined the legions and had been inducted into the mysteries of Mithras that he’d embarked on his own religious journey. Each time he’d entered a Mithraeum, he’d descended into basements, caves, and other out of the way underground places that had been dedicated to the god who’d spread from the far reaches of Persia and beyond.
Now, as he descended deep into the cave they’d hidden in, he recalled the touch of Selene on his heart when he’d been promoted straight from the third rank to the fifth. As he thought of the goddess and the mark she’d put on him, the aches and pains fighting at the edge of his awareness receded further and brought clarity to his mind. He could do this. He could fight through the pain and terror. Inhaling deeply, he let the calm air of the cave fill his lungs and stretch his ribs. He exhaled and stood. Deeper he must go, so deeper he went.
SIXTEEN
One moment, Lucius’s hands touched the rough, uneven wall of the cavern wall, and the next, nothing but air. The ground, although it hadn’t been horrible, had still been that of a cave with its irregularities. Now he stood on a smooth surface, his caligae’s hobnails clicking on stone or tile.
Light exploded around him, blinding him as his eyes clamped shut. He stopped moving, listening for anything that might signal danger. After a few moments, his eyes stopped throbbing from the sudden luminous assault, so he opened them a crack, letting them get used to the silvery gold light filling the room—and it was a room.
He could see the column bases along the floor and stone benches arranged on both sides of the walls with a central aisle. Once his eyes adjusted, he opened them the rest of the way. He stood at the entrance to a magnificent Mithraeum. The columns reached up, attaching to the ceiling next to a barrel vault that looked more like a hollow column on its side with the bottom length cut away to sit on the rectangular box of the temple. With the curve coming back in at the edge, it almost looked like an Omega running from front to back in the temple.
Beautiful frescoes adorned the walls, depicting scenes of Mithras and his deeds as well as other gods. Some stories Lucius recognized, while others must have derived from tales not told in the empire. At the end opposite him, was the bull scene, though it was more elaborate and beautiful than any he’d seen before.
The stone carvings were lifelike and detailed in the larger-than-life image of Mithras subduing the bull. Lucius could see the supreme exertion of the god as he struggled to subdue the primordial world bull. Mithras wore a green tunic and blue leggings with a red cape billowing out behind him. On his head, he had the Phrygian cap rising tall, its top falling forward. His skin was tan with an olive tinge like the people of Syria, Parthia, and Persia. Black curls fell from under the cap, landing around his ears and shoulders. In one hand, Mithras gripped the bull’s head, hauling back on it. With the other, he plunged a sword into the bull’s neck, freeing a stream of red blood. Lucius could feel the torment of the bull being slain, its muscles practically rippling, agony filling its eyes.
Above Mithras on one side, Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun, drove his chariot across the sky with his four white horses. On the opposite end, the place Lucius let his eyes fall last, the moon goddess drove her chariot, hauled by two great oxen, one light in color, the other dark. Selene practically glowed with silver radiance. His Mistress. The goddess who’d marked him all those weeks and miles ago in the Mithraeum in Antiochia.
Throughout the Mithraeum, gems and precious metals adorned everything. He’d never been to imperial Roma, but he imagined the opulence of this temple might even shame the temples there. Wounded, disheveled, and with torn clothes, he looked a beggar in such splendid surroundings. Despite what he looked like, this must be the Mithraeum the pater patrum had ordered Syphax to find. A pit opened in his stomach at the thought of his departed friend.
He hobbled down the central aisle, wanting to explore the Mithraeum. Before he’d managed to get a third of the way into the temple, the atmosphere shifted, becoming thicker, more viscous. Lucius shook his head. Perhaps he’d lost too much blood or it was a trick of the odd lighting, but he thought he saw the statue of Mithras move.
With growing horror, he realized the statue was moving. Mithras, the stone version, unfolded himself from the bull, leaving it in precisely the same position, and stood up. The statue grew, eclipsing the altar behind him as his head reached toward the ceiling, towering over Lucius.
“Who comes before me in my home, my sanctuary?” Mithras’s voice boomed, shaking the mountain to its core, or perhaps just shaking Lucius.
