The Legions of Fire Read online

  THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

  TOR BOOKS BY DAVID DRAKE

  Birds of Prey

  Bridgehead

  Cross the Stars

  The Dragon Lord

  The Forlorn Hope

  Fortress

  The Fortress of Glass

  From the Heart of Darkness

  Goddess of the Ice Realm

  The Gods Return

  The Jungle

  Killer (with Karl Edward Wagner)

  The Legions of Fire

  Lord of the Isles

  Master of the Cauldron

  The Mirror of Worlds

  Mistress of the Catacombs

  Patriots

  Queen of Demons

  Servant of the Dragon

  Skyripper

  Tyrannosaur

  The Voyage

  THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

  DAVID DRAKE

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

  Copyright © 2010 by David Drake

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2078-0

  First Edition: May 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Sarah Van Name, a fellow Latinist

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dan Breen is my first reader. He catches things that I miss and, even more important, forces me to look at things that I passed as “Well, that’s about right.” When I tell myself that something’s about right, it means it really isn’t right.

  Dorothy Day and my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, archived my texts as usual, protecting me against electronic disasters, my own screw ups, and the possibility of a moderate-sized asteroid targeting my part of the country. (Don’t laugh: there are a lot of asteroids up there!)

  Karen (again) and Joe Benardello each provided extremely specialized information that I couldn’t have gotten in any other way. I hope I have used their help in fashions that won’t embarrass them.

  Computers died in the creation of this book. I’m sorry, but they did. One I simply worked to death. As for the backup machine, I was working away (outside on the porch, as usual) when a squall hit, blowing the rain in horizontally. My son, Jonathan, replaced the first with its nearest modern equivalent; he then got the backup working again, to my great delight.

  My wife, Jo, continues to feed me extremely well and to keep the house running, while also reminding me of the normal incidents of human society (a birthday party tomorrow night, the dental appointment next week, and so on).

  I could work without my circle of friends and family. The books would not be as good, though, and I would certainly not be as good.

  My thanks to all those above; and thank heavens that I’m not alone.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  First and foremost, The Legions of Fire is a novel about a fictional city named Carce (pronounced CAR-see) and the empire which Carce rules. It is not a novel about Rome and the Roman Empire in a.d. 30, under the emperor Tiberius.

  Having said that, a reader who knows a little about Roman history and culture will find similarities with my Carce. A reader who knows a great deal about Rome will find even more similarities. I’m not writing a historical novel, however, or even a historical novel with fantasy elements.

  The fantasy elements which I’ve used here, like the historical and cultural elements, are real. The Cumean Sibyl did exist; so did and do the Sibylline Books, which a committee of senators examined when Rome was in particularly grave danger (for example, after the disaster at Cannae).

  I prefer to use real things instead of inventing pastiches which I hope will sound right. The magical verses of this novel come from the Sibylline Books and (for reasons which will become clear to the reader) from the Völuspá, a Norse prophetic poem. (Occasionally you will find lines from other poems of The Elder Edda as well.)

  There are various literary borrowings throughout The Legions of Fire. This wasn’t research on my part, exactly: I read classical literature for fun, and I found it easier to snatch something from (for example) the elder Seneca, or the Homeric Hymns, or Silius Italicus, than to invent it myself. (This is the first time in forty-odd years that I’ve found familiarity with Silius Italicus to be useful knowledge.)

  One final note: the word “servant” occurs frequently in this novel. In Carce as in ancient Rome, the word generally means “slave.”

  I’ve heard intelligent people state that classical slavery wasn’t as bad as slavery in America’s antebellum South. You can make a case for that, but I consider it along the lines of arguing that the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t as bad as the Gestapo.

  A Roman householder had the power of life and death—and sexual control—over the slaves in his or her “family,” and this power could be extended to freed slaves as well. I’m not writing a political tract, but the reader should be aware of this background in order to understand the social dynamics of The Legions of Fire. A servant in Victorian England might lose her position if the mistress became angry. A servant in Rome—or Carce—could lose considerably more.

  I’ve had a lot of fun in trying to make a foreign culture accessible to modern readers. The fact that the culture is (pretty much) real and is one of the major underpinnings of Western civilization made my task even more fun.

  But I’m not an educator. I’ll have succeeded if you readers also have fun with my story.

  DAVE DRAKE

  www.david-drake.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  EPILOGUE

  Air and Darkness Teaser

  THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

  CHAPTER I

  Corylus had ordered Pulto to wear a toga because he thought that he’d need his servant to swell the audience for the poetry reading by his friend and classmate Varus. Pulto hadn’t complained—he’d been a soldier for twenty-five years and the batman of Corylus’s father, Publius Cispius, for the last eighteen of them.

