The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  “By Hercules, you fool!” said Naevius. “That’s enough. Just get back.”

  The priest paused for a moment to compose himself. Then he pulled up a fold of his toga to cover his head and lifted the curved rod in his right hand.

  “I pray to you, Jupiter, the chief and best among the gods, all-seeing and lord of all!” he chanted. “You are the fulfiller who whispers into the ears of the prophets. Be gracious, all-seeing lord of the heavens, most excellent and great! Bless these undertakings with your wisdom!”

  Naevius lowered his staff and stepped back. He looked ready to snarl at Herennianus, but the chickenkeeper had already gestured frantically to the servants with the basket. They lifted off the wicker top and tipped the opening down to decant the sacred hens into the circle.

  Three birds spilled out. Their feathers were completely white; Hedia presumed that was a requirement for the post.

  But one hen had blood in her neck where another had pecked her. There was a collective gasp from the spectators. Even Hedia, who knew little and believed nothing about this business, felt a stab of cold to see the blotch.

  “Catch that chicken!” cried the priest, swinging his staff at the chicken. “Don’t let it eat!”

  All three birds turned and ran toward the grove of cypresses, squawking and flapping their wings. The birds took increasingly long hops. Their wings had been clipped but not recently enough, and when the breeze gusted all three managed to get airborne. Herennianus ran after them bawling in horror, but his servants remained transfixed.

  Varus shrugged out of his toga and ran after the chickenkeeper. Hedia saw him drop his notebook down the neck of his tunic so that the sash would hold it at his waist. Pandareus jumped from her side and sprinted through the circle; his feet scattered the uneaten meal.

  Like the escorts of the other nobles, the boy’s servants had been keeping well back from the ceremony. They must not have realized what was happening immediately, because Varus had dropped his toga. When Candidus recognized the youth in a tunic as his master, he started after him with a shout as horrified as that of Herennianus a moment before.

  The chickens vanished among the cypresses. They flew into the branches, Hedia thought; but their white feathers should have showed up vividly against the sparse foliage.

  The chickenkeeper, Varus, and Pandareus followed—and vanished. There were only six trees in the grove, but Hedia couldn’t see the men among them.

  And from the increasingly desperate shouts of Candidus and the rest of Varus’s escort, neither could they.

  CORYLUS AWAKENED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT and slid open the curtain of the alcove. Though the shutters were closed, the suite was so bright that he had to squint.

  “Good morning, Master Corylus,” said an oily under-steward who’d been part of Varus’s escort at the Temple of Jupiter. He bowed deeply. Three footmen stood with him against the outside wall of the bedroom proper. “His young lordship instructed us to provide you with whatever you wished upon rising.”

  That’s typically thoughtful of Varus, Corylus thought. The fact that his friend had been able to get up and dress without waking his guest was remarkable, though. I must have been sleeping the sleep of the dead.

  “A little bread and wine for breakfast, if you please,” he said aloud. His stomach rumbled. He thought of porridge but decided he didn’t want the weight. But perhaps some cheese? No, not that either.

  A footman scurried off in silent obedience. Corylus thought of the dream he’d had, then looked down. His feet were splashed with mud, and a half-rotted birch leaf, one cast the previous fall, stuck to the inside of his left arch.

  He peeled it off, thinking. The servants watched, silent and probably uninterested. The leaf was a matter of concern only because of the dream—of which they knew nothing.

  Corylus swallowed. “What time is it?” he asked, suddenly remembering that he’d promised Alphena to exercise with her.

  “Almost half past the third hour, sir,” said the steward, bowing again. His name’s Manetho, isn’t it? Not that it mattered. “The young master has gone with his father and mother to the Temple of Jupiter to take auspices for the noble Lord Saxa’s consulate.”

  The steward coughed delicately into his palm. “The young master directed that we show you every courtesy until his return, which he expected would be not long after midday.”

