The Legions of Fire Read online

  The freedman to whom he’d been talking looked up in surprise; he saw Alphena bearing down like an angry weasel. He scampered also, though his fat friend’s absence had cleared enough space already.

  Corylus looked startled, then faced front and pretended not to notice that Alphena had sat down beside him. For a moment, she’d started to let fear break through her mind’s surface of anger; Corylus’s action brought the anger back to full blazing life.

  Alphena wasn’t interested in Corylus; not that kind of interested. He was only a knight after all, and even that by sufferance: his father had managed to stay alive for twenty-five years in the army and had his status raised from ordinary lummox to knight. She knew that soldiers were necessary on the frontiers to keep out the even cruder barbarians beyond, but it seemed to Alphena that they should stay in the border districts instead of coming here to Carce.

  Of course Corylus wasn’t a soldier himself; and though Alphena knew he intended to become one, she found it hard to imagine the youth as what she imagined a soldier was. Maybe …

  Alphena didn’t blush, but she pressed her lips together more closely. She was smart, not bookish smart like her brother but in the way that let her look at people and things and understand how they fit together. When parts didn’t fit, one had the wrong shape. In this case, she knew that the mistake could be in what she thought a soldier was, instead of in the shape of Corylus who planned to become one.

  She still wasn’t interested in him. Of course!

  Alphena had been the only person to use the gymnasium for over a year. Lenatus had informed Saxa that Alphena wanted the sort of lessons he’d expected to give Varus. He’d hoped his employer would order him to do no such thing. The Senator instead acted as though he hadn’t heard the statement.

  Lenatus had been angry and embarrassed to train a woman, but Saxa paid well. The first thing a new servant in his household learned was that the master wanted to have a quiet life—and that if the daughter of the house was angry, she would make her father’s life a living hell until he did what she wanted.

  Lenatus had thereupon gotten on with his job, which, in the household of Gaius Alphenus Saxa, turned out to be training a young girl as though she were to become a soldier—or a gladiator. After a while he’d more or less gotten used to it. Alphena had heard him tell the cook that it was like learning to drink ale instead of wine when he’d been stationed in Upper Germany: it wasn’t the way it ought to be, but that didn’t matter.

  Then Varus had offered his new friend use of the facilities.

  Alphena had watched Corylus the first time he exercised. Corylus had protested, but Varus wouldn’t stand up to his sister. In part she was being contrary—she did quite a number of things because she knew that other people would rather she didn’t—but she was also proving that nobody in the household could prevent her from doing what she wanted.

  As for Lenatus, he’d taken his master’s lesson to heart: he pretended he didn’t hear either party to the argument.

  Corylus had at last gone ahead with his basic drills, despite the audience. He couldn’t order around the family of the man from whom he was accepting a favor. Alphena had colored when he said, “When in Carce, one follows the customs of Carce,” and bowed low to her, however. He’d made the light comment sound more insulting than a tirade from a bearded Stoic philosopher.

  “Gentlemen of Carce!” squeaked Varus. Oh, Venus and Mars, he sounds so young! “I welcome you on my own behalf and on behalf of Senator Gaius Saxa, my noble father and patron!”

  The audience shuffled its feet dutifully, indicating its appreciation of the greeting. Alphena turned and glanced back, wondering if Saxa had come in after she did. She couldn’t see the whole room—she was shorter than most of the richly dressed freedmen—but she knew that the Senator’s presence would have caused a stir.

  Saxa was probably off with Nemastes again; he seemed to spend all his time with the Hyperborean. He had never pretended to care about literature, of course, so he probably wouldn’t have been present at his son’s reading regardless.

  Saxa was a good father in most fashions. He never ranted at his children about their behavior, and he supplied the money for their whims without objection or concern. He even seemed to care about their well-being, though he viewed them from a foggy distance.

  Alphena didn’t love Saxa; that would be like saying she loved the ornamental pond in the garden. But she liked him a good deal, and she certainly didn’t want her existence to change so that he was no longer part of her life. One way or another, Nemastes the Hyperborean meant change.

