by David Drake
Early in his classes with Pandareus of Athens, Corylus had intervened when Piso, a senator’s son, and several cronies had started bullying a youth who was both smaller and obviously smarter. Corylus could have handled Piso and his friends easily enough, but he hadn’t thought about the retinue of servants accompanying the bullies.
The servants hadn’t gotten involved, because Pulto stood between them and the trouble with his hand lifted just enough to show the hilt of the sword he wore under his tunic. The weapon was completely illegal within the boundaries of Carce, but nobody made a fuss about it, since the youth being bullied was the son of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa. Saxa’s influence couldn’t have saved his son from a beating, but it had been more than sufficient to prevent retribution on those who had stopped the beating.
Varus had been appreciative. He had as few friends in Carce as Corylus did, though in Varus’ case that was because he didn’t have any use for hangers-on or any interest in the drunken parties that were the usual pastime for youths of his class. Corylus was scholar enough to discuss the literature and history that mattered to Varus; and because Varus gave his new friend use of the gymnasium that was part of the Alphenus town house, Varus started exercising also.
The sauce on the mullet was that the household’s private trainer, a veteran named Marcus Lenatus, was a friend of Pulto from when they both served with the Alaudae. Quite apart from the good that exercise did Varus, Pulto had had a word with his army buddy. Varus never again left the house without an escort who were willing to mix it with three times their number of thugs, if that was what it took to keep their master from a beating. The youth himself was probably oblivious of the difference.
“I should have worn a toga,” Pulto muttered harshly. “I don’t care what you say, I should’ve worn one!”
“Absolutely not,” Corylus said firmly. “The senator won’t set eyes on you, and you’re not here to impress the staff by wearing a tent. Besides, they know who you are.”
In Corylus’ heart he wondered if Pulto might not be right, though. It was too late to change now.
The toga had been normal wear in ancient Carce, but now the heavy square of wool was worn only on formal occasions. Corylus wore a toga in class, because Pandareus was teaching them to speak in court, where it was the uniform of the day. Even when Corylus came straight from class to the town house, he doffed the toga inside before he went back to the gymnasium or upstairs with Varus to his suite of rooms.
Today Varus was with his mother forty miles north in Polymartium; Corylus had been summoned to the town house by Saxa himself. There were any number of reasons the senator might have sent for him, but none of them seemed probable and some of the possibilities were very bad indeed.
He can’t possibly think that I’ve been trifling with his daughter. Can he?
Realistically, Saxa wouldn’t be talking with Corylus about his dealings with Alphena. Saxa’s wife would have taken care of that.
Corylus thought Hedia liked and respected him; they’d been through hard places together and with Alphena as well. But if Hedia thought Corylus was jeopardizing Alphena’s chances of a proper—virgin—marriage with another noble, she would have him killed without hesitation. Once Alphena was married, she became the responsibility of her husband. Until then her purity was the duty of her parents, and Hedia took family duties very seriously.
But if not Alphena, why?
Saxa’s doorman saw them approaching and bellowed, “The honorable Publius Cispius Corylus and Marcus Pulto!”
The blond doorman still had a Suebian accent, but it wasn’t nearly as pronounced as it had been the first time he had been on duty when Corylus arrived at the town house. Besides taking elocution lessons, the doorman had learned manners and no longer treated free citizens of Carce as trash trying to blow into Saxa’s house from the street. That was particularly important when dealing with a veteran like Pulto or with the frontier-raised son of an officer.
Corylus nodded in acknowledgment, as he had seen his father do a thousand times to the guards when he entered headquarters. Nobody saluted on active service, but courtesy was proper anywhere—and courtesy toward the men you expected to follow you into battle was also plain good sense.
In the past when Corylus visited the Alphenus residence, the entrance hall had usually been crowded with Saxa’s clients and with people simply trying to cadge a favor or a handout. Today the staff had crowded the visitors into the side rooms where ordinarily servants slept. Three understewards—the fourth must be with Hedia and Varus—in embrodiered tunics stood to the left of the pool that fed rainwater from the roof into cisterns. Agrippinus, the majordomo, waited at the back of the hall at the entrance to Saxa’s office.
