The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  Pandareus was following Priscus into the vault with equal care. Varus bent to examine the stone chest, then thrust his left arm away so that he didn’t burn himself on the lamps he held. Corylus took the staff from him and hung the lamp chain from one of the hooks placed for the purpose in the low ceiling.

  Varus muttered thanks. He felt increasingly hot and uncomfortable. He doubted that was embarrassment: he was far too used to behaving in a fashion which those around him considered bumblingly incompetent.

  As they had every right to do. Priscus is old and fat, and I’m a bumbling incompetent. As well as being a bad poet.

  He squatted, keeping his shadow off the carvings on the side of the chest. It was limestone and not a particularly fine-grained variety at that, so the figures were necessarily crude. Nevertheless, they were powerful.

  In the center was a chariot to which horses were hitched in parallel: four of them as best Varus could tell by the additional grooves shadowing the outline of the legs of the animal closest to the viewer. The figure driving the chariot had a woman’s torso and breasts, but her head was that of a maned lion; bird wings sprouted from her back. A similar creature—sphinx? Gorgon?—ran on two bird legs in front of the team but looked back over her shoulder toward her fellow. The heads of all the figures were at the same height. Varus had seen similar bands of decoration painted on very old vases.

  “Sir?” said Varus, looking up at Priscus. Suddenly realizing that he was speaking to a man who was far his superior in age, knowledge, and position, he wobbled upright as he would for his father. “Ah, Lord Priscus? Is this box Etruscan?”

  “You’ve got a clever one there, Teacher,” Priscus said to his friend. Pandareus didn’t reply, but his smile was a trifle warmer than usual as it drifted toward Varus.

  “And yes, boy,” Priscus continued. “At any rate, it looks like Etruscan work to me, and early Etruscan besides. Which is just what I would expect, since I believe it’s the chest in which Old Tarquin placed the books after he bought them from the Sibyl. Do you know the story?” He thrust his finger toward Varus. “You, I mean. Since you’re a clever bugger.”

  I’ve been called worse, Varus thought.

  “Sir!” he said as though he were in class. “An old woman approached Tarquin the First, an Etruscan and the fifth king of Carce. She offered to sell him nine books of prophecies by the Sibyl of Cumae at the price of three hundred didrachms. Tarquin refused to pay so much.”

  “So, boy …,” said Priscus, leaning slightly forward and scowling. “Was Tarquin a fool?”

  This was like class! “Sir!” Varus said. “No, Tarquin was a tyrant and a foreigner, but he was reputed to be one of the wisest men of all time. The price, however, was enormous—particularly since Carce was then only a town and surrounded by powerful enemies.”

  He cleared his throat. Both Pandareus and Corylus were smiling smugly; they knew he wouldn’t embarrass them.

  And I won’t. Varus continued. “The old woman threw three of the books on the fire in Tarquin’s chamber. They were written on dry palm leaves and burned to ash. She then demanded the same price for the six books remaining.”

  “And?” said Priscus. He was smiling in satisfaction also.

  Varus rested his left hand on the stone chest, feeling the carvings beneath his fingertips. He knew the story well, as he knew many stories. Until this moment it had been a myth, but now in this place he could see Tarquin, his stern face lighted by a sudden flare from the charcoal brazier which tried to warm the painted stone walls of his throne room.

  “Tarquin again refused the offer,” Varus said, “and the old woman threw three more books onto the fire. But when she offered him the final three books, Tarquin paid her the full price, three hundred didrachms. The Sibylline Books have been the most holy treasure of Carce from that day to this.”

  “Very good, boy,” said Priscus softly, but he turned toward Pandareus. “A treasure too holy for me to display even to the scholar whose wisdom and knowledge I respect above those of any other man I know.”

  “If you don’t mind, old friend,” said Pandareus, “we’ll stay in this vault while I tell you some of my history.”

  “Sir?” said Corylus. “Should Varus and I leave?”

  “Not at all,” Pandareus said. “You’re welcome to hear, and for other reasons”—he turned his odd smile toward Varus—“I particularly want Lord Varus to be present.”