  “The filthy River Baroda slowly plows the sandy wastes of Libya,” Varus said, beginning to chant his poem. His voice had settled out of its initial squeak, but it had no more life than the plash of rain into the cistern in the entranceway.

  Alphena had heard established poets and professional singers whom her father had invited to dinner parties. Some of them were better than others, but she couldn’t compare even the worst of them to what she was hearing now. Her brother’s delivery was as dull as watching concrete set.

  Nemastes had appeared two weeks earlier as a petitioner at Saxa’s morning levee. The Hyperborean was only a short step up from the outright beggars who crowded every rich man’s doorstep until the servants ran them away, but because he claimed to be a wizard he’d been admitted to the office after Saxa and his more important clients had exchanged greetings.

  Nobody seemed to know what had happened then, but Saxa and the Hyperborean had spent most of their waking hours together ever since. Indeed, Saxa had announced that Nemastes would be moving into the town house—

  But that plan had collided with Hedia. Nemastes might well be a wizard, but Saxa’s third wife had proved a match for whatever magic he was using on the Senator. There’d been a blazing argument—Hedia was petite, but her lungs and projection could match a professional actor’s—at the end of which the two men had left the house. Saxa had returned alone later that evening.

  “A dragon a hundred cubits long lived near that fateful bank, in a grove like the Avernian entrance to the Underworld,” chanted Varus. His expression mingled terror with resignation. Alphena wondered in a clinical fashion whether that was how men looked when they were waiting to be executed.

  She hadn’t respected her brother until she realized that Publius Corylus did respect him. Of course a rich man’s son would always have men—and women, of a sort—crawling about him. Varus had stayed free of parasites, however, in much the same fashion in which he had the mud wiped from his shoes when he’d been caught outdoors in the rain.

  Corylus wasn’t a toady trying to cadge wine and dinners at the tables of the wealthy. He treated Varus with the respect owed a senator’s son—and treated Saxa, when they occasionally met, with the greater respect owed a senator; but it was always the respect which a free man owed his social superiors, not cringing servility. He’d befriended Varus as a still-more-learned scholar.

  Corylus didn’t behave in an improper fashion toward Alphena. She’d have cut him off at the ankles if he had, but with a sense of smirking satisfaction; he was, after all, a handsome youth though a member of the lower orders. Instead, ever since their first loud argument about her presence in the gym, he pretended not to be aware of her existence. Which is just what he’s doing now.

  Alphena’s lips set in a hard line. With the two freedmen gone, there was room on the bench for three Alphenas. She squidgled closer to Corylus, bringing her left thigh in contact with his right.

  He didn’t twitch, not even to move away. She would have gotten as much reaction from a statue. He seemed completely lost in her brother’s poem, though how anybody could really listen to that twaddle was beyond her.

  “The monster split the earth and raised its glittering head to the stars,” Varus chanted. His hawk-featured teacher was jotting in a notebook of waxed boards, though his eyes never left the boy’s face. Judging from Pandareus’s expression, he wouldn’t have any
thing pleasant to say to Varus at the end of the session … but maybe that was unfair. He might be serious rather than fierce.

  Alphena hadn’t taken well to Hedia when Saxa brought his new wife home. His first wife, Marcia, had given him both his children but died of fever a week after Alphena was born.

  Sometimes Alphena wondered what it would be like to have known her mother, but now that she was a teenager, she knew that she had seen as much of Marcia as most of her acquaintances did of their mothers. Even when the parents remained married, the wife’s social life was more important than the child-rearing duties, which could, of course, be delegated to a slave or an inexpensive peasant woman.

  Saxa had then married Secunda, her mother’s younger sister. Alphena remembered seeing her several times in the three years or so the marriage had lasted. Secunda had flitted occasionally through her life with a train of maids and pages, perfectly dressed. Each time, she dipped her fan toward the children, gave them a gracious smile, and continued on her way.

  Alphena imagined that Secunda had a lovely, melodious voice, but she’d never heard it. She wondered if Varus had.