“Welcome, Publius Corylus!” Agrippinus said. Nothing in his accent suggested that twenty years before he had come to Carce as a slave from Central Spain. “I greet you in the name of Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Governor of Lusitania, former consul, and senator of the Republic of Carce!”
Saxa came out of the office, beaming and holding out his hands. “Thank you so much for coming, Publius Corylus,” he said. “Come into the office, if you will. I have a business on which I hope you can help me.”
Varus’ father was a pudgy man of fifty who was starting to go bald at the top of his head. He sometimes looked kindly, as he did now, or worried, or startled, and often completely dumbfounded. Saxa had never displayed harshness or anger that Corylus knew of.
“Guess we were wrong to worry,” Pulto murmured in a voice as low as he would have used at night on the east side—the German side—of the Rhine. “I’ll look Lenatus up in the gym.”
“I was honored by your summons, Your Lordship,” Corylus said, walking forward with his own hands out. “I will of course do anything I can to aid Your Lordship.”
This was even more surprising than it would have been to find the public executioner waiting for him. Better, of course, but still not a comfortable experience. Corylus had grown up in the Zone of the Frontier, where “unexpected” was too often a synonym for “fatal.”
Corylus touched Saxa’s hands, but he was too unsure of himself to grip them as he would have done with Varus under the same circumstances. What is going on?
“Well, I certainly hope so, my boy,” said Saxa, drawing Corylus into the office. Agrippinus closed the door behind them.
ALPHENA BACKED AND SIDESTEPPED LEFT as the trainer came on at a rush. Marcus Lenatus was using his weight. He kept his infantry shield advanced, a battering ram that would have knocked her over if she had waited to meet it.
Lenatus turned to keep facing her, but the weight of his heavy shield slowed him. Alphena thrust for his right wrist. Lenatus got his sword up in time. The wooden blades clacked together nastily, but it had been close.
If Alphena had been an instant quicker, her lead-cored practice sword would have numbed the trainer’s arm and caused him to drop his weapon. If they had been using steel swords, her thrust would have severed his hand.
She sidestepped left again. Lenatus would tire, and when he did her thrust would get home.
The door to the gymnasium opened. “Stop!” Alphena said. She hadn’t given specific orders that she wasn’t to be disturbed while she was fencing with Lenatus, but she was going to make sure that whichever servant had opened the door wouldn’t do so again.
Alphena turned, wheezing as she gulped in air. Instead of being a servant, the intruder was Marcus Pulto, Corylus’ man.
Corylus is here!
“Your Ladyship,” Pulto said with a nod as he closed the door behind him. “I can leave if you’d rather. I’m just here to chat with Marcus Lenatus while my master’s in with the senator.”
While the door was open, Alphena had seen at least a dozen servants crowding the hallway beyond. Saxa had more than two hundred servants in this town house. Many of them had nothing to do most of the time and some never had anything to do, so anything unusual drew a crowd.
In this case they were probab
ly hoping to hear Lady Alphena screaming abuse at the fellow who had interrupted her sword training. Not long ago they would have gotten their wish, but Alphena had recently begun to moderate her temper. The change surprised her even more than it did those around her.
Alphena had grown up angry and frustrated because she wasn’t allowed to do certain things: she was a girl in a world ruled by men. Her brother could learn literature and public speaking in classes, then prosecute or defend others in court, or he could enter the army as a general’s aide and proceed to command legions and even armies.
In fact, Varus had no interest in either of those careers. Instead he wanted to read books and discuss their ridiculous contents with scholars as addled as he was, an activity open to the poorest freedman in the Republic.
Alphena declared that she wanted to become a gladiator. Not even Saxa was so easygoing that he would permit his daughter to debase herself in a profession filled by slaves and criminals, but Alphena proceeded stubbornly to practice swordsmanship in the private gymnasium, wearing the full armor of a soldier of Carce.
