The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "And if the Day of Judgment should come before then?"

  "In a thousand years and more it's not happened."

  The village militia was assembling to hunt down the Jacque king as Raymond sent his squire back to the inn with the chainmail. Vitellan began walking toward the snowdrifts at the edge of Marlenk, and he beckoned the French knight to follow.

  "The countess kissed you with unseemly ardor just now," said Raymond. "She is of a mind to bed you. I—I cannot deny that you have done great deeds for her, yet I must appeal to your honor. Please, respect her rank and position—"

  "We shall be behind that snowdrift in a few moments. I want you to help me scoop out a trench in it. I shall take off my robes and lie down naked in the snow. When I stop breathing you must cover me with snow, then fetch Guy and Lew." Raymond stared in surprise, then shivered at the thought.

  "But without your elixir you will die."

  "There is elixir in my blood, enough for one more leap through time. I have been sipping at it for some weeks to reaccustom myself to its potency. Here, this is a good place."

  "Master Vitellan, this snow will melt in spring."

  "But by then Lew and Guy will have hollowed out a proper Frigidarium in some deep ravine and carried my body there. Come now, dig. You can make up some story about me being lost in the hunt for Jacque Bonhomme, and there will be no more Vitellan to tempt the countess to impure love. Return in a year or so. Lew and Guy will give you a map and the instructions to revive me. Give them to Lucretia when the countess is dead. Ask her to establish a tradition to revive me in her family. Never tell the countess where my body is hidden: she may try to have me revived." It did not take long to scrape out a trench in the newly fallen snow. Vitellan began to disrobe.

  "Remember, tell Guy and Lew to dig into a deep, blind ravine, where the ice never melts or moves. Tell them that my will is to be revived in . . . let us make it 2054, when I shall be two thousand years old."

  "But Master Vitellan, why not a glacier, so that you may still have a chance should Lucretia's descendants fail you? I'll give Guy gold coins to bury nearby to attract searchers."

  "No! Tom Greenhelm studied glaciers for decades. Their

  ice splits, distorts, and shatters. Without a hollow boulder to protect my body it would be mangled beyond revival. No, it must be a deep ravine where the ice does not move."

  Naked and shivering, Vitellan lay down in the trench.

  "Heaven and saints! So-so cold. Quickly, pack snow. All around, every p-part but... not my face. N-not yet."

  "God forgive me, I'm killing you."

  "No! Only . . . sleep. W-when breath and t-talk stop, cover face. T-tell Guy ..."

  "I'll do it. By my life I'll do it. Vitellan? Master Vitellan?"

  Every man who could be spared set off after Jacque Bonhomme but his trail was soon lost amid the glaciers, ravines, and ridges of the mountains. The countess fell into an exhausted sleep with her daughter in her arms, and did not awake until nearly noon the following day. By then the weather had closed in, and it was snowing heavily. Two of the Marlenk militia died of exposure before they could return from the hunt. The Marlenk priest recorded the deaths of three searchers.

  The Count of Hussontal gathered a small group of fanatical knights together and spent the next nine years raiding the English Free Companies. Several of the small, savage battles that he provoked were against odds of two or three to one, and he did much to weaken the myth of invincibility surrounding the English after the Battle of Poitiers. The countess invited him to return to their estates when she learned that he had lost an eye and had had his right knee shattered by an English mace. Although she had forgiven him, he was unable to do the same for himself. Whenever there was fighting anywhere he would leave for it at once. He was killed by an exploding bombard in 1374.

  For a medieval knight Raymond lived uncommonly long. He was there to whisper the truth about Vitellan to the countess on her deathbed, then watch her die at peace. Lucretia had already been told what had happened by then, and she undertook to establish a tradition to revive Vitellan, yet... Jacque Bonhomme, Father Guillaume, whatever name he went by, he had been right. Lucretia's great-great-grandson fell from his horse and broke his neck while hunting before the story

  of the Roman hero had been explained to his own five-year-old son. The parchments and map that Lucretia had placed in the family archives remained undisturbed until the castle was looted and burned in 1795. Both Roman officer and peasant Icing slept on, oblivious, the latter inching his way toward thaw and death, the former with only a scrap of parchment between him and a headlong plunge into eternity. With the paranoia common to all good Icekeepers, Guy had made a second, secret map to Vitellan's frozen refuge against time.