  After the divorce—Alphena couldn’t even guess when that had been; she’d been young, and neither the marriage nor its dissolution seemed to have been matters of great moment, even to the couple itself—the affairs of the Senator’s household had gone on in a very placid fashion. Alphena’s nurses and other female servants had made sure that she learned What Men Are Like—but frankly, her father had never struck her as that sort of man. Indeed, often he didn’t seem to be any sort of man.

  Thus when Saxa suddenly married the widow of his cousin, Calpurnius Latus, the mere fact had been a terrible shock to Alphena. Hedia herself had been a much worse surprise. Unlike Secunda—and probably Marcia—she had immediately become involved in every aspect of the household, including her husband’s sixteen-year-old daughter.

  Even a girl brought up to prize the feminine virtues of good breeding and decorum would have found the situation a wrench. Alphena had early on set out to be the son which her brother certainly was not. The new marriage had made her blaze like a funeral pyre even before she heard the stories about her stepmother which the servants were only too happy to retail. If so many as half of them were true, Hedia was a fast woman and no better than she should be.

  In addition, rumor said that not fever but poison offered by his wife had carried off Calpurnius Latus. Was her father out of his mind?

  “The monster filled its vast gullet and its poison-pregnant belly with full-grown lions which it snatched as they came down to the Bagrada to drink!” chanted Varus. The snake that lived in the Temple of Feminine Fortune—the spirit of the temple, the priest said—ate morsels of bread sopped in milk, but you were expected to provide a silver piece to the priest also if you wished to be certain that your prayer would be honored.

  It would take a great deal of bread and milk to feed a snake the size of the one Varus had invented. Alphena wouldn’t have thought lions were so common in Libya that they made a reasonable alternative, though.

  She felt the solid presence of Corylus’s thigh, but his mind seemed to be in another world. He wasn’t so much avoiding Alphena as unaware of her existence.

  Alphena had intended to ignore her stepmother, but Hedia hadn’t permitted that to happen. The day after Saxa brought his new wife home, she had made an inventory of the town house. Agrippinus had guided her, but even then Alphena had realized that Hedia was in charge.

  The servants treated Alphena like a small dog with a tendency to bite; they respected and feared their new mistress, which was quite different. That had been another case in which Alphena would have been less angry if she hadn’t seen the reality of things so clearly.

  Hedia was all the things Saxa’s daughter was not: beautiful, sophisticated, and sleek. Alphena had thought it would be easy to hate her; and perhaps she did, but she found she respected Hedia as well. The older woman was as much at war with society’s view of Proper Womanhood as Alphena was, though their techniques could scarcely have been more different.

  And Hedia was a lot more successful in her revolt.

  “The monster roared!” sang Varus. “It was louder than the booming East Wind, more violent than the tempest which shakes the sea bare to its depths!”

  Why does she insist that I get married? Alphena thought. And then with a silent wail she added, And why does Corylus ignore me? I’ve seen him look at her!

  She shivered. The room was crowded and should have been uncomfortably warm at this time in the afternoon, but she’d felt a chill touch her spine. Corylus was as cold and distant as the image of Jupiter Best and Greatest in his temple on the Capitoline Hill.

  Alphena tried to be angry with her stepmother, but she knew in her heart that Hedia meant well by her. So why does she insist I get married?

  She was afraid she knew the answer.

  “We fled,” sang Varus, “breathless with terror—but in vain!”

  HEDIA STOOD IN THE DOORWAY to the portico around the central garden. Her expression was as calm and aristocratic as those of the death masks of her husband’s noble ancestors hanging from the walls of the reception room behind her. Both had been whitened, her face with rice flour, and white lead for the wax which decades and even centuries had turned black.

  Hedia doubted that the ancestral masks were angry. She made it a point of pride that people around her couldn’t read her emotional state, but obviously she wasn’t as successful as she would have hoped: her personal maid, Syra, was in a state of terror.

  Hedia patted the girl’s wrist with her left hand. “It’s quite all right, dear,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

  Syra’s lip quivered. Her eyes were fixed on the great purple flowers of the cardoons in the garden, but tears dribbled from their outer corners.