Even so, she wasn’t allowed to spar with a human opponent. Instead she hammered a stake with her weighted practice sword. Lenatus critiqued her form and demonstrated technique, but Saxa had warned him that he would be executed if he allowed Alphena to bully him into engaging her directly.
The trainer was a free citizen of Carce; no one had the right to execute him without trial. That said, neither Lenatus nor Alphena herself had any doubt that Saxa would do exactly what he threatened, nor that the wealthy senator would escape any retribution for his action. The authority of a father over his offspring was one of the most revered customs of ancient Carce.
The rule against Alphena sparring had been loosened recently. Alphena and her sword had stood between the world and monsters that would have destroyed the world, and Hedia had watched.
“Didn’t know you were supposed to be doing that,” Pulto said mildly, making a brief gesture with his left hand that might have been meant to indicate the gear in which his friend was sparring.
“Oh, it’s all right, Pulto,” Alphena said. “For Lenatus to fence with me, I mean.”
“I never had a problem with it, Your Ladyship,” Pulto said in the same falsely calm voice. He looked back to Lenatus and said, “You remember Tiburinus? Had the Third Century back when the Old Man had the Fourth?”
Alphena frowned. The change of subject made as little sense to her as one of her brother’s declamations would have. She set her practice sword in the rack, wondering if she should unstrap her shield as well.
“Yeah,” said Lenatus. “We’re none of us going to forget that soon, are we?”
“We all thought Tiburinus was screwing the maid of the Legate’s wife, Your Ladyship,” Pulto said, turning to Alphena again. “Pardon the language.”
“Go ahead,” Alphena said. She had started to understand where this was going.
“Thing is, it wasn’t the maid but her mistress that he was seeing,” Pulto said. “Which the Legate figured out too. I was on headquarters guard that night, but I guess you could hear the shouting in the cantonment outside the walls. After that, Tiburinus manned a one-man listening post on the other side of the river until he deserted.”
“Tiburinus stuck it out a month,” Lenatus said, shaking his head with a rueful smile. “I guess he hoped the Legate would calm down eventually.”
Pulto smiled at the recollection. He said, “He hopped it when he heard there was going to be a sweep into Free Germany. He knew when that happened he was going to be sleeping outside the palisades of the marching camps.”
“But this”—Lenatus tapped his shield boss with the flat of his sword, making a clack instead of the clang of steel—”is straight. The senator called me into his office and told me he was letting Lady Alphena”—he nodded toward her—”spar now. Only not with Corylus, that’s the only off-limits. It nigh knocked me on my ass to hear him say that.”
“My mother thought there should be a change,” Alphena said, speaking precisely and a little louder than she would have needed to. She could feel herself blushing, but part of her hoped that if she pretended that it wasn’t happening neither of the men would notice. “She talked to Father, and he agreed.”
Pulto chuckled. “I don’t guess there’s many people who don’t agree with Lady Hedia when she makes up her mind to do something. Men, anyhow.”
“I don’t have much luck arguing with her, either,” Alphena said. She suddenly smiled.
“Partly.” she blurted, “because I see that she’s right when I really listen and think about it.”
Alphena was treating these two commoners as equals. That would horrify and amaze virtually any noble or member of a noble household; Agrippinus would be furious if he heard the discussion.
But another way of looking at it was that these two veterans were treating a sixteen-year-old girl as an equal. Alphena had earned their respect because of what they had observed and because people whom they respected, Hedia and Corylus, respected her.
“Say, you couldn’t promote a jar of wine, could you?” Pulto said, speaking to his friend but looking sidelong at Alphena.
“Well, we just got started here …?” Lenatus said, also eying Alphena.
She took the hint, but as she opened her mouth to end the session Pulto said, “Say, go ahead. Now that I think about it, I’d like to see this for myself. If that’s all right?”
Instead of speaking, Alphena picked up her sword and faced the trainer again. She was breathing normally again after the break.
