The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  In fact she’d make sure the chairmen got a silver piece each for their initiative. The chair itself wouldn’t fit through the doors and turns of the town house, but the servants had judged that Anna wouldn’t be a problem simply to carry—and had done so, ignoring her false insistence that she didn’t need the help.

  “No, I don’t want anything to drink,” said Anna, softening slightly. “And I won’t sit down either, not just yet. What is it you saw?”

  “My daughter was standing over here,” Hedia said, walking to the spring. “On the coping. She was wearing that armor she practices in; Lenatus said she left the gymnasium looking for Corylus. And I think I saw a blond woman, quite pretty in a common fashion, right there in the portico. But then they both vanished.”

  She touched her lips with her tongue and went on. “No one has seen Master Corylus either, since he came into this garden to eat his breakfast. He wasn’t here when I entered.”

  Anna stumped over to the coping and looked at the stones without speaking. She raised her head and said, “No wonder my boy stank of magic when he came home from your house after the reading. This place—”

  She gestured around her with one cane.

  “There were altars in the woods,” she said, “when I was a girl in Marruvium. There’d been sacrifices on those altars when my grandmother was a child, and probably back to her grandmother’s grandmother. But they didn’t have the reek that this garden does.”

  “We knew Nemastes was a wizard,” Hedia said calmly.

  “Aye,” said the older woman. “And now we know how much of a wizard he is. I don’t like it, your ladyship. I truly do not like it.”

  There was a moment of gray silence as Hedia and Anna looked from the well curb to the corner of the portico, then back again. “Omphale saw the woman with Lady Alphena,” said the maid unexpectedly.

  Hedia snapped around. She composed herself in the space of three heartbeats before she said, “Syra, who is Omphale and where did she see the woman?”

  “Omphale is a downstairs maid,” Syra said in a little voice. Her eyes wandered in a nervous circle, never quite meeting her mistress’s cold gaze. “A new one, she was only bought a month ago. She fancies Master Corylus, your ladyship, and she was peeking through the door”—Syra gestured without moving her hand any distance from her body—“to see if he was still here. She saw Lady Alphena and the woman in the yellow shift before she ducked back again. She was afraid because they were arguing.”

  Anna had walked from the well to the portico, moving more easily than she had when she entered the garden. The emotions the old woman felt—and Hedia suspected that the thrill of a challenge was as significant as the fear she’d confessed to—were making her joints more flexible.

  “Bring her here,” Hedia said without raising her voice. “Tell her I want her immediately.”

  Instead of disappearing into the house proper, Syra tapped three times on the door. It opened and a pert girl entered the garden with an abruptness that suggested she had been pushed. Obviously the servants had decided among themselves how to handle a business that might be very dangerous for them.

  “Your ladyship,” said Syra, pinching the girl’s left ear and drawing her toward Hedia with that grip. “This is Omphale. Tell her ladyship the story, and don’t lie.”

  “They’re all against me,” the girl whined to the ground; she was afraid to meet Hedia’s eyes. “They dragged me here, your ladyship, and they said you’ll boil me alive if I don’t tell the truth!”

  “Then you’d best tell the truth, hadn’t you, Omphale?” Hedia said calmly. “What was my daughter and the other woman arguing about? And do please look at me, child.”

  She’d seen the girl before, but she couldn’t have put a name to her. The enthusiasm with which the other servants had turned on her suggested that Omphale hadn’t made herself well liked during her short tenure; she was pretty, and she was too young to have learned that pretty alone didn’t last.

  Omphale raised her eyes with trepidation. “The young ladyship wanted to know who the other girl was and what she was doing in the garden,” she said.

  When Hedia nodded encouragingly instead of doing something violent, the maid went on. “She said she was Persica. She wasn’t a servant, anyhow; she wasn’t taking nothing from her young ladyship, just like she was a great lady herself.”

  “And what happened then, child?” Hedia said. She thought of patting the girl encouragingly, but she was afraid that in her present state Omphale would burst into tears of terror.