  Guy returned to England, although on his way he called in at the estate of Anne de Boucien. He was delayed for some months, journeying on only after they were married. The new match made Guy the stepfather to Louise, Marie, and Jean, and later the father of two children of his own. Once Jean was old enough to run his father's estate, Lady Anne went to live in Durvas.

  Guy became Mayor as well as Icekeeper, and with the money from Anne's French fortunes gradually built the declining village back into a thriving community. Even Raymond's long life paled as an achievement when compared to Guy's death in his nineties. To survive both the Black Death and some of the worst fighting of the Hundred Years War he had had a very strong grip on life.

  The secret of Vitellan's resting place was preserved in the second map in the Durvas archives, and the tradition of maintaining the village Frigidarium was revived by new generations of Icekeepers. The climate cooled again, and what later became known as the Little Ice Age ended the long, warm medieval summer. Once more the Durvas Frigidarium had work as storage for frozen meat, although Icekeepers still dreamed wistfully of returning the Master to the stone bench that was always kept respectfully empty. Each new Icekeeper's first duty was a pilgrimage to the Swiss Alps to check that the resting place of the Master was undisturbed.

  In the nineteenth century a Durvas engineer was among the first to experiment successfully with refrigeration machines, using new discoveries in gas thermodynamics. Durvas grew first into a large manufacturing center, then into a corporation called the Village. It was bombed during World

  War II, but was soon rebuilt and went on to grow into a medium-sized city by the end of the twentieth century. The University of Durvas specialized in the study of cryogenics and techniques of suspended animation. As far as the people of Durvas were concerned the very existence of Vitellan had faded into the folktales and ballads that were sung in local pubs and at May and harvest fairs, but for the members of the Village Corporate it was different. Vitellan was in theory their chief executive officer, and the entire legend was explained to each new recruit. He was the Centurion of Durvas, and they were stewards of his rapidly expanding empire.

  The story of Jacque Bonhomme had been a slur on the memory of Vitellan, at least as far as Guy Foxtread had been concerned. He saw to it that all records of what had really happened at Marlenk were rewritten to denigrate the King of the Jacquerie. As time passed historians grew uncertain whether the original Jacque Bonhomme had ever existed, or had merely been figurative.

  The twenty-first century opened to increasing excitement in the exclusive innermost circle of the Village Corporate, for their secret Master's scheduled revival in 2054 was within the probable lifetimes of even those who were middle-aged. Vitellan would be two thousand years old, and he would inherit a mighty corporation that was more far-flung than Rome's empire had ever been.

  4

  the centurion's champion

  Durvas, Britain: 12 November 2028, Anno Domini

  The Icekeeper of Durvas lay dead in the smoking ruins of the Village Imprint Research Clinic, his chest smashed to bloody pulp and splintered bone by a burst of tumble-shot. The rescue crews ignored his body, and even Lord Wallace gave it no more than a glance as he inspected the s
hattered pile of rubble and collapsed slabs. Downwash from a sky- grapple's rotors raised swirling dust and smoke like the special effects in a cheap disaster vid.

  "Anderson, where is the Master?" demanded Lord Wallace in an oddly thin, high voice when he reached Durvas'

  corporate marshal.

  "Under that," Anderson replied, wild-eyed and breathless, pointing to one of the toppled walls which lay alarmingly level on what had been the clinic floor. "Forty minutes since the attack, and we still have no idea what shape he's in. My guess is that he's flatline."

  "By the look of it, he's flat as well," Lord Wallace shouted back above the noise. 'That's a seven-ton slab." Rescue workers were swarming over the slab, attaching woven monofiber cables and pressure claws. The down-wash began to increase as the motors of the skygrapple spun up to a new pitch. The slab eased up, then the huge machine heaved its load sideways and dropped it on a nearby lawn. Nobody was watching; everyone was looking at the remains of a trolley that had been crushed to a few inches thickness. There was a darkening blot of blood all around it. A second skygrapple flew in, lowering a cryogenic chamber on a cable as the medics rushed forward to tend the crushed body.

  "Careful, don't move him yet," someone called as they began to attach sensors to scan for life signs.

  "Damn you, he's sure to be scan-dead!" shouted Anderson. "Just cut the straps and get what's left of him into the cryochamber as fast as possible. Every second you arse around means more brain damage!" Lord Wallace counted four fairly large fragments of skull being put into the chamber with the main part of the body. His gorge began to rise, but it was through fear and guilt, not the horror of what had happened to Vitellan's body.