  On the other hand, the young master hadn’t specified footgear. Pulto had chosen to wear hobnailed army boots with the toga.

  Corylus grinned as they turned from the Argiletum Boulevard onto the street where the town house of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Varus’s father, stood. Pulto clashed along beside him, mutteri
ng curses. Hobnails were dangerous footwear on the streets of Carce. The stone pavers had been worn smooth as glass and were slimy besides: the last rain had been almost a month past, so more recent garbage hadn’t been swept into the central gutters and thence to the river.

  Corylus wasn’t an army officer yet, but he’d learned a few things growing up on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, where his father had been first centurion of the Alaudae Legion and then tribune in command of the Third Batavian Cavalry. Sometimes letting your subordinates do just what they pleased was the most effective punishment you could visit on them.

  Pulto caught the young master’s smile and—after an instant of bleakness—guffawed in good humor. “By Hercules, boy,” he said, “you are the Old Man’s son. I keep thinking you’re the sprat I paddled for having a smart tongue. It’ll serve me right if I fall on my ass, won’t it? And have to get this bloody toga cleaned!”

  Corylus laughed. “Maybe you’re setting a new fashion trend,” he said. “Carce is too stuffy about style, I think.”

  He’d never have ordered Pulto to wear his boots, but the ring of hobnails on stone turned out to have an unexpected benefit. Wagons weren’t allowed inside the city until after dark, but peddlers, beggars, loungers, and other pedestrians clogged the streets, especially old ones like these in the very expensive Carinae District. To people who came from regions recently annexed to the Republic of Carce—and many of the city’s poor did—the soldiers who’d done the annexing were still figures of terror.

  As a citizen of the world educated by Pandareus of Athens, Corylus was disturbed by the implications of why people scuttled to the side or even hunched trembling with their heads covered. As a citizen of Carce and a soldier’s son … well, he’d have been a liar if he’d claimed he didn’t feel a touch of pride. And it did make it easier to walk without getting his toga smudged.

  “How long do you guess this is going to go on, Master Corylus?” Pulto said, sounding resigned now instead of huffy. “Lord Varus’s reading, I mean?”

  When Corylus went to Carce to get the first-class education which Publius Cispius wanted for his son and heir, Pulto had come with him. Corylus knew that his father didn’t expect him to live like a Stoic philosopher—Cispius had been a career soldier, after all, before he retired to the Bay of Puteoli and bought a very successful perfume business.

  He didn’t want his son to get in over his head if it could be avoided, however. The young master wouldn’t be able to bully Pulto into letting him do something stupid.

  And if trouble couldn’t be avoided, well, Pulto was a good choice there, too. He’d stood over the Old Man when a Sarmatian lance had knocked him off his mount. By the time the rest of the troop rallied to relieve them, the servant had seventeen separate wounds—but when the tribune woke up, he had only a headache from hitting the frozen ground. Pulto limped and his fringe of remaining hair was gray, but neither Corylus nor his father knew anybody who was more to be trusted in an alley in the dark.

  Pulto would rather face Sarmatian cavalry than listen to an epic poem, even if Homer himself were singing it. Unfortunately …

  Varus was an erudite scholar and the only one of Pandareus’s students with whom Corylus could deal as a friend. He put enormous effort into his verse; nobody could’ve worked harder.

  But Varus wasn’t Homer. Dull didn’t begin to describe his poetry.

  “I expect he’ll finish by the eleventh hour,” Corylus said, feeling a pang of guilt. “I, ah, think so. I may stay longer to chat, but you can change out of your toga as soon as the reading itself is over.”

  “We stood a dress inspection for the Emperor the onct,” Pulto said stolidly. He settled the fold of his toga where it lay over his left shoulder; it wasn’t pinned, which was all right if you were standing on a speaker’s platform but less so if you were striding along at a military pace. “That was at Strasbourg. I guess I can take this.”

  “We’re just about there,” said Corylus soothingly. “Ten paces, soldier.”

  He didn’t blame Pulto for disliking the toga, but it was the uniform of the day for this business—and in Carce generally, though the city was the only place in the empire where the old-fashioned garment was still in general use. In the provinces a citizen wore a tunic in warm weather and a cloak over it in the cold and wet. In Gaul a gentleman might even wear trousers in public without anybody objecting. The toga was for lawsuits and other formal occasions, like weddings and a son’s coming-of-age ceremony.