  “Sir,” said Varus, lifting his head in acknowledgment. He wasn’t sure he’d spoken loudly enough to be heard. He didn’t suppose it mattered.

  “I’m a Melian by birth,” Pandareus said, facing Priscus and Corylus. His shoulder was to Varus, whom he seemed to be ignoring. “I went to Egypt, though, as a young man and spent a year in Alexandria.”

  “Melos?” said Priscus, frowning. He rubbed his chin with his knuckles. “I thought you were from Athens.”

  “Pandareus of Athens was a better name for a teacher,” Pandareus said with a hard smile, “than Pandareus of Melos, an island which was a backwater when Cadmus founded Thebes and hasn’t become any more important in the millennium since.”

  The others laughed. Varus felt warm and prickly on the inside of his skin. He no longer heard the chant that had been with him since the afternoon of his reading, but there was a keening at the edges of his mind. It could have been the wind, or perhaps a woman wailing in distant misery.

  “The Egyptians are a dirty people,” Pandareus continued, “and fond of superstition. But they’re an old race, and their land is very old. In Alexandria I met an Egyptian whose name was Menre. He said he was a scholar of the Museum and had been a student of Demetrius of Phalerum.”

  “That’s impossible, surely?” Priscus said. Corylus’s sharp expression showed that he was thinking the same thing but hadn’t wished to contradict his teacher. “Unless you misheard him?”

  “I did not mishear him,” Pandareus said, his smile slightly wider, “as you already knew. As for whether it was possible that Menre was a student of the man who advised Ptolemy to create the Museum three hundred years ago … I thought it very unlikely. I asked Menre to introduce me to his teacher, and he said he would when the time was right.”

  “And?” said Priscus.

  “I didn’t see Menre again while I was in Egypt,” said Pandareus. “I left for Athens a few months later and gained a name there. Including the name Pandareus of Athens.”

  The others laughed. Varus remained in his warm, prickly cocoon. He saw and heard everything that was going on in the vault, but he was miles and ages away from his companions.

  He reached beneath his toga and gripped the ivory head with his right hand; his left hand still rested on the stone box which held the Sibylline Books. He felt someone coming toward him through a tunnel of fog.

  “I hadn’t thought of Menre in decades,” said Pandareus. “I was quite satisfied with my life in Athens. The students who attended my lectures were of reasonable quality, the range of books which were open to me there was wider even than here in Carce—they’d been brought into the city by men who loved learning, not soldiers in armor like those who gathered the libraries of Carce.”

  “But the pay, my friend?” Priscus said.

  The teacher shrugged. His shadow quivered oddly, unpleasantly, on the wall of the vault.

  “The only men in Athens who are as wealthy as a senator of Carce,” Pandareus said, “are senators of Carce who’ve retired to Athens. Nonetheless some men of Carce send their sons to Athens still, as Cicero’s father and Cicero himself did, even though there are teachers at home equal to the best in Greece. If only because we recently were the best in Greece.”

  Varus watched him grin in profile.

  “And I will note,” Pandareus said, holding the smile, “that the rich and powerful of Carce are no more punctual with their sons’ school fees than their lesser brethren of Athens were. Your senatorial colleague Calpurnius Piso comes immediately to mind when I hear the words ‘slow to pay.’”r />
  An old woman hobbled toward Varus. He watched his own body standing with his friends in the vault while with another part of his mind he waited for the woman. She wore a cowled gray cloak over a long tunic—an Ionic chiton—of bleached linen; her face was wrinkled and ancient.

  “But one night, in what must have been a dream,” Pandareus was saying, “Menre visited me. He told me I must go to Carce so that I would be on hand when I was needed at a great crisis of the world. In support of his demand, he showed me astrological calculations which proved the necessity beyond any doubt. The stars didn’t describe the form of the danger, however: only the fact that it was focused on Carce.”

  “All roads lead to Carce,” Priscus said, quoting the old adage. He was smiling, but there was no laughter in his expression.

  “Yes,” said Pandareus simply. “Or at any rate, mine did.”

  He turned his hands up as if to show that they were empty, then said, “And lest you ask, I didn’t remember a single one of the astrological alignments when I awakened—only that they had been convincing.”