  “Your ladyship, I ran away!” Omphale whimpered, lowering her face into her hands and speaking through her whimpers. “The ladies were really angry and I was afraid that if anything happened I’d have to testify in court and I’d be tortured! I didn’t see anything, your ladyship, I didn’t see anything!”

  “I’m sure you didn’t, child,” Hedia said. Her voice was calm, though her mind was filled with doubt and darkness. None of this helped! “When I saw this Persica and my daughter, they were both unharmed.”

  A slave’s testimony against a citizen was permitted only under torture. This girl had obviously feared that Persica and Alphena were going to come to blows or worse. Her fear proved that the discussion really was angry—not just a girl dramatizing an ordinary conversation for the servants’ quarters.

  “Send her away, your ladyship,” said Anna, standing near the peach tree. She lifted one cane to indicate Syra. “The other girl might better go as well. We have private things, you and me.”

  “I’ll call you when I need you, Syra,” Hedia said. She appreciated Anna’s discretion. Syra knew quite a lot about her mistress’s personal affairs, but this business involved magic. Sometimes that affected people in ways that something as ordinary as sex did not.

  The door closed behind the two servants. Hedia turned to Anna, who grimaced and tapped the peach tree with a cane.

  “Persica is the spirit of this tree,” the older woman said. “A wood nymph. I don’t suppose it’s a surprise that she might appear, with as much magic as Nemastes let loose in this garden.”

  Anna stared glumly at the tree. “She must know what happened to your daughter,” she said. “Likely she had something to do with it, and maybe with my young master disappearing besides. But I can’t make her come out to answer questions.”

  “Perhaps I can, then,” Hedia said, taking the small dagger from the folds of her girdle. She stepped to the tree, thrust the point into the trunk, and peeled a strip of bark down.

  A shrieking blond woman appeared beside them. The thin silk of her synthesis couldn’t absorb the blood welling from the long wound on her right thigh. She clapped her hand over the injury. Glaring at Hedia, she cried, “You bitch! How would you—”

  Hedia backhanded her across the mouth. She wore rings on all four fingers; two of them cut the skin of the nymph’s cheek.

  “You would be Persica, I assume,” Hedia said, smiling. “Watch your tongue, girlie, or you won’t have it anymore.”

  “Not her tongue,” Anna objected calmly. “We need her to talk.”

  If we’d rehearsed this, Anna couldn’t have responded better, Hedia thought with a rush of appreciation. Of course neither of us is joking.

  Aloud she said, “I saw you with my daughter Alphena, so don’t bother telling me that you don’t know where she’s gone. I want you to bring her back now.”

  “How am I supposed to do—,” the nymph began. Hedia stepped toward her, bringing her left hand back for another swipe.

  Persica cowered down, crossing her forearms before her face. “Don’t!” she said.

  “Listen, girlie,” Hedia said, hearing her voice rasp like a stone saw. “I could find an axe somewhere in the house, I’m sure, but I won’t do that: I’ll have the scullery maids peel your bark off with paring knives, working down from the thinnest branches. Or, you can tell me where Alphena is and how to get her back.”

  Persica straightened warily. She looked at her palm, the
n the silk shift. The wound was no longer bleeding, but it had stained the fabric in a broad wedge.

  She glanced at Anna, then looked away quickly. The old soldier’s wife was at least as determined as Hedia herself.

  You’re not dealing with little girls, now, Hedia thought.

  “She’s in the spirit world,” the nymph said in a chastened voice. “But she could be anywhere. She—”

  She gestured toward the spring enclosure and saw the blood on her palm again. She clenched her fist.

  “I sent her from there,” Persica said; she dropped her eyes during the admission, but she raised them again. “She wanted to find Corylus, and I said the stones are a gateway and he might have used them to go to another world.”

  “Did he?” said Anna. “Is that what my boy did?”

  “I don’t think so,” the nymph whispered. “I think he might have used the mammoth tusks instead.”

  She nodded briefly to the great curves of ivory sheltered under the portico.

