The Legions of Fire Read online

  “By Hercules, the bloody room’s full!” muttered Pulto. He sounded amazed. So was Corylus, because the statement was undeniably true.

  “Please come to the front, Master Corylus,” Agrippinus said, starting down the center aisle. The room, thirty feet wide and nearly that deep, now held two files of benches which must have been rented for today’s event. The seats weren’t packed as tight as the bleachers of the Circus during a program of chariot races, but people were going to have to move if the newcomers were to sit down.

  “A moment, if you please,” Corylus said with a curt gesture to the majordomo. “Pulto, you can suit yourself. While you’re welcome to listen to the reading with me—”

  “Venus and Mars, young master,” Pulto said, grinning broadly. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be in the gym chewing the fat with my buddy Lenatus till you’re ready to go home.”

  “Dismissed,” said Corylus, falling into military terminology naturally. Between Cispius and Pulto, “Army” had been the household tongue when Corylus was growing up. His mother had died in childbirth; his nurse, Anna, had taught him the Oscan language and a great deal of superstition, but she hadn’t cared any more for roundabout politeness than the men had.

  Anna was now Pulto’s wife. She was just as superstitious as she had been when Corylus was a child; but as he grew older, he’d come to realize that quite a lot of Anna’s superstitious nonsense was in fact quite true.

  Corylus nodded to Agrippinus; they resumed their way to the front. Gaius Saxa had obviously done what he considered a father’s duty to his son: he’d sent invitations to all his senatorial friends. They hadn’t come, of course, and Saxa wasn’t present either. They’d sent clients and retainers, though, men who were beholden to them and who made a brilliant show in the hall. Some of the senators’ freedmen here were not only wealthier than Cispius, they had a great deal more power in the Republic than a retired tribune did.

  Varus would appreciate his father’s gesture, but the expensively decorated togas drove home the fact that Corylus and Pandareus were the only people in the audience who’d come to hear the poetry. And even they—well, Corylus was here out of friendship and Pandareus might well regard his presence as a teacher’s duty.

  Corylus grinned, then quickly suppressed the expression. The thought behind it was unkind to a friend. It was traditional that poets suffered. In Varus’s case, the problem wasn’t poverty or a fickle girlfriend: it was lack of talent. Which, for somebody who cared as deeply about his art as Varus did, was a far worse punishment.

  Agrippinus gestured toward the place which had just opened in the front row, on the right side of the center aisle. “Or would you care …?” he said, tilting his head delicately toward Varus, whose back was to the room while he talked with his teacher.

  “No, I’ll speak to him after the reading,” Corylus said. Varus is nervous enough already.… He settled himself carefully onto the bench.

  Togas weren’t really intended to be worn while sitting down. Ancient Carce had transacted all public business while standing. A less stiff-necked people would’ve changed to a more comfortable formal garment before now, but a less stiff-necked people wouldn’t have conquered what was already the largest empire in history. A soldier’s son could get used to wearing a toga.

  Corylus had met Varus when they both became students of Pandareus a year before. Pulto had already known a member of Alphenus’s staff, however: Marcus Lenatus, the household’s personal trainer, was an old soldier and an old friend of Pulto’s from the Rhine. Corylus would have been able to exercise in the private gymnasium in a back corner of the house even if the Senator’s son hadn’t invited him to do so.

  The man on the bench beside Corylus was, from his conversation with the fellow to his other side, the steward of another senator whose master was planning a banquet in a few days’ time. It was the sort of thing that would’ve bored Corylus to tears even if the servants had tried to make him a part of the discussion. Agrippinus might feel it was politic to show deference to a friend of the family, but these men had no reason to pretend a mere knight was as interesting as a hare stuffed with thrushes which had been stuffed in turn with truffles.

  Corylus smiled faintly. He supposed he wouldn’t turn down a portion of the lovingly prepared hare—so long as it came with bread and onions. That was a soldier’s meal. It wasn’t an accident that the frontiers of the empire stopped at the edge of where farmers plowed fields instead of grazing goats or cattle.