  “Have you come far?” the old woman asked. Her voice was as thin and dry as the rustling wing cases of cicadas.

  “Mistress,” Varus said, “I’m in the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. I haven’t traveled at all.”

  She laughed like silver chimes in place of the cracked tittering he had expected. “Do you think so, Gaius Varus?” she said, reaching out with her right hand. “Come with me and we’ll see what you say then.”

  Varus took the woman’s hand in his left. Her skin was like thin vellum, and the bones within were as fine as a bat’s. In the vault of the temple his body stood silently, touching the ancient stone box and gripping the ivory head beneath his toga.

  “My wife, Claudia, is an estimable woman,” Priscus said, “but she’s more superstitious than a kitchen maid just up from the country with her love potions and beauty creams. This is the sort of thing I’d expect to hear from her.”

  No one spoke. Priscus sighed and went on. “And I suppose if Claudia does describe that sort of dream to me in the future, I’d better listen to her. Since I believe you, my friend.”

  The commissioner’s voice trailed off, and the four figures in the vault faded into grayness. Varus and the old woman stood where they were, but fog rolled like a torrent beneath them. Low blue-gray hills on the horizon swept toward them. From the top of one boiled the fog which covered the world beneath.

  “That’s Vesuvius,” Varus said. Who was the woman? Her fingers rested as lightly on his as a perching butterfly. “We visited Baiae when I was a child, my sister and I and our nurses.”

  He’d seen his father in Baiae one afternoon. He’d seen Saxa only rarely until he’d started secondary schooling when he was twelve.

  “I remember Vesuvius, the smoke coming up all day,” he said. “Just like that.”

  “Smoke, you say?” said the old woman. “Watch, Gaius Varus!”

  The top of the cone lifted off with a shuddering roar. Fireballs shot skyward, and a phalanx of lava gushed in all directions. The liquid rock was as orange as flame, but a sulfurous yellow haze hung over it.

  “Watch!” the old woman repeated in her terrible voice.

  Lava splashed and spread like water from a downspout. It reached an olive grove. The trunks of individual trees shattered as the rock lapped them. Severed branches fell onto the surface of the flow and were carried along by it. They blazed and dissolved until only black outlines remained, distorting slowly as the rock spread onward.

  “Who are you?” Varus said. Though he shouted, no human voice could have been heard over the volcano’s constant crashing thunder.

  A flock of sheep grazed on the middle slope of the cone. They blatted at the oncoming lava; then, individually and in pairs, they turned and began trotting downhill. The shepherd and his two dogs stared in wonder for a further moment, then followed the sheep.

  “Who?” Varus repeated.

  The woman laughed. The cowl covered her face almost completely, but he saw the gleam of her eyes. “Who I am isn’t important,” she said. “I’m too old to be important. You’re the only thing that’s important, Gaius Varus, because you’re the only one who can stop this.”

  The shepherd and his flock reached the edge of a knob, then froze in horror: bubbling lava had circled the knob to either side, racing ahead of man and sheep and closing to trap them. The shepherd threw up his hands. His dogs yapped and made short rushes but the glare of the rock drove them back each time.

  “How do I stop it?” Varus shouted. “No one can stop it!”

  The lava surged forward to cover the knob. The animals in its path, sheep and dogs and man, gouted steam an instant before their dried remnants burned in a bone-devouring fire.

  “Only you, Varus!” the old woman cried. “And if not you, then no one!”

  They had risen to a great height. The world was a globe, and fire was engulfing it. Varus saw the figures of squat demons with bodies of flame climbing from the pit of Vesuvius. They marched outward shoulder to shoulder, igniting animals and trees and the very soil itself into black ash which the blazing rock then covered.

  Varus pointed to the fire demons. He was shouting, but he couldn’t understand his own words.

  “You or no one!” said the old woman, and Varus awakened. His friend Corylus was shaking him back to his senses.

  CORYLUS FELT UNCOMFORTABLE. The air in the vault was still, but the lamp flames twisting at the corners of his eyes made it seem that the gryphon heads were moving. He clasped his hands behind his back to keep from twitching toward a spear or a sword hilt.