  “That Hyperborean might have been responsible, don’t you think?” Persica said.

  No, I do not think Nemastes was responsible, Hedia thought. Not when you were here and we know what you did to my daughter.

  But first things first. However much Hedia liked young Corylus, Alphena was family.

  “All right,” she said. “You sent my daughter into this spirit world, so you can now go bring her back.”

  Persica opened her mouth to protest. Before she got a word out, Hedia added, “Otherwise, you’re of no use to us.”

  “But I can’t,” the nymph said in a tone of desperation. “I can’t leave my tree, don’t you see?”

  A man might feel sorry for you, missy, Hedia thought. Aloud she said, “If you can’t bring her yourself, how do we return Lady Alphena to this world?”

  She didn’t bother to add a threat. Persica certainly understood by now that if Hedia couldn’t get her daughter back, the nymph and her tree would die after several days of agony.

  Persica turned her head so that she looked at Hedia through the corners of her eyes. “I can send you after her,” she said in a small voice. “But I can’t send you exactly where, I can’t. You’ll need a guide when you get there, and I can’t help with that either.”

  Hedia looked at Anna and raised an eyebrow in question. The old woman shrugged. “She can’t leave her tree, that’s true,” she said. “Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have her turned into firewood, but that won’t help with either of the children. I wouldn’t be much use in the dreamworld myself”—she lifted a cane to waggle it, then planted it firmly on the ground again—“which leaves you, milady. Unless you think perhaps Lord Varus …?”

  “No,” said Hedia more curtly than she had intended. “How will I find Alphena after I’ve done this, gone to this dreamworld?”

  “I can send you there!” Persica said. “No one else can!”

  Hedia looked at Anna again. The older woman gave her a slight smile and said, “I might manage, but it’ll be easier if she’s helping. If anything goes wrong, I have my own paring knife. I won’t need your maids to help me.”

  “I didn’t hurt the girl,” the nymph said, hugging herself. “I didn’t hurt anybody. I just did what she wanted!”

  Both women looked at her. Anna said to Hedia, “You’ll need your own guide, your ladyship; it requires the help of the spirit of somebody close to you. Do you have a lock of your mother’s hair, perhaps, or a ring that your father always wore? Something like that?”

  Hedia thought for a moment, then laughed like ice tinkling down onto a tile roof. “Not hair,” she said. “And not a parent. But yes, I have a part of someone who owes me more than he can ever repay. I’ll have my husband’s ashes brought from his tomb.”

  VARUS LOOKED AT THE SPRING OF EGERIA, flowing through rock at the base of the Aventine Hill. A century or two ago it had been ornamented with a semicircular curb of polished limestone, but graffiti defaced the stones and trash choked the pool.

  When Carce was young, the region was rural, and according to legend the nymph Egeria lived in the spring. She had become the mistress of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Carce, and had whispered her wisdom to him on their couch.

  The Appian Way entered the city here, and now two huge aqueducts crossed just to the north and brought water to the southern half of the city. Traffic was heavy and constant, and nobody had time for legends.

  Varus sighed. He wished that someone would whisper wisdom to him. The rhythm pounding in his mind was—

  He shied away from the word “maddening.” But he was very much afraid that the beat was driving him mad.

  The spring was adjacent to the Temple of the Muses, a simple structure where ordinarily no one was present except a caretaker. Varus had come frequently to sit on the temple steps and write when he was fooling himself that he was a poet. It wasn’t peaceful, not alongside the busiest highway in the empire, but he enjoyed the association not only of the Muses but also with Carce’s legendary history.

  A troop of gladiators swaggered through the Capenan Gate, up from their training school to the south. Sea bathing was part of their regimen, so many of the schools were on the Bay of Puteoli, where Corylus’s father had his perfume factories.

  They were singing a bawdy song about the king of Syria in what was meant to be Latin. Each of the dozen gladiators had a different accent. Apart from the fact that the king’s private parts were improbably large, Varus couldn’t understand much of the burden.