  "Scrape up every bit of tissue and get it into the chamber," the marshal was shouting to medics, who were more inclined to reach for a fire hose when confronted with such a severely pulverized corpse. It was like collecting the fragments of a shattered champagne glass for restoration, and just as futile.

  A tiltfan descended smoothly to the disaster site. Cassion,

  the clinic's director of surgery, jumped clumsily to the rubble and made his way through the dust to the chamber with Vitellan's body.

  "Life signs?" he demanded of Anderson.

  "With respect, sir, you've got to be joking," he replied, then hit a stud on the side of the chamber. A hologram of the crushed body took form in the air in front of them. "Over forty minutes like that. All we could do was scrape him off the trolley and force-chill him at once. I'm not even sure if he has enough oil in his tissues for a full freeze."

  "He doesn't, but I can fix that," said Cassion.

  Lord Wallace was grim-faced. "All right, guard what's left of him on a shoot-to-kill alert, and get it all into the shaft to the Deep Frigidarium. What about my son's cryo-chamber?"

  "It's stored over in South Five," said Anderson. "There's no damage reported from there."

  "You had better get his chamber to the Deep Frigidarium as well."

  "Right away, Lord Wallace," said Cassion, and he left at once.

  Anderson took Lord Wallace's arm as the chamber was lifted away. "The Icekeeper's dead," he told him.

  "After what happened here today, it's what he deserves," replied Lord Wallace coldly. "His security's a disgrace, it shouldn't be dignified with the name security. The Lumin-iste agents walked in so easily that I actually felt insulted. Gulden will be the interim Icekeeper," Lord Wallace declared, as if the decision had been ratified by the Village Corporate.

  "Gulden? He has only minority support on the Corporate."

  "Well he had plenty of support and look at what's happened," said Lord Wallace, jerking his thumb toward the body of the Icekeeper. "I know what you're talking about but now we need the best, not just a good compromise. Bonhomme's people always recruit the best, that's why all this happened. If it's any consolation to you, I don't like Gulden either."

  "So why maintain the Icekeeper position at all? There's no Master now."

  "We've had Icekeepers with no Master from 1358 to 2016,1 don't see why we should change. The true facts will be kept from the rest of the Corporate, of course."

  "Of course," echoed the marshal.

  Anderson glanced over the shattered building. It was not the damage that unsettled him so much as the implication of weaknesses that almost certainly existed elsewhere in the organization. What other parts of Village security would collapse so readily after a relatively small shock, he wondered.

  Lord Wallace beckoned to a waiting tiltfan to pick them up and it advanced toward them, floating just above the rubble and raising a cloud of dust. All at once Cassion came running across the rubble from South 5, waving his arms.

  "They've taken one of the cryochambers!" he shouted. "The one with your son's body." Paris, France: 6 December 2028, Anno Domini

  Warmth and contented lethargy caressed Vitellan, melting memories of the sharp touch of snow on his bare flesh and the intense, blazing stars of a night in the Berner Alpen late in 1358. It took some time for his nerves to accept that there was no more cold and pain, and that this was the end of the great sleep and not the beginning. His eyes blinked open and came into focus on someone holding ... he could not identify it, but the man's bearing of alert confidence suggested that he was a warrior. Was it a weapon? There was no blade, and it was too short to be a mace. Perhaps it was a distant descendant of the gonnes that he had seen and used as he had traveled through wartorn France?

  A hand-held gonne, then, but where was the smoke of its fuse? Could it be that—no, impossible. Vitellan saw white columns beyond the sky-blue blankets of his bed, and there were two men in dark, finely tailored jackets beneath open white robes with colored, oblong brooches pinned to their chests. Perhaps one of the men was a woman, Vitellan wondered, his or her grooming was subtly softer. They walked away, and the one with the warrior's bearing walked past again, alert for anything unusual. His gaze scanned across Vitellan's face.

  "His eyes are open!" the warrior exclaimed, jerking his weapon up to point at the Roman's head. A hand-gonne, there was no doubt of it. Vitellan thought his words familiar, but missed their meaning. Perhaps it was a dialect of French, of which he only had a smattering. There was a patter of approaching footsteps.

  "How did he wake so quickly?" asked the woman. "It should not have been for another day."

  "The devil gives him strength," said the guard.

