The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  Hedia got in with the supple ease of a snake. She snapped her fingers and the bearers took the weight of the litter again. They started forward.

  Alphena squeezed the wooden staff hard. The blood was tacky and gave her a good grip. It would be very satisfying to smash it into her stepmother’s fine features and end her effortless flow of commands.

  But because Alphena had more self-awareness than she was comfortable with, she also knew that Hedia’s quick, concise decisions had been correct from first to last. That was what made her so irritating.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Using a stylus on a wax tablet, Hedia wrote,

  My dear Anna, if you are well it is good; I also am well.

  Corylus is staying tonight with my son.

  Matters have occurred which have bearing on our discussion this morning. Please visit me tomorrow at the seventh hour—not earlier, though I might wish it, because I will be attending the rites involved with my husband taking up the consulship.

  I will have a litter waiting at your building at midday. The attendants will help you down the staircase.

  Sighing with relief, Hedia set the bronze stylus in its holder and motioned to her secretary, Praxos, who waited silently on the other side of the small writing desk in her reception room. The gesture was unnecessary: Praxos was already closing the tablet. Red wax warmed over the desk lamp, ready to pour on the ribbon closures when the secretary had tied them. He would press in the seal also, a piece of wood in which worm tunnels formed an H.

  Well, Hedia told herself, it was an H. It was as good an H as she could have made herself.

  Writing notes to friends with her own hand was a polite accomplishment for a woman with any pretense to social status, so of course Hedia could do it, but if any more had been required than a few lines, Praxos would have written it to her dictation. The result would have been quicker and clearer; one of the reasons Hedia used wax instead of brushing ink on papyrus or thin board was that corrections were easier to make. Treating Anna as an equal was both polite and politic, however, since they were allies in this business with Nemastes.

  “When it’s sealed, give it to a courier to take to the apartment of Master Corylus off the Argiletum,” Hedia said. “Give it to Iberus, now that I think of it; he already knows the way. And he’s to wait if Anna and her husband aren’t home when he arrives.”

  It was possible that they would be working—digging—in the old cemetery until nearly dawn.

  “Yes, your ladyship,” said the secretary, bending over the sealed tablet with an ink brush. He was writing Anna’s name on the thin sheet of elm which covered the written surface of the wax.

  Anna wouldn’t be able to read it herself, but her husband, Pulto, would. He’d been a watch stander in the army, so he had to be able to read a guard roster and basic orders. Poor as Hedia knew her handwriting to be, it was probably better than that of many centurions.

  Hedia rose to her feet and stretched. She could use some exercise to get rid of tonight’s tension, but it didn’t seem likely that events would fall that way. Still, an optimistic outlook had brought her more than one unexpected reward. Sometimes even more than one reward at a time.

  She smiled. She wasn’t sure how the expression read to the servants with her in the room; from the fact that they all went determinedly blank-faced, they probably didn’t take it as involving humor. It did, but that might bother them even more—particularly the straitlaced Praxos.

  “I’m going to see my husband,” Hedia said in quick decision. “Syra, wait up, though I hope I’ll not need you. The rest of you can go to bed.”

  The servants waited like statues until Hedia had swept regally through the door of the suite, which one of them was holding open. They were afraid that if they called attention to themselves, their mistress might find additional tasks for them.

  In fact Hedia was neither petty nor the flighty-minded sort of person who changed her mind often. The servants might prefer to think of her that way, though, than to dwell on the fact that if she threatened to have them flogged—or flayed—she wouldn’t change her mind then either.

  According to Agrippinus, her husband had come home—without Nemastes—not long before she and Alphena arrived. He wouldn’t be asleep yet; and anyway, she was willing to wake him up for this.

  Saxa’s suite had its own doorman. He didn’t attempt to stop her, but he turned his head and called loudly, “Her noble ladyship Hedia, your lordship.”