  Lenatus and the gym wouldn’t get much use if it weren’t for Corylus. Saxa saw the trainer only during the Saturnalia festivities, when he visited each post of duty to give the servants their year-end tip. Varus sometimes tried to exercise, but he’d begun coming regularly only to keep Corylus company. Even then, he often sat on the masonry bench built out from the dressing rooms and jotted poetic inspirations in a notebook.

  Saxa didn’t care about the waste of money, of course. A private gymnasium was a proper facility for a man of his stature, so he had one.

  He also had day and night shifts of servants servicing the water clock in the central garden: a man to empty the quarter-hour tumblers; a man with a rod to ring each quarter on a silver triangle; and a third man with a bugle to sound the hour. Each servant had an understudy, ready to take over the duties in case the principal died of apoplexy while pouring, ringing, or striking.

  Alphena, Saxa’s daughter by his first wife, used the gymnasium too. Corylus felt his face stiffen out of the smile that was its usual expression.

  The girl was sixteen, a year younger than Corylus and Varus. Alphena and her brother were both stocky and of middling height like their father, proper descendants of the sturdy farmers of Carce who had spread from their hilltop village to conquer a great empire.

  Alphena would never be a great beauty, but she was cute and full of an energy that would have made people notice her even if she had behaved with decorum. Which she most certainly did not.

  Corylus had realized even before he came to Carce that the only people who really set store by proper behavior were the solid folk in the middle ranks of society: peasant farmers and small businessmen. The poor were too busy scraping out a living to worry about such things; even a youthful moralist could understand their attitude.

  But the very rich were if anything worse.

  Alphena wasn’t promiscuous, but that at least would have been an ordinary feminine failing. Alphena wasn’t feminine. She acted as though she were Saxa’s son, not his daughter, and the more masculine son besides. With Varus as her brother, that wasn’t much of a stretch.

  The stewards beside Corylus were discussing ways to make counterfeit mullets out of minced pork. At first that sounded reasonable to the part of Corylus’s mind that was listening; mullet was a very expensive fish. As the conversation continued, he realized that the fake fish were even pricier than the real thing, and that the greater cost was the reason they’d been chosen for the banquet. It wasn’t about food at all, just status.

  Corylus would much rather be in the gym with the two old soldiers, hacking at a post with a practice sword. He’d even rather—

  He eyed Varus’s stiff pose critically.

  Corylus would almost rather be preparing to read bad poetry to an audience of strangers and his teacher.

  VARUS FELT A RUSH of gratitude when he saw Publius Corylus and his man at the entrance to the hall. Corylus had said he was coming and he’d never given anyone reason to doubt his word, but even so the relief of having a friend present was greater than Varus would have guessed.

  Pandareus wasn’t an enemy, of course, but just now as the teacher glanced over the poem Varus felt a sort of blind hatred. He imagined that a worm might feel the same way about the robin whose beak had just plucked him from a leaf.

  Varus smiled broadly. Pandareus shuffled the scroll expertly with his left hand, taking up the pages he’d skimmed while his right in perfect unison opened the unread portion. He glanced up from the verse and said,
“A happy thought, Lord Varus?”

  “Master Pandareus …,” Varus said, chilled as if he’d been asked to expound on a passage he’d read only moments before. “I know that I take myself far too seriously; I can’t help it. But at least I can laugh at myself for taking myself too seriously.”

  Pandareus said nothing for a moment, then smiled as broadly as Varus had ever seen. “The first rule of a philosopher is ‘Know thyself,’ Lord Varus,” he said. “I would say you’ve come further in that study than many of my long-bearded colleagues who expound their wisdom in the Forum and at the dinners of the wealthy.”

  He went back to reading About the Heroic Life and Martyrdom of Publius Atilius Regulus. Varus intended it as his first trial at his life’s work: the epic of Carce’s struggle with Carthage. Indeed, perhaps it would still be unfinished at his death, as Vergil had left his immortal Aeneid.