  Does the fool think I’m going to have her tortured to death because my step-daughter won’t listen to me? Hedia thought in a fury. How dare she! She raised the folded fan in her right hand—

  And caught herself with a sudden giggle. Syra had been with Hedia for five years, through her first marriage. She was a perceptive girl. Sometimes rather too perceptive for her own good.

  There were over two hundred servants in Saxa’s town house. Syra was the only one Hedia could see at the moment, and the maid would have fled too if she had dared. They all knew that the mistress was angry, and they weren’t sure that there was any limit on the kind of punishments that anger could lead to.

  Normally servants swarmed in every room unless you ordered them out, and even then they’d be listening at doors and from outside under the windows. A rich man and his spouse had no more privacy than did the members of a poor family crammed six or ten to a tenement apartment.

  Which was why Hedia was furious about her husband’s stupid behavior. She didn’t know what this Nemastes was doing, but she was quite certain that when the Emperor heard about it—when, not if—he and his inquisitors would take a dim view.

  If Saxa had been carrying on at one of his rural estates—he had a score of them, scattered from Spain to Syria—he might have gotten away with it at least for a while. This was the middle of Carce. Every time Hedia heard horses in the street outside, her heart leaped with the thought that it was a troop of the German Bodyguards come to arrest everybody in the house and carry them to the palace for questioning.

  They’d start with the slaves, of course, but neither Saxa’s lineage nor Hedia’s own would spare them from torture when the Emperor’s safety was at risk. So stupid.

  Hedia gave Syra a look of calm appraisal. The maid didn’t look away, but she squeezed her eyelids shut. Tears continued to dribble from beneath them, and it was obviously taking all her strength to stifle the sobs.

  Hedia didn’t have anybody to talk to. If she said, “Syra, what do you think this Nemastes is really after?” the girl would simply stare like a rabbit facing a weasel. And Syra didn’t have an answer; none of the servants ha
d an answer, no more than Hedia herself had an answer.

  As if she were reading Hedia’s mind, Syra whispered, “Your ladyship, do you think the Senator’s new foreign friend is a real magician?”

  Hedia smiled wryly. Syra’s eyes were still closed. She’d spoken because she was more afraid of silence than of speaking; and she’d asked the same empty question her mistress would have asked if she’d permitted herself the weakness.

  “Oh, I don’t imagine so, Syra,” Hedia said lightly. “No doubt there are real magicians in the world, but I’m afraid my dear Gaius Saxa is more the sort to attract charlatans and confidence men. I suppose that’s all right so long as it amuses him. He can afford his whims, after all.”

  By Astarte’s tits! she thought behind her bland smile. How I wish I thought Nemastes was a charlatan.

  Hedia had met—and had done various other things with—quite a number of charismatic, powerful men at one time or another. Nemastes wasn’t simply a foreigner who had fasted himself thin and shaved his scalp clean.

  For one thing, he wasn’t shaven and it wasn’t his scalp alone: his whole body was as hairless as an egg. The linen singlet the Hyperborean—wherever and whatever Hyperborea was—wore had few secrets from eyes as practiced as Hedia’s at assessing men.

  If she’d seen him only once, she could think he’d had his body waxed to impress the gullible. There was no sign of regrowing hair on any of the later visits, however. That didn’t prove Nemastes was a magician. Hedia was quite sure he was something, though; and Hedia hadn’t needed to feel the hatred boiling from the fellow’s eyes to know that he was something dangerous to know.

  Varus began to recite; Hedia looked toward the entrance of the hall. From where she stood, the words were a drone with an irritating timbre. She suspected—she grinned at Syra, but the maid didn’t grin back—that the audience heard a louder version of the same irritating drone.

  When Alphena had turned and scurried into the hall, Hedia had seriously considered striding in herself and retrieving the girl. Saxa’s daughter was used to being the only person present who didn’t mind a scene. That had changed when her father remarried, and the sooner the girl learned it, the better off they all would be.