  The people in front of Vitellan were milling about in confusion, and he was confused as well. He had survived another plunge through time, but this was all so unfamiliar. Where was the bath of warm water? His chest was not at all painful from the pounding to restart his heart and breathing, yet he was alive. How had these villagers revived him without pounding his heart back into action? If it came to that, his stomach was not hurting either. After a decade of pain Vitellan was now quite unsettled by its absence. Sweet scents like the perfumes of a strange pomme-d'embre hung on the air.

  The architecture was sharp and clean, the walls were flawless white. Almost. . . Roman! Had civilization returned to the styles of the century of his birth? He was lying in a bed. It was soft yet supportive, the blankets were clean and pale blue, and their weave was very fine. Glowing dots winked on the sides of glossy boxes draped with colored strings and cords. Unfamiliar insects chirped sharply in time with the lights. Have I slept too long, Vitellan wondered?

  More people arrived to mill about in front of him. Most wore robes like open white togas over dun-colored jackets and trousers. They have the bearing of senators and their guards, Vitellan speculated. One of the women clothed in white sat on the bed and peered into his eyes while holding up a light that blazed like a speck of the sun.

  "Salve," Vitellan whispered. "Quid est—"

  "He's speaking Latin," she said, looking up at someone behind him.

  "Bonhomme must be told," said a man.

  "Bonhomme is in Santiago, he flies back tomorrow. This was not expected."

  Vitellan could glean crumbs of
meaning from the distant descendant of the French that he had heard in the fourteenth century. Their manner told him a lot more. They were brusque, unfriendly, and suspicious. A horrifying thought crossed the Roman's mind: they kept saying Bonhomme. These people might think that he was Jacque Bonhomme. Had the events of... God in Heaven, only last night, become a great legend over the centuries that had actually passed? Had he been revived as the monster of St. Leu ... or had Bonhomme been discovered and revived first, and gone on to start a new uprising of Jacquerie?

  The sheets and blankets were stripped back, and Vitellan saw that he was naked. More people came to attach green pads trailing orange cords to his limbs. His muscles began to work involuntarily. Once he got over the initial shock the effect was quite pleasant, something like a long, languid stretch. None of those tending him spoke Latin, but their French had something in common with its fourteenth-century ancestor. By concentrating he began to deduce more and more meaning from what was being spoken around him.

  "I have word that Bonhomme is returning," someone said to one of the guards. "His suborbital lands tomorrow afternoon. A squad of his Inner Security will take over at the change of shift and remain until he arrives." The guard made an unfamiliar gesture, but it had the crispness of a salute. Was Latin as dead as Etruscan by now, Vitellan wondered? No, one of the, the . . . physicians, perhaps, had definitely recognized his first words as Latin. The physicians returned to remove the massaging pads and help him from the bed. At first Vitellan's knees buckled with every step, but his strength returned quickly. Too quickly. His other four revivals had been much worse than this. They kept touching little tubes to his skin, tubes that hissed and left the skin tender. When he finally ate, it was sitting up at a table. The soup was filled with shredded meat and vegetables, yet his stomach did not revolt at the solid pieces or hurt at all. No pain in his stomach ... he began to take almost sensual pleasure in being free of that pain. The guard changed as he finished the soup. There were

  five newcomers, two women and three men. Each carried a gonne, but they had more of the barbarian's swagger than the crisp discipline of the previous guards. Two of these guards followed Vitellan and one of the white-robed men into a tiled room where he was washed and scoured by a pair of metal arms that protruded from the wall. A hose that moved of its own accord, like a silver snake, drenched him with hot, steaming water. Before being returned to bed Vitellan was dressed in a green robe that was laced up along the back. He sank to the pillows with relief, exhausted with the strain of merely walking and eating. He was strapped to the bed, and the bindings were strangely soft yet unyielding. His arms were left free, but the buckles that opened to the touch of the physicians remained inert to his fingers. Now Vitellan noticed a new woman among the guards— above average height, but with an easy grace of movement. She had dark, slightly wavy hair in a pageboy style, cut so that it could never cover her eyes. Hers was a big smile, an easy smile, she seemed something of a harlot, but more than that. She blended in by putting people at their ease, rather than by being suspiciously nondescript. Her figure was just a little thin to draw admiring glances, and she wore a pastel-blue skirt—mid-thigh and loose, like that of a Roman youth.