The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  The slab tore downward in a spray of lesser fragments; the sound of its jouncing progress was literally earthshaking. Varus got a mouthful of dust and began sneezing violently. He looked over the ledge, splaying his left fingers over his eyes to stop some of the flying chips.

  The six-foot slab hit the lizard fifty feet below with a sharp crack! and bounced. The shock drove the lizard back to the bottom of the crater.

  It writhed to its feet and shook itself. Its gray hide showed no sign of injury. It placed its right forefoot on the crater wall and began to claw upward again.

  “I suppose,” Pandareus croaked, “that we should not be surprised that a creature we meet under these circumstances would not be of a wholly natural sort. I wonder what Aristotle would say?”

  The ivory talisman throbbed against Varus’s chest; he felt the prickly white haze close over him as it had in the vault of the Temple of Jupiter. He thought he saw figures moving in the shadows, but they made no sign when he raised his hand to gesture.

  The fog felt cool. It soothed his burning lungs.

  “Greetings, Lord Varus,” said the wizened old woman he’d met when he was in the temple vault. She held a closed scroll in her right hand and a clear glass ampoule in her left. Something moved within the jar, but it was too small for Varus to tell what it was.

  “Mistress?” he said. “Can you help me?”

  “Help you, Lord Varus?” said the old woman. “No, not I. But you can help yourself if you like.”

  Her lips moved as though she were speaking, but from Varus’s own throat piped the words “Out I go at once, flinging wide the doors! I have no fear—”

  The fog dissipated into bright light and cries of wonder.

  “—as I welcome my kinsmen!” Varus said.

  He staggered forward as his legs crumpled. His stepmother caught him and kept him from falling.

  He was back beneath the cypresses of the Capitoline Hill. Servants clustered around him; Midas was supporting Pandareus, whose knees and even cheek had been scraped by the rock.

  Mine too, I suppose, Varus thought as he took his weight on his own legs again. Hedia was surprisingly strong.

  He looked at his teacher and grinned. Not even Caesar had this to write about, he thought. But he was already sure that he wouldn’t be discussing what had happened with anyone but Pandareus and Corylus.

  CHAPTER X

  The breeze that fluttered the hem of Corylus’s borrowed tunic had come from the north, across the river beside him in which blocks of ice bobbed. He knew he’d be extremely cold—maybe dangerously cold—shortly, but for the moment his blood was too hot with emotion for him to feel it.

  He was on a strand of dark gravel—broken basalt, he thought. The river was turbid, roiled to a pale gray from silt; in the near distance to the north was a tall cone from which a line of steam drifted westward. Lupine and magenta fireweed grew down into the shingle, while a little higher up the slope were scattered spruce trees and the little white flowers of bunchberry.

  There was no sign of wolves or, for that matter, any animal life. Corylus hunched and walked up the gravel margin, then raised his head cautiously. Stands of birches and alders were darker blotches on a plain covered with coarse grass. A straggling line of brush a quarter mile to the east probably marked a lesser stream flowing into the river on whose bank he stood.

  Or was it an inlet of the sea? Corylus returned to the edge and dipped two fingers of his left hand, then licked them. The water was fresh, but it had a gritty texture.

  Floating near the shore was a brown, spindle-shaped object almost ten feet long. Corylus started back, thinking it was a sea animal; after an instant he realized it must be an overturned leather boat. It had apparently caught on something.

  He thought for a moment, then pulled off his tunic and tossed it onto a carpet of ferns and fireweed to keep it off the ground. He didn’t know how deep the water was. Stepping into it would be unpleasant regardless, but his skin would dry more quickly than the woolen fabric would.

  Corylus stepped into the water. His right leg found bottom at knee level, but his left followed it to midthigh.

  He grabbed the prow of the boat and pulled with both hands. It resisted. Wondering what it could be caught on, Corylus tried lifting it. The boat was much heavier than it should be. Finally he braced himself on the smooth rocks of the bottom and strained until he managed to turn the boat onto its keel again.