  She brushed past him. Saxa was sitting up in bed, attended by six servants. One was reading a poem, apparently on astrology in epic stanzas, while another was carefully tilting a cup of mulled wine so that his master could drink without using his hands. The wine warmer was a bronze basin with a water bath between its charcoal brazier and the mixture of wine and herbs; two servants tended it. The remaining pair were ready to fluff pillows, adjust the covers, or do anything else that the Senator wished.

  “You lot may leave,” said Hedia, emphasizing with a curt gesture that they would take her offer. The reader continued, though he wasn’t ignoring her. His eyes sought his master in terror for acquiescence or argument, so that he wouldn’t have to decide whom to obey on his own.

  Saxa hunched a little and pretended not to be aware of his wife’s presence. Hedia felt a degree of pity for the reader; the gods knew that she’d had a lot of frustrating experience with trying to get her husband to make a reasonable decision.

  Nonetheless, the servants had to learn that Lady Hedia was the person to obey because she wasn’t going to brook any alternative. She plucked the scroll from the reader’s hands—he gasped but didn’t try to fight her for it—and deposited it in the charcoal glowing under the wine warmer.

  “Out,” she repeated, gesturing again.

  The reader squealed in despair. He started for the door, then froze for a moment—and snatched the scroll back before finally scrambling out of the room. The papyrus was beginning to char, but it hadn’t caught fire yet.

  Hedia watched him go with a mixture of contempt and admiration. He was risking death by torture for a book which could be replaced for a few silver pieces. That was simply stupid—and it wasn’t even his book.

  On the other hand, the servant believed in something greater than his own life. That too was probably stupid … but it nonetheless made Hedia feel small about herself and her sophistication.

  She and her husband were alone in the room; the doorman latched the panel behind the reader, the last of the attendants. Saxa looked up and grimaced.

  “Hedia, dear,” he said. “I can’t talk tonight, I’m very upset. I was just trying to settle my mind before I went to sleep, and now I think I’m ready.”

  Hedia didn’t bother calling her husband a liar. “This is about your daughter,” she said. “Who is Spurius Cassius?”

  “What?” said Saxa. He no more could act convincingly than he could fly, so he really was at a loss. “I don’t know any Spurius Cassius. And what has he to do with Alphena?”

  He fluttered his hands in agitation; it was just as well that the servant had put the cup down on a side table instead of leaving it with his master. “Anyway, I can’t talk now, dear, I’m just not up to it!”

  Hedia sat down on the bed beside her husband. She felt tired and sad, but she wasn’t angry anymore. Saxa looked helpless. His fists were clenched on the bedspread, but he looked more like he was going to try to rub tears of desperation out of his eyes than to hit anything.

  He certainly wouldn’t hit her. There’d been a number of men in Hedia’s life who had—and had lived to regret it—but Saxa wasn’t like that. He was a decent man, and because of that she loved him.

  “Dear heart,” she said, “tonight the statue of Tellus told your daughter that she would marry Spurius Cassius and reign in the Underworld. The voice was male, so I don’t imagine that the goddess was really speaking; it must have been a trick, but a very clever trick.”

  She took a deep breath and went on: “I saw the sta
tue’s lips move. I thought I did.”

  “Really?” said Saxa, sitting up straighter. “Why, that’s very interesting, my dear! I’ve read of similar prodigies, but to have one occur now and in my own family—why, this is amazing!”

  “Saxa,” Hedia said, knowing that she was letting her exasperation show. “This is your daughter, Alphena. Your daughter.”

  “She wasn’t harmed, was she?” Saxa said in sudden concern. “I know I’ve been distracted, dear, but it would be terrible if anything happened to Alphena. Or to Varus, of course.”

  “Varus is fine,” Hedia said, wondering why she’d bothered to start this conversation, “and nothing happened to Alphena tonight except that she was badly frightened.”

  The girl would certainly object to being characterized as frightened, but it was true. Hedia would have said the same thing even if it weren’t true: she had to get her husband to open up to her. Making him afraid for his children’s safety was one of the few tools she had to do that.