  Literature was a proper arena for a gentleman; especially for a gentleman who had no talent for war. Varus wasn’t a coward—he wouldn’t be declaiming his own verse to an audience if he were a coward—but the sight of blood made him squeamish.

  While Varus was writing, he could feel the thing beyond the words. Somewhere out there was the true ideal that he was striving for. But he couldn’t see it, nobody could see it, and no poet would ever reach it.

  Sometimes Varus told himself he was blessed above other men because he knew there was an ideal. At other times—and this was certainly one of those other times—it seemed to him that lucky people didn’t torture themselves by chasing the unobtainable. That was obvious when he looked at Pandareus’s other students.

  Corylus had an interest in literature, but he didn’t hold it in the sort of religious awe that Varus did. The other ten students were wellborn—six, like Varus, were the sons of senators—but they were at most interested in learning how to argue a case in court. That was a matter of extravagant language, flashy figures of speech, and skeins of logic which had been twisted until they screamed.

  But half the class didn’t care even about learning tools to use in court. They attended classes—or their fathers sent them to classes—because there was a cachet in saying you’d been taught by Pandareus of Athens—Pandareus the Sage, some of the parents called him, though Varus had never heard Pandareus himself use that boastful title. For them everything was appearance, not a pursuit of the ideal.

  Pursuit of the unattainable ideal.

  Varus’s mind was lost in a very present philosophy of life, but his eyes must have been focused on Pandareus. The teacher looked up and said mildly, “A very well-prepared manuscript, Lord Varus.” He gave the volume a twitch to emphasize it.

  “Yes, master!” Varus said. He was relieved that he hadn’t squeaked; he felt seven, not seventeen. “I, ah, thought it would give a better impression to the audience if it was, ah, neat.”

  One of the clerks in Saxa’s business office had a fine hand, but in the end Varus had decided to go to Marcus Balbius, who produced manuscripts for sale. In the main Balbius specialized in cheap reading copies by popular poets, but he had a sideline in presentation volumes; he’d been more than happy to produce a manuscript of the very highest quality for Varus.

  Pandareus went back to reading. Varus realized that his teacher was deliberately preventing him from compulsively going over the document during the last quarter hour before the declamation. He’d have worked himself into a state if he’d done that, and he wouldn’t have been able to prevent himself from doing it even though he knew better.

  Pandareus was being kind to him. Varus would still rather have been standing on a dune in the Libyan desert than watching his teacher roll the volume forward and stop, roll and stop; his lean face all the while as expressionless as that of a vulture.

  The volume shimmered. The roller sticks had been gilded, and red silk ribbons fluttered from their ends. The papyrus had been pumiced smooth before being whitened, and the calligrapher’s hand was flawless as well as being unusually legible for a work of art.

  Varus honestly didn’t know what the manuscript had cost. Whenever Balbius presented the account, Agrippinus would settle it just as he did those from vintners, poulterers, fullers, and all the rest of the tradesmen who supplied the household of a wealthy senator. Saxa wouldn’t notice the amount any more than he noted what Hedia, his new young wife, spent on dressmakers.

  “Ah …?” Varus said, struck by a sudden fear. “Master, though the manuscript was professionally prepared, I really did write the verse myself. On wax notebooks. Every bit of it.”

  Pandareus paused and stared at him. “You may set your mind at rest, Lord Varus,” he said. His dry voice was all the more cutting for not having any emotional loading whatever. “I did not imagine that this—”

  He waggled the volume again. The gesture gave the impression of the mistress of the householding a dead rat by the tail as she gingerly removed it from the kitchen.

  “—had been plagiarized.”

  Varus felt his face glow. “Sorry, master,” he muttered. He shuffled, glancing toward the audience just to avoid looking at his teacher. His eyes caught Corylus in the front row. He looked up toward the ceiling immediately. It was bad enough being here as Pandareus judged him; it would be even worse to be judged in front of his only friend. Being reminded that Corylus was present helped settle him again, though.