  The footman reentered the suite. Instead of bringing a quarter loaf of bread and a cup of wine lees to dip it in—Corylus’s normal breakfast, perhaps with fruit or (out of season) dried fruit—he was accompanied by four members of the kitchen staff. The first held a platter with six styles of breads and buns; a silver mixing bowl and cup were on the second man’s tray; and the maids carried a jar of wine and a jar of water respectively.

  Corylus stared at them in a mixture of frustration and horror. They knew I just wanted a simple breakfast! But maybe they didn’t know; and anyway if they brought this panoply, they couldn’t be accused of not carrying out the young master’s orders. Varus wouldn’t play that sort of game. His sister might if she was in a bad mood, though; and Alphena seemed to have more than her share of bad moods.

  “Right,” he said. He was still frustrated and more than a little horrified. He wouldn’t take it out on the servants, but neither was he going to be bound by their standards of propriety.

  Corylus took the wine jar from the girl—she eeped but didn’t object—and the cup from its tray, then poured a few ounces of unmixed wine into the cup. He returned the jar, then took what he hoped was a wheat bun from the other tray while the servants watched in concern.

  He’d expected Manetho to protest aloud. He seemed to have become less officiously garrulous than Corylus remembered him being in the past.

  “I’m going into the back garden to eat my breakfast,” Corylus said in what could easily have been taken as a challenging tone. “I do not wish to be attended while I do so.”

  He turned toward the door to the suite. Manetho bent to whisper in the ear of a footman. As soon as Corylus was out of the door, the footman sprinted past him.

  Nothing is simple, Corylus thought with a grimace. But in this case, the footman was probably going to clear the garden for him.

  That was an advantage to being extremely rich. You certainly couldn’t get everybody out of the central courtyard of the apartment block Corylus lived in, not unless you were willing to deploy most of a cohort for the job.

  Corylus sauntered past the gymnasium on one side and the summer dining room on the other. A miscellaneous group of servants was leaving the garden as he approached; they hastened to get out of his way. Mostly they turned their faces away when they saw him, but the footman who’d brought the warning made a short bow of acknowledgment.

  The gate onto the alley banged closed as Corylus entered by the inside door. Apparently Manetho’s order had applied—or been applied—to the guard on duty as well as to loitering members of the household staff. Corylus didn’t imagine that he had real privacy, but at least he wouldn’t find himself listening to a watchman’s reminiscences about service in the army … or the city watch … or the bodyguard of some Lycian chieftain.

  Corylus really wanted to relax and think about last night’s dream or whatever it was, before he had to deal with Alphena. That wasn’t going to be relaxing.

  There were two trees in the garden, a pear and a peach, but the pear was leafless and the bark was scaling off its dead trunk. Munching a bite of bun which he’d dipped in the wine, Corylus walked over to examine it.

  His frown deepened. Several of the branches had split along the grain. Corylus had seen that happen in Germany, when a hard frost had struck early and sap still in the limbs of fruit trees had split them. There’d been no such frost in Carce, not in the past few nights—or ever, he suspected.

  “Well, hello!” someone behind him said in a throaty voice.

  Corylus spun, choking on the last bite of what had turned out to be a currant bun. A young woman was seated o
n the curb of the spring in the corner beyond the peach tree. He’d never seen her before. She had red-gold hair and wore a silk synthesis dyed to a perfectly matching color.

  Whoever the woman was, she hadn’t come far. She was barefoot, and her garment was so thin that Corylus could be certain that she didn’t wear anything beneath it.

  “I’m Persica,” she said, patting the ancient stone. “Come sit with me, why don’t you? I’m more fun than she was, even before the Hyperborean killed her two days ago.”

  Corylus coughed his throat clear, then swallowed to dispose of the last of the crumbs. “Ma’am?” he said. “You say that the Hyperborean killed this tree? Nemastes, you mean?”

  “Come!” she repeated in a sharper tone, patting the curb again. She pouted and said, “I don’t know about their names. He and his kind hate anything that’s alive.”

  Her expression became petulant. Before she could repeat her command, Corylus walked toward her with the care he’d have shown if he were on point for a patrol on the east bank of the river.