  “It’s what’s going to happen to Alphena that worries me,” she continued harshly. “She has to be dead to be in the Underworld, whether queen or not. Doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, I quite see what you mean,” Saxa said, but the brief personal note was gone from his voice. “And you’re quite sure you saw the statue’s lips move?”

  “I’m sure,” Hedia said curtly, though by now she wasn’t really sure that her eyes hadn’t been tricking her in the dim light. And she’d drunk quite a lot of wine. “My lord husband, is Nemastes behind this?”

  “What?” said Saxa. He stiffened and leaned his upper body away from Hedia, though of course he wasn’t going anywhere until he disentangled his legs from the bedclothes on which she was sitting. “Why do you say that? What could Nemastes have to do with it?”

  I don’t know, Hedia thought, but you must at least have an idea or you wouldn’t find the question so disturbing. Saxa really shouldn’t try to lie or even to conceal the truth.

  She got to her feet. Staring down at him, she said, “My lord Saxa, this is your daughter’s life—or worse. What is Nemastes doing to her?”

  “Nothing!” Saxa said. He closed his eyes in misery. “Nothing, nothing, nothing! Not that I know of, Hedia. But”—his voice became a wail—“I know so little, and the dangers are so great!”

  Instead of a gush of frustrated anger, Hedia felt her heart melt toward the poor man. He was completely out of his depth, and he knew it. She was out of her depth also, but that made her the more determined to fight; her own strength was all she had left.

  Saxa, dear kindly Saxa, didn’t have any inner strength. Well, he had her; she would supply the backbone that nature had not.

  Hedia sat on the bed again and tousled his hair with her left hand. For a moment she massaged his bald spot with her fingertips; she knew he liked that.

  Then she unpinned one shoulder of her chiton and tugged it down to her waist. “Come, dear husband,” she said, lifting her right breast and holding it out to him. The nipple hardened in anticipation. “Come, you know you’ll feel better. You always do.”

  “No, Hedia, not now, please!” Saxa said. His face scrunched up and he looked even more as though he were about to burst into tears. “In the morning I’ll look into the prodigy. There have been similar ones, but none that I recall that involve private persons.”

  He must have seen the way the planes of her face had hardened. With a flare of his own anger, he snapped, “I said I would look. That’s all I can do!”

  Before she could decide how to respond, Saxa sank back into misery and desperation. “Hedia, Hedia,” he said. He was crying now. “You say it’s my daughter. It’s not. It’s the whole world. Unless we stop them, they’ll destroy the whole world!”

  Saxa buried his face in the pillows. Hedia, her mind wrestling with questions she couldn’t properly form, left his bedroom.

  She was almost back to her own suite before she remembered to cover her breasts again.

  ALPHENA HAD FOUND LENATUS WAITING in the street when she and the others arrived. Varus had helped along the limping Corylus. Most or all of the thirty-odd attendants were better suited to supporting the injured youth than Varus was, but he’d insisted on being the one his friend leaned on.

  Alphena had taken time to change into a short tunic and comfortable shoes in place of the high buskins that formality required. Now she was ready to join the men.

  She’d heard Lenatus say that he’d look at Corylus in the bath house, a small affair attached to the exercise ground. Occasionally Hedia used it, but normally the family went to the large public bath house on the corner of the Argiletum, where the facilities were much more extensive and comfortable. The private one was intended for members of the household who had just exercised in the gymnasium. That meant Alphena herself—and recently Corylus.

  Servants were gathered outside the closed door. There must be fifty of them, squeezing together so that each could claim to have been present. They couldn’t possibly have been overhearing what was said inside: their breathing alone would smother words that penetrated the thick panel.

  Alphena felt her anger blaze. She’d been threatened by a spectral voice and bullied by her stepmother; now she had a legitimate target for her temper.

  “Get out of here!” she shouted. “I’ll have you flogged! By Hercules, I’ll flog you myself! Where’s a whip? I want a whip!”