  It bobbed free and came to shore with him then. It was a kayak. The occupant was still laced tightly into the cockpit. He was a stocky man with coarse black hair and a flat face. He’d been dead about three days, as best Corylus could judge.

  Corylus pulled the kayak far enough up on the shingle to be stable, then looked at the man. He wore skin garments skillfully sewn with the fur side in. He was probably in his midtwenties, but Corylus couldn’t be sure. The corpse had been hanging upside down in the straps, so its face was mottled and swollen.

  The wind was beginning to bite. Exertion had kept Corylus warm while he struggled with the boat, but his body was cooling quickly now.

  The dead man wore a shoulder belt to which a number of tools were tied with lengths of sinew. Corylus drew a knife from a sheath which covered half the bone hilt. The blade was grayish green and translucent: obsidian, not metal, and sharp enough to shave sunlight. He used it to cut the straps, which had swollen from their long immersion.

  Having sheathed the knife carefully—it was a godsend to him under the circumstances—Corylus was able to lift the corpse. Its legs had stiffened at a right angle to the body, but he was able to work them out through the opening. He set the body on the strand and stripped off the tool belt and the long, soft boots. Then he paused to consider the situation.

  The fur coat and trousers would be very useful, even though the dead man had been at least a handbreadth shorter than Corylus was. He wasn’t bothered by the notion of stripping the garments from a corpse, but to remove them he’d have to break the stiffened arms and legs. That wasn’t the way to treat a benefactor, even an unwitting one.

  Corylus sighed. He could cut himself a wrap from the boat, he supposed, if he didn’t decide to paddle somewhere himself.

  The situation came home to him like someone piling bricks on his shoulders: he didn’t have anyplace to go. Carce—or even the German provinces—must be unimaginably far south of here. He’d try, of course, but the thought robbed him of strength and hope.

  A pair of ravens flew overhead, turned, and banked to land on the shingle some fifty feet away. For a moment Corylus imagined that they might be Wisdom and Memory from his vision, but these seemed to be ordinary birds. They croaked angrily, then hopped closer while keeping their eyes on him.

  Which brought up another problem: what to do with the body? He could simply leave it where it was, of course; or he could shove it back into the water where he’d found it. He didn’t really owe the dead man anything, after all.

  He heard plaintive yipping; it was probably foxes, though it might even have been birds. The sound couldn’t have been far away, since it was coming from downwind of where he stood with his dilemma.

  He sighed. Well, he’d already decided when he didn’t take the garments, he supposed.

  Feeling like a fool but with no doubt in his mind, Corylus carried the corpse to the top of the floodway and set it among the ferns. Without pausing to think the matter over—his skin had dried off, and his tunic would feel very good against the breeze—Corylus strode into the water again and began picking up rocks from the channel.

  The dead man’s equipment had included a basket woven from finely split willow withies. Though it folded into a package no bigger than a man’s paired fists, it was capacious and tough—the perfect tool for carrying five or six head-sized rocks at a time from the river bottom to the corpse.

  Corylus kept working at the cairn without allowing himself to think about what he was doing. He had many pressing tasks to accomplish if he was to survive; but he
had to complete the tomb immediately if it was to be of any purpose. A half-raised cairn would be simply a dining hall for the birds and beasts.

  The ravens were angry. They hopped and even flew short distances to one side or the other, but they didn’t come within twenty feet of the corpse.

  There were egg-sized rocks among the gravel which Corylus could have thrown with hard accuracy, but he wouldn’t bother unless the birds tested him a little closer. Till then—and the ravens seemed to understand the unspoken rules—Corylus could concentrate on building the cairn.

  He’d started by dumping rocks on the ground nearby, then setting them on the corpse. As the job wore on—and wore Corylus—he began decanting the stones directly onto the body. He was as gentle as he could be, but it simply wasn’t practical to pretend to the niceness that leisured civilians could indulge in.

  The dead man hadn’t been coddled in life. He would understand.