  The gladiators wore richly embroidered tunics, and a small army of servants attended them with food, drink, and shades against the sun. A stranger might have mistaken them for foreign royalty. In the minds of the crowd which would cheer them in the arena, that’s what they were.

  Varus thought about his sister and her sword practice. He grimaced, but he’d been wasting his time just as thoroughly with his poetry. At least Alphena hadn’t made a fool of herself in public!

  A bareheaded man with white hair had left the highway and was coming toward him. Varus frowned in surprise; then he remembered that he was alone. Ordinarily when he came to the temple, he had a dozen servants. He directed them to keep well away while he was writing, but they nonetheless made sure that beggars and hawkers stayed at a distance also.

  After the living vision on the Capitoline Hill, Varus wanted to be really alone. There were people passing by constantly here, but nobody knew him and nobody would pay him any attention. He’d even insisted that Pandareus not join him. He wanted to think.

  He smiled faintly. He hadn’t been doing much thinking, at least not in any useful fashion. He wondered if he’d expected Egeria to pop out and speak to him. She would have to struggle to get through the potsherds, the broken wheel, and assorted other rubbish which people had tossed into the pool over the years.

  Varus turned to the white-haired man and said, “I haven’t a coin to give you, even if I wanted to do that. And if the servant who normally would accompany me with my purse were present, I fear that he’d have cracked you over the head before you got this close to me. Go your way, sir, and leave me to my thoughts.”

  “I’m not a beggar, Lord Varus,” said the stranger. “I shouldn’t have thought that I looked like one. Certainly not as much as you do in your present state of disrepair, if you’ll permit me to say so.”

  He paused. The smile that quirked his lips had more of sadness than humor in it. “My name is Oannes,” he said.

  Varus looked down at himself. He’d been so lost in his mind that he hadn’t paid any attention to his physical presence.

  He had left his broad-striped toga with the servants at the temple because he didn’t want the wool rubbing on his various injuries. Balaton had sponged off the blood with a mixture of water and sour wine. The temple stores also provided a very soothing ointment made from herbs crushed into the grease of raw wool: apparently it wasn’t uncommon for suppliants to manage to burn themselves while tossing pinches of frankincense on the altar.


  “As you say, Master Oannes,” he said with a smile, “I don’t look like an obvious person from whom to solicit alms.”

  He coughed to indicate the delicacy of what came next, then said, “My name is Gaius Varus, which you already knew, and I apologize for my insulting presumption about your motives. But I really don’t want company now.”

  “I suspect you came here for answers,” Oannes said. “It would be natural for a man of your antiquarian bent to wish that Egeria would speak to you as she is said to have done to your ancient king.”

  He stood beside Varus, just over an arm’s length away. He was facing the spring, but he turned his head slightly as he spoke. His knee-length tunic was simple; over it was a short cape with a fringe of leather tassels, a fashion Varus had never seen before. He wore a leather satchel on a shoulder strap as though he were a traveler, but he had neither hat nor staff.

  Smiling at Varus, he said, “Do you believe that Egeria was real, your lordship?”

  Since he knows who I am, this isn’t a chance meeting.

  Aloud Varus said, “I believe that my ancient ancestors had divine guidance, yes. I find that less improbable than that a gang of shepherds and bandits founded the city that became Carce without divine guidance. But—”

  Oannes watched with the detached calm of a man observing a beehive.

  “—I don’t know if one of those divine spirits was named Egeria. Or for that matter, if one of the men was named Numa.”

  Oannes smiled faintly. “If she—whatever her name might have been—had ever been here,” he said, nodding toward the pool, “then I fear she’s long gone. Even so, I think it would be polite to clear her precincts. Perhaps I’ll do so after I’ve finished the business that brought me here.”

  Varus faced the stranger. The traffic on the Appian Way flowed back and forth, more people in an hour than there were in most country towns; singing, jabbering, praying. None of them paid any attention to him and Oannes. Every traveler or group of travelers was a separate world, sufficient to itself.