  Everything was formal in Carce. Even the slaves wore togas, at least the ones with any pretensions.

  And speaking of pretentious slaves, Saxa seemed to have a new doorman, whose lip was curling upward as he watched Corylus and Pulto approach. In the year Corylus had lived in Carce, he’d learned what to expect from that expression.

  Saxa let ground-floor rooms to shops on either side of the house entrance. There was a dealer in upscale leather goods for women on the far side; on the near side, a Greek jeweler named Archias bowed low to Corylus as he passed. Corylus had never done business with Archias, but the jeweler was unfailingly courteous to a friend of his landlord’s son.

  If the doorman had been more observant he would’ve noticed that. He’d been picked for his impressive appearance rather than his brains, though: he was broad-shouldered and well over six feet tall, with blond, lustrous shoulder-length hair.

  Sneering at the two narrow purple bands on the hem of Corylus’s toga, he said with a strong South German accent, “Around to the back entrance if you’re looking for a handout. The Senator’s hours for receiving riffraff are long past.”

  “Do you suppose he’s one of the scum my father dragged to Carce in chains?” Corylus said, speaking German in a louder-than-conversational voice.

  “Might be a bastard of mine, young master,” Pulto rumbled back. “Venus knows the brothels at Vetera were mostly staffed with Suebian whores. About all the use I ever found for a Suebian, come to think.”

  From deeper inside the house, a female servant called cheerfully, “Agrippinus, you’d better get out here fast or you’re going to have to replace the new doorman!”

  The German had reached for the cudgel behind him, but the maid’s voice penetrated his thick blond hair as the jeweler’s deference had not. Red-faced, he straightened. “Whom shall I announce, gentlemen?” he croaked.

  “Publius Corylus, a knight of Carce”—as indicated by the twin stripes on the toga; a member of the middle class and very much below a senator in rank—“and his companion, Marcus Pulto, by appointment to attend the public reading by their friend Gaius Alphenus Varus,” Corylus said, speaking this time in formal Latin.

  He was shaking with reaction. For a moment everything had blurred to gray in his sight except the necessary parts of the German’s body. Grab the left wrist and twist hard so that the blond head crashes into the transom. Pulto would kick the German’s knee sideways, breaking it, so Corylus could topple him into the street where they would both work him over with their boots ….

  “Master Corylus, how delightful to see you again!” said Agrippinus, Saxa’s majordomo: plump, oiled, and very smooth. He spoke Latin like an aristocrat of Carce and Greek like an Athenian philosopher, but he was a former slave who’d been born in Spain. “And how pleased Lord Varus will be that you’re present for his literary triumph! Please, let me lead you into the Black-and-Gold Hall, where Lord Varus will be reading.”

  Corylus had visited the house scores of times. Agrippinus knew he didn’t need a guide, but it was important that the doorman learn that the youth was a friend of the family rather than being one of the parasites who haunted great men’s doors in hopes of an invitation to fill out the dinner party. To underscore the fact, the majordomo said over his shoulder, “I’ll want to have a discussion with you, Flavus, when Gigax relieves you at nightfall.”

  Agrippinus minced quickly through the entrance hall. Half a dozen servants stood there around the pool which caught rainwater from the insloping
roof. They bowed, but Corylus suspected the gesture was paid not to the visitors but to the majordomo. Agrippinus’s present aura of pompous formality was even more impressive than his toga of bleached wool with gold embroidery.

  Instead of continuing on into the office which was in line with the entrance, Agrippinus turned right to enter the portico surrounding the large garden in the center of the house. Saxa’s house had no exterior windows on the ground floor, but the garden acted as a light well and also provided flowers and fruit in a bustling city. The roofs over this main section of the house fed the pool in the middle of the garden, but they did so through down-spouts and sunken pipes.

  The Black-and-Gold Hall interrupted the portico in the middle of the east side, opening directly onto the garden for the maximum of light. Ornate frames of gold paint separated the black panels of the walls, each of which had a golden miniature of a fanciful creature in the center. The dais on which Varus would read was against the back wall, but there was a triple lamp stand to either side.

  Just now Varus stood stiffly beside the dais. He was talking with Pandareus, who taught public speaking to a class of twelve youths including Varus and Corylus.

  Varus and Corylus also learned to love literature and Truth. Their classmates saw no value to literature except to add colors to an oration—and as for Truth, if they ever thought about it, was a danger which successful attorneys shunned.