  It wasn’t until Corylus started to place the last basket of rocks that he understood that it was the last basket. The corpse was hidden beneath a mound that was at least two layers thick. The individual rocks were too big for birds or foxes to move, and they’d give pause even to wolves.

  Voles could creep in, he supposed, but they could tunnel through the soil as well. Besides, voles weren’t interested in the flesh, though they’d gnaw the bones when decomposition had freed them.

  Corylus shrugged into his tunic, then hung the tool belt over his own shoulder. He looked at the mound and quirked a smile at it.

  “May the stones lie light on you, my friend,” he said. He didn’t have a better prayer to offer; and maybe there wasn’t a better one.

  Cold, tired, but surprisingly satisfied with himself, Corylus started off westward. It was time to think about his own meal, because he’d definitely worked up an appetite.

  ALPHENA FOUND HERSELF STANDING on turf instead of the stone coping. She flailed her arms instinctively as her cleats dug into the sod. The weight of her shield nearly pulled her over.

  It was night instead of noon as it had been in the garden. Besides that, the moon was in its first quarter instead of being a day past full as it would be when it rose tonight in Carce. The warm air was scented with unfamiliar spices, and the trees were nothing like anything Alphena had ever seen.

  Something very close by screamed in metallic rage. Alphena turned toward the sound and drew her sword. She didn’t know what was happening, but it obviously wasn’t happening in the garden of the noble Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa.

  The shriek sounded again. Alphena sidled toward it carefully, looking over the top of her rectangular shield. Three layers of birch had been laminated into a sheet so that the grain crossed and then recrossed. The whole was about two inches thick, bulky as well as heavy.

  Alphena suddenly didn’t mind the shield’s awkwardness. At the moment it gave her more confidence than the double-edged short sword in her other hand, though that too was of army pattern.

  She worked her way around a line of leaves which were each the size of a blanket. Twenty feet away, a cat the size of an ox was clawing at the thin trunk of a tree topped not with branches but rather with what looked like a single dock leaf.

  A man in a full cloak balanced precariously on the leaf. His broad-brimmed traveler’s hat lay near the base of the tree where the cat must have surprised him. He met Alphena’s eyes, then looked away. The leaf concealed him from the beast’s vantage, but out of sight obviously didn’t take him out of the creature’s mind.

  The cat stretched to its full height, then ripped both forepaws down. Strips and fragments flew from the trunk; the top wobbled, causing the man to adjust his position. The cat couldn’t reach to within fifteen feet of him, but in a few minutes the severed trunk would topple him to the ground.

  The cat moved back slightly and paced, its eyes always upward. Alphena had thought it was a cat beyond the size of any lion she’d seen in the arena. When it moved out from the shadow of the leaf, she saw that its head was human—or almost human.

  The creature’s long, narrow face wouldn’t have aroused comment on the streets of Carce so long as it kept its mouth shut. When it opened its jaws for another high-pitched, terrible scream, Alphena saw teeth like the points of javelins.

  She recognized the creature then: it was a sphinx. Had Persica transported her to the lands below Egypt where such monsters might live?

  The sphinx leaped at the tree, slashing furiously with both forepaws. The top swayed, tipping toward the creature despite the attempts of the man hiding there to shift his weight to the back.

  His only chance of survival was to distract the beast long enough for him to get away or at least to a more secure refuge. He could have called its attention to me easily enough, then run the other way. He didn’t do that.

  The sphinx’s back was toward her as it ripped into the tree trunk. Alphena sprinted toward it. The short sword wasn’t the best weapon for the job, but if she had her choice she wouldn’t be here at all.

  The beast must have gotten an inkling of her presence just before she reached it, because it twisted down at her with astonishing speed. She thrust toward its kidneys, but the tip of her sword skidded across its ribs instead of biting into the vitals.

  The sphinx’s paw batted the shield like a stone from a siege catapult. Alphena skidded backward to the edge of the leaf from which she’d charged. Her left arm was numb, and the creature’s claws had ripped through the wood in three places. She braced her legs under the long shield, knowing that she couldn’t get up yet.