  Smiling again, Persica—Peaches, a name she’d probably adopted because of her hair and rosy complexion—went on. “I don’t know why this one left the Band. They should all stay on the Horn, where there’s nothing but themselves and the demons.”

  Corylus seated himself on the woman’s right, keeping the wine cup—now almost empty—in his left hand. She shifted closer and took the cup, setting it on the curb on the side opposite him, where it didn’t get in her way. She snuggled closer still.

  He didn’t know who Persica was, but she was obviously at home in the town house and she wasn’t a kitchen maid. She might be Hedia’s sister, come to stay with them. Her behavior was, well, even more blatant than Hedia’s.

  Or she might be Saxa’s mistress. Corylus didn’t know much about how nobles conducted their private lives, but he suspected that any household with Hedia in it would be conducted loosely by any standards.

  “Ah, do you know why Nemastes killed the tree, ah, Persica?” Corylus asked. He didn’t move from where he was sitting, but he leaned his body as much to the right as he could without being too obvious about it.

  She put her arm around his waist. “My,” she said as he tensed. “You’re hard all over, aren’t you? You don’t have any fat.”

  Corylus stood up abruptly. “I was wondering about Nemastes?” he said, giving her a weak smile. He gestured to the pear. “Why he killed this tree?”

  Servants would be listening to everything that was going on. Regardless of whether Persica was a senator’s mistress or a senator’s sister-in-law, the best thing that could result from Corylus getting involved with her would be that he’d be barred from the house immediately.

  And though his father was a native-born citizen and a substantial businessman in his own right, there was a real possibility of much worse results. The gap between Corylus and the urban riffraff wasn’t nearly as wide as the gap between Corylus and a senator.

  Corylus grinned despite himself. Nor was he naive enough to imagine that the fact that the woman had made advances to him would have any effect, except possibly to enrage Saxa even more.

  The girl pouted. “You’re as cold as a Hyperborean yourself!” she said. “And anyway, he killed pear”—she didn’t say “the pear”—“by accident anyway. Not that he would have cared. He was doing a divination and something went wrong.”

  She looked up with a cruel grin. “Maybe his friends back on the Horn have found him,” she said. “They’re pretty mad, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Her pique turned to anger. Glaring at Corylus, she said, “Do you ignore me because of that little girl? Why, she’ll never be able to do the things for you that I could!”

  “Hercules!” Corylus said. “No, that’s—well, I’m not interested in Alphena. Hercules! You shouldn’t suggest such a thing in her own father’s house!”

  “Him?” sneered Persica. “Why should I care about that soft old man? Though you’re not much more interesting than he is, it seems.”

  That doesn’t mean she’s not Saxa’s mistress, Corylus thought with a grimace. In fact, given what he’d seen of the girl’s personality, it was even more likely that she was.

  He glanced at the sundial. He was sure that Alphena would come to find him if he wasn’t in the gymnasium when he’d promised to be, but that would be at least another ten minutes. For once the girl’s presence—and the scene she would probably throw—would be welcome.

  “Mercurial” seemed far too mild a word for Persica’s moods. He didn’t want to learn what would happen if he tried to leave the garden without a rear guard, so to speak ….

  “Where did Saxa get these elephant teeth?” he said, walking carefully toward the portico on the south side of the garden. “I’ve never seen any so large. Or curved like this either.”

  “That’s more of the Hyperborean’s doing,” Persica said with obvious disinterest. “He brought them here because a foreigner wouldn’t be allowed in the temple they came from. He wanted them for a focus. I listened to him and the old man talk.”

  Corylus touched the ivory with his fingertips. Though the tusk was faintly yellow, age hadn’t begun to craze its surface. The distance between the tip, worn by digging, and the base was as much as he could span with both arms, but the length along its deep curve was much greater.

  They were nothing like the tusks of the elephants he’d seen in the arena, trapped on the Mediterranean coast of Libya. Carthaginian explorers had claimed that the elephants living far to the south, beyond the great desert, were bigger—but not this big, and anyway, Corylus didn’t take everything he read as true beyond question. The giant serpent that attacked Regulus in Varus’s epic was described by historians also—though without the poisonous breath.