Lenatus cinched the strap of his shield tighter to the stud over his left shoulder; he’d loosened it to rest the bottom of the shield on the ground while they talked. Without warning he thrust for Alphena’s right shoulder.
She circled back and left as usual, letting the blade barely tick the top of her body armor. Lenatus followed her, one step and then two. His shield lagged a hair farther out of position at each step.
Alphena retreated a fourth step and then, as Lenatus advanced, thrust for the point of his right hip. Lenatus jumped away, but he stumbled and dropped to his knee to keep from sprawling on his back.
“Buggering Venus!” the trainer shouted.
Alphena backed away. She bent forward so that she could fill her lungs more easily. She had gotten solidly home that time. And he didn’t touch me! she thought.
“That the best you can do, Marcus?” Pulto said, leaning against the gymnasium’s shaded wall.
“You think you can do better?” Lenatus said. He straightened carefully, rubbing his hip with the pommel of his sword. “She’s bloody good, I tell you.”
“That suit you, Your Ladyship?” Pulto said over his shoulder as he walked to the racks of equipment.
“Yes,” Alphena said, trying not to snarl. She had almost objected that she was winded from the bout with Lenatus, but Pulto was an old man and clearly out of shape. Besides, that would have been whining.
Pulto took down the wooden equivalent of a long cavalryman’s sword and small buckler whose twin handles he gripped together in his left hand. He turned to face Alphena.
“I’ll wait for you to get the rest of your armor on,” she said, puzzled.
“I got the web of this helmet adjusted for me,” said Lenatus, holding it out to his friend. “It oughta fit you unless yours has been swelling since you left the Alaudae.”
“I’m all right,” Pulto said, smiling toward Lenatus. “We’ll pretend I’m a German, though their crappy shields are generally bigger’n this.”
He grinned broadly at Alphena. “I’m ready, girlie.”
It was the tone more than the words that drove Alphena to a sudden rush behind her upraised shield. Even as she started to move, she realized that Pulto hadn’t been carelessly relaxed the way she had thought.
He took the shock of her heavy shield on his buckler without any more give than a fortress wall. An instant later, something banged into the back of Alphena’s head,
knocking her helmet off and spilling her sideways in the sawdust.
Alphena rose to her knees with difficulty, tangled with her equipment. Besides the shoulder strap, her left forearm was through the double staples on the back of the shield, a part cylinder of laminated birch two inches thick. It was heavy and awkward when she was in the best of shape; now she was sick to her stomach and her eyes weren’t right.
Her helmet had bounced off the wall and now rocked beside her. The bronze had a deep dimple just behind the left earpiece.
Her fury scoured away the dizziness. Alphena jumped to her feet and shouted, “Lenatus, you hit me from behind! I’ll have you crucified for this!”
“Peace, Your Ladyship!” the trainer said in surprise. He had been bending toward her but jerked upright.
“He did not,” said Pulto, stepping between Lenatus and his furious mistress. “I don’t need help to larrup a recruit who leaves herself as open as you did. Watch!”
“I wasn’t open!” Alphena said, but in a calmer voice. “I was behind my shield!”
“Watch!” Pulto repeated. He turned to the heavy post that Alphena had dented with over a year of blows with a practice sword. Pulto’s arm swung wide as he leaned forward. The tip of his long blade moved sideways and cracked the top of the post from behind.
Pulto straightened and looked at her. “You were behind your shield,” he said. “So you weren’t watching me. Got it?”
“Yes,” said Alphena. She had dropped her sword when she went down, so her right hand was free to unbuckle her shield strap. “Master Lenatus, I apologize. I’m a fool.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, hoping that she wasn’t crying or that, anyway, the tears would be mistaken for sweat. Her whole body was trembling. As soon as she had shrugged her arm out of the shield loops, she sat heavily on the bench built into the back wall.
“Don’t move,” Pulto said. Alphena felt his fingers probing her hair. He was extremely gentle, so she wasn’t expecting the sudden jolt of pain when his finger moved slightly. She gasped and jerked her head forward.