  The sphinx poised. Its tail stood straight up like a bulrush with a bristly tip; it waggled twice, side to side. Alphena saw the stranger leap down from his trembling vantage, cloak fluttering. At least this is going to work out well for somebody.

  The creature leaped onto Alphena. Her thighbones stood like pillars to take the strain, but the pain on her knees and hips was incandescent. She stabbed upward, too blind with agony to have a target.

  The weight came off instantly. The sphinx tumbled sideways with a querulous shriek and backed a few feet away. Blood dripped from its side; the turf sizzled where drops fell.

  Alphena rolled to her feet. The tatters of her shield hung from the strap; her left arm couldn’t hold it out from her body. She hadn’t been sure her legs would support her either, but they did: she guessed the emotions surging in her blood masked the pain for now. She didn’t suppose she would live long enough to feel the hurt.

  The sphinx gave her a look of savage rage. Its jaws opened silently; moonlight glinted on its fangs. The tail tuft twitched once, twice—

  The cloaked man grabbed the tail and twisted it to the side. The sphinx shrieked and pivoted toward him. Alphena lunged with a strength she didn’t know she had remaining and stabbed the creature through the neck.

  The cloaked man ducked to avoid a swipe of the creature’s forepaw. When Alphena’s sword drove home, the sphinx tried to twist back. Its left hind leg folded and the creature fell on its side. The man sprang away, barely avoiding having it roll over him.

  Alphena clung to the sword’s ivory grip with her right hand and as much support as her left could add now that she’d given up trying to hold on to the shattered shield. The blade withdrew more easily than she’d been afraid it would. Blood gouted from the wound and from the creature’s mouth.

  The sphinx bunched its legs to leap—but sprawled forward instead. Alphena tried to step back but her left leg buckled; she went down on that knee. It took all her concentration to keep the sword lifted.

  The sphinx struggled to its feet and turned toward Alphena; she couldn’t read the expression on its human face.

  The creature collapsed onto its left side and began to thrash. The fountain of blood from the wound suddenly faltered. Though the violence of its spasms lessened, as long as Alphena remained where she knelt, trying to gather strength, there was always a limb or a knot of muscles under the moonlit hide twitching.

  Sod smoldered over a wi
de area. Places where blood had poured out in quantity were burned into craters.

  The stranger had picked up his hat; he came toward Alphena. She fought to her feet and stayed there, though she wavered for a moment. She managed to thumb the support strap off the rivet in the belly of the shield and let the debris fall away. The broken layers had begun to separate.

  The stranger stopped a polite six feet away. He was tall and, despite the cover of the cloak, seemed thin.

  “I am Deriades, mistress, and I owe you my life,” he said. “I believe I owe you a sword as well. If you’ll come with me, I’ll discharge the latter debt at once. Our home isn’t far.”

  Alphena looked at her sword for the first time since the fight began. Half the blade had wasted away. As she stared, another blob of steel dripped onto the ground, where it continued to sizzle slightly.

  Alphena flung the hilt away in horror. “If you could find me something to drink,” she croaked, “I’d like that even more.”

  HEDIA TURNED as one of the chairmen came into the back garden holding Anna’s two walking sticks. The second chairman followed the first, carrying the arthritic woman herself.

  Between them, the servants set Anna down. One held her upright until the other had put the canes in her hands and made sure her feet were firmly on a path of marble chips. Only then did they step back.

  Anna glared at one, then the other, pivoting her head like a screech owl. “There was no need for that!” she snapped. “I could have walked through the house!”

  Hedia gestured the chairmen toward the door to remove their irritating presence from her guest’s sight. She and her maid were now alone with Pulto’s wife.

  “I regret that my servants were overzealous, Anna,” Hedia said, touching the older woman’s hands on the heads of her canes. “Still, it was well meant, so I won’t punish them too seriously. Will you care to sit down? And I can send Syra here to bring whatever refreshment you’d like after your journey.”