  The crowd burst like a melon dropped onto a stone pavement. Servants ran in all directions except straight at the young mistress—and, blinking, Alphena realized that with the way they were shoving each other, it was perfectly possible that one of them would lose his balance and knock her down.

  A scullery maid slipped and was trampled by several of her fellows. She squealed in terror every time someone stepped on her. Tear-blinded, she was still squirming on the hallway floor after the rest of the servants had vanished either into the back garden or toward the front of the house.

  Alphena felt queasy. She’s no older than me! She bent and took the girl’s hand. The maid rose to her knees; she wasn’t really hurt. When she wiped her eyes and saw who had helped her, however, she gave a muffled shriek and ran into the garden.

  Alphena pulled open the bath house door. In the light of a pair of three-wick lamps, Corylus reclined on the table while Lenatus applied ointment to his knee. Varus was refilling a basin from the large boiler in the corner. This facility was too small to have a proper heated bath, but servants could sponge you with hot water before a massage.

  Now that the torn skin had been cleaned, the scrapes didn’t look too serious. His right knee had swollen to half again the size of the left, however. Unless it went down under the trainer’s ministrations, it would be as stiff as if it had been splinted.

  The three men stared at Alphena. She had assumed that she’d announced her presence when she shouted at the servants, but the trio had obviously been too involved with their own business to pay any attention.

  Lenatus had a napkin draped over his knees to wipe his hands as he applied the ointment. He tossed it over Corylus’s manhood and rose to face her, standing between Alphena and his patient. The pot of ointment smelled like sheep.

  “Your ladyship, you shouldn’t be here,” Lenatus said. His expression was one of cold misery, like that of a brave man who has just been sentenced to death. “Please leave now.”

  “Who are you to tell me where I can go in my father’s house, you servant?” Alphena said. She heard her voice rising to a scream and hated it, but she could no more control the tone than she could stop breathing. “Don’t you dare give me orders!”

  Lenatus flinched, but he didn’t move. In a quiet voice without inflection he said, “Your ladyship.” It wasn’t a plea or a complaint, just the simplest acknowledgment he could make of the fact that the young mistress was shouting at him.

  Alphena gasped, appalled at herself. She thought of the look on the scullery maid’s face when she recognized her mistress.

  T
he trainer knew that no matter what he did in the present situation, there was a good chance that he would be dismissed and possibly crucified. All the servants knew what it meant to anger their ladyships, Alphena as surely as Hedia.

  If Lenatus let her stay while he worked on Corylus’s injuries, however, her father’s social position meant he would have to take action if he learned about it. The trainer was bound to have at least one enemy among the hundreds of servants in the town house, so Saxa would surely learn.

  Varus stepped forward. He’d put down the basin, but his hands were still wet from wringing out the bloody sponge.

  “Sister,” he said with a dignity that Alphena didn’t recall him displaying in the past. “Please show courtesy to our guest, Master Corylus. He isn’t an exotic animal on display at the Games.”

  Alphena stepped back into the corridor, but she kept hold of the door. “Yes,” she said. “Master Corylus, I apologize. I’m, I … tonight was upsetting. And to you too, Lenatus.”

  “Thank you, Sister,” said Varus, reaching out to take the door from her.

  “A moment, please,” Alphena said sharply. Speaking as though the trainer were a curtain, she said, “Master Corylus, you won’t be going to the auguries for my father’s consulship tomorrow morning, will you?”

  Lenatus had given a sigh of relief when Alphena backed from the bath house. He stiffened again, though this time he looked wary instead of doomed.

  “Ah, no, your ladyship,” Corylus said. If she could have seen his expression, it probably would have been as careful as the trainer’s was. “It’s a nonbusiness day so we don’t have class, but I thought I’d go home and … well, to be honest, I’d reassure Anna. She fusses over me, you know.”

  “I’ll leave you with Lenatus now,” Alphena said. “But promise you’ll train with me tomorrow before you leave.”

  There was frozen silence from the bath house. Alphena added, “At the fourth hour. And I understand, we won’t be sparring.”