  “I don’t see that this brings us any closer to being able to examine the Books, though,” Priscus said. “I already trusted you, and your dream visit from an Egyptian isn’t going to help sway the Senate. I—”

  “And then a great river of blazing fire will flow outward,” someone shrieked. The voice was that of an ancient woman, but it came from Varus’s lips.

  He stood with one hand spread on the stone casket and other gripping the object he’d brought from where it hung on a thong beneath his toga. Corylus saw the wink of age-yellowed ivory within the cylinder of his friend’s fingers.

  “It will devour every place, land and great ocean and gleaming sea,” cried the voice. “Lakes and rivers and springs, the implacable Underworld and the heavenly vault—all will be consumed!”

  Varus’s stern, set expression reminded Corylus of a statue of a young Stoic facing execution. His eyes blazed, and his throat swelled with the power of the voice that issued from it. Corylus hadn’t seen him take a breath since he started his declamation.

  Pandareus watched intently; Priscus stood transfixed, his face pale and without expression. Temple servants ringed the opening of the vault, staring down in a mixture of terror and confusion.

  “All the souls of men will gnash their teeth, burning in a river,” cried Varus’s lips. “The world is brimstone and a rush of fire and a blazing plain, and ashes will cover all!”

  Varus was swaying. Corylus made an instant decision—he didn’t know what was happening, so he went to his friend. He took Varus by the left wrist and the right shoulder, shifting him back from the casket and the light.

  “Varus!” he said. “Wake up!”

  Varus slumped. His body had been rigid; now if Corylus hadn’t had his arms around him, he would have fallen to the floor of fitted stone blocks. His flesh was icy despite the warmth of the vault.

  “Lord Priscus!” called Balaton from the nave of the temple. “Should we come down?”

  Corylus glanced up, caught the servant’s eyes, and dipped his chin in negation. They didn’t need more people down here at the moment.

  Priscus took a deep breath. “Pandareus, you sly dev il!” he said. “How did he do that? How did you do that?”

  “Not me, old friend,” said Pandareus. His smile was slight, but despite the pressure of events it was real. “And I don’t know precise
ly what Lord Varus did either. But I thought that if I brought him near the Books, perhaps something would happen.”

  Varus straightened. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely to Corylus. He squeezed his hand before they stepped apart. Probably they both were a little embarrassed; Corylus certainly was.

  They faced the older men. “Sirs,” Varus said. “I dreamed the way I did during my reading, but it wasn’t the same this time. I saw Vesuvius erupting.”

  He lowered his eyes and whispered, “It was terrible. Everything burned. People burned.”

  “So we gathered from what you recited to us, boy,” Priscus said. He shook his head in wonder. “Do you remember that?”

  “No sir,” Varus said. “I didn’t know what I was saying during the reading, either. What they tell me, what Corylus and Master Pandareus tell me I was saying.”

  “Sir?” said Corylus, holding the commissioner’s eyes. He was angry at being kept in the dark, because that was what it amounted to. Though he tried to control it, his tone was marginally stiffer than he should have been using while speaking to a venerable and exceptionally learned senator. “Please? What is there about what Varus said that made you ask Master Pandareus how he did it?”

  Priscus glanced at Pandareus, but before the teacher could respond he turned to the youths again. He gave them a crooked smile.

  “I don’t see any reason not to tell you,” he said, “given what just happened. Master Corylus, your friend just quoted from the Sibylline Books. Which he’s never seen and won’t be permitted to see until he’s been elected by the Senate to the Commission for the Sacred Rites. As I have no doubt he will be, in good time; but not till he’s my age or close to it.”

  “I assumed you would recognize a passage from the Books if you heard it, my friend,” Pandareus said. “I know and respect your memory.”

  Priscus sniffed, but he smiled also. “During consultations,” he said—he wasn’t whispering, but Corylus noticed that he pitched his voice a hair lower—“the Books are open. Any of the commissioners can read them. Most of my colleagues don’t use the opportunity, so far as I’ve noticed, but I do, and”—he smiled more broadly at Pandareus—“as my friend suggested, I do have a good memory. I hope that I’m not generally a vain man, but I do pride myself on that point.”