  He ran his fingers along the ivory. What these reminded him of were the tusks of the shaggy elephants that he’d seen in the vision which ended with Saxa and Nemastes chanting over a brazier.

  They’d seen Corylus, also. No wonder the wizard thought that the youth intended to attack him!

  He turned. The girl was staring at his back with an unpleasant expression.

  “Ah, Lady Persica?” he said. Even if he was overstating her rank, it was safer than making the opposite mistake. “Do you know where these teeth came from originally? That is, are they from … well, Hyperborea?”

  “How would I know what there might be in Hyperborea?” Persica snapped. “But yes, I suppose they were. The wizard said something like that.”

  She got up and walked into the southeast corner of the portico. Corylus was glad to see that she wasn’t joining him but wary about what she was doing. She touched the oscillum, the disk of polished marble, there. It was in full sun. As it quivered, it threw highlights across the shaded interior.

  “You find the bones of dead animals more interesting than me, I see,” the girl said. She didn’t raise her voice, but the inflection she gave “animals” was nothing short of poisonous. “Well, would you like to see why he wanted to use them?”

  She gave the oscillum a hard flip, making it spin more quickly than a breeze would have done. The reflections licking across Corylus were alternately bright and diffuse: one side of the disk was smooth, while the other bore a low relief of Priapus holding his outsized penis in both hands. The curved side scattered the sunlight more.

  “Ah, yes, thank you, I would,” Corylus said. He doubted that he would learn anything useful, but perhaps there’d be something he could describe to Pandareus. Anyway, it would occupy the girl for a time; a long enough time, he hoped, for Alphena to arrive to save him.

  “Stand where you are, then,” Persica said. She brushed the bottom of the oscillum to slow it, then gave the edge a tap with her finger to adjust the speed at which it rotated. “The Hyperborean used an incantation too, but he didn’t understand light. None of you do.”

  She sounded sourly irritated. She was obviously angry that he’d rejected her advances. But what had she expected, here in Saxa�
�s own house?

  “What should I do now?” Corylus asked quietly. In Persica’s present mood, she was likely to scream at him whether he spoke or kept silence, but he was going to try to be pleasantly attentive even though he didn’t expect it to work.

  “Stand where you are!” the girl said. “Are you deaf as well as being a eunuch?”

  The reflected light made Corylus slit his eyes to watch through his lashes. It wasn’t so bright that it dazzled him, but the rhythm was beginning to be bothersome. Persica continued to tap the disk, never hard but minusculely faster each time.

  Corylus was becoming dizzy. “Lady Persica—,” he said, about to end the demonstration—or at least his part in it.

  Light glinted on snowfields. “Stop this!” he said.

  Corylus took a step toward Persica and fell onto a stony beach. His skin prickled, and his eyes throbbed with the flashing pattern of the oscillum. He heard the triumphant trill of the girl’s laughter; then that too was gone.

  Corylus was alone beside a river, facing a distant shore on which a snow-covered volcano smoked. Blocks of ice wobbled in the slow current, and in the cold white sky a seagull shrieked.

  ALPHENA STORMED INTO the back garden. She’d left her helmet behind in the exercise yard, but she carried her shield because she hadn’t bothered to unfasten the strap from the stud on her breastplate. Lenatus had chosen not to follow her.

  She was furious: with Corylus, who hadn’t kept their appointment, and also (though she couldn’t have given a reason for it) with her stepmother. All Lenatus could tell her—or would tell her—was that he hadn’t seen Master Corylus this morning and that the boy hadn’t changed in the dressing room.

  Alphena had caught a pair of footmen near the door to the gym before they could scatter. They had exchanged glances before one admitted hearing a maid mention that the young man was taking his breakfast to the garden, “—though I haven’t seen him myself, your ladyship.”

  If Corylus was here, reading a book and forgetting the time they’d set to meet, Alphena would let it pass. Well, let it pass mostly.