  Corylus’s father, Publius Cispius, was wealthy by the standards of most people—but not by the standards of the senators’ sons who were the majority of Pandareus’s students. Besides facing ordinary snobbery, Corylus was an army brat—raised in camps along the frontier instead of the relatively civilized surroundings of a provincial city. He might have had a very difficult time of it in school, especially since Piso, the acknowledged leader of the class, had a cruel streak.

  It wouldn’t have helped Corylus that he was a real scholar instead of a numskull more familiar with swagger sticks than with the rollers of a book; his scholarship might even have made it worse. And it certainly didn’t help that he and Varus had become friends. Gaius Alphenus Saxa was powerful enough that his son wouldn’t be bullied, even by a Calpurnius Piso, but to extend his protection further would require that Varus have an active personality instead of being a loner, and a rather puny loner besides.

  Corylus was tall and had fair hair from his Celtic mother. Presumably he’d gotten his slender build from her also, but Piso had learned the first afternoon following class that “slender” didn’t mean “weak.” He’d shoved Varus and found himself with his right arm twisted up behind his back and his thumb in a grip that could obviously dislocate it any time Corylus wanted to.

  Another boy—Beccaristo, son of a wealthy shipper from Ostia and Piso’s chief toady—tried to jump Corylus. He fell screaming when Corylus brought his heavy sandal down on his instep.

  Piso had shouted for his entourage of servants to help. None of them moved. Corylus’s man hadn’t said a word, just watched with his right hand under his toga. The thing he was gripping would be about the right length for an infantry sword.

  Corylus had released Piso then. He’d straightened his toga and grinned, not saying a word. And Varus had said, “Master Corylus, would you care to come home with me for some refreshment? I’d like to discuss the Epilion of Callimachus, which the master cited in his lecture.”

  Varus warmed at the memory. It was probably the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life. It had cemented his friendship with Corylus at the very beginning of their relationship.

  Pandareus rolled the volume closed with the same smooth grace as he’d been reading it with. “Thank you for the early look, Master Varus,” he said formally as he handed it back. “I await your reading with interest.”

  The water clock reached the tenth hour, the time set for the declamation. The bugler called over the ringing of the quarter-hour gong.

  Apollo and the Muses, be with your servant, Varus whispered under his breath as he mounted the podium.

  As if to make him even
more uncomfortable than he already was, his sister, Alphena, came marching down the aisle without so much as a maid to accompany her. She gave a peremptory gesture to the freedmen beside Corylus and sat down in the front row, glaring up at Varus.

  She looked furious.

  THE REAL PROBLEM WAS NEMASTES the Hyperborean, but Alphena wasn’t allowing herself to think about that. She was as angry as she ever remembered being. How dare my stepmother tell me that I need to get married! Why doesn’t Father stand up to her?

  This was one of those times that Alphena wished she weren’t quite as smart as she knew she was. Much as she fumed over Hedia—who was only six years older, even though she was on her second husband already!—Alphena knew that underneath she was afraid, not angry.

  She was afraid for her father. Ever since he met the Hyperborean wizard, Saxa had been acting strangely. He’d always been, well, a bit of a fool about the supernatural. Her father was a senator of Carce and one of the most powerful men on earth, so it was unkind of Alphena to suspect that he was unusually willing to believe in higher powers because he knew how incapable he was of intelligently exercising the authority he’d been given.

  Alphena stamped into the Black-and-Gold Hall without any clearer notion than knowing that she would shock everyone by being the only woman in the audience—and that Hedia wouldn’t follow her here. As soon as she was inside, she remembered seeing Publius Corylus coming up the street a moment before her stepmother drew her aside for an unwanted discussion.

  Corylus was in the front row, so Alphena strode down the aisle toward him. When one of the wealthy freedmen seated there glanced up, she showed him her left fist with the thumb raised. That was the way the audience voted death in the amphitheater.

  The freedman shot from the bench like a lion prodded into greater liveliness with a torch; he’d obviously understood Alphena’s mood. Very possibly he had heard stories about the would-be poet’s sister when he asked about the event he’d been ordered to attend.