The Legions of Fire (10 page)

“For my part,” she went on instead, “I'll hold the marriage divination tomorrow as planned. I only hope that I can save Alphena from the wreck of her father's life.”

Despair was crushing her down. She turned and strode from the room, leaving the door open behind her.

A waist-high plinth supported a small marble faun in the corridor. It stuck out slightly from its alcove. Hedia deliberately stubbed her toe on the base, then bent over shouting curses.

It was an acceptable excuse for the tears that were about to burst out regardless.

P
ANDAREUS HAD PAUSED
to write a message on a sealed tablet for one of Saxa's servants to carry to Priscus, and the children of the house were staying home; Pulto and Corylus left the town house alone. On the doorstep Pulto paused. “Kid,” he said, “I need a mug of wine before we go home. Or maybe a whole jar of wine. You up for that?”

“Sure,” said Corylus. He grinned. “I don't know that I'll be downing much of the jar, but I don't mind trying to carry you home.”

Pulto chuckled, a pleasant change from the bleak glare he'd worn since they'd left the gymnasium. He turned right toward the bar two doors down, the Blue Venus, instead of left to go home.

“The Old Man's done it more than once for me,” he said, “and me for him. Never both of us falling-down drunk at the same time, until he got enough rank that we stayed home instead of crawling the strip.”

A masonry counter faced the street and ran down the right side of the central aisle. Three men stood at it. On its corner was the little statue of painted terra-cotta which gave the bar its name; Pulto patted her for luck. Thousands of other clients must have done so over the years, because the
paint was worn from her bosom. Most of the times Corylus heard the bar spoken of, it'd had been as the Blue Tit.

To the left of the aisle were three small masonry booths, empty at this hour. “Bring us a jar of the house wine, Maura,” Pulto said. “The better stuff, mind. We'll settle up when we leave.”

He led the way to the farthest booth. “Now, boy, sit down,” he said. “Because I'm going to talk to you.”

“Yes, sir,” Corylus said obediently. He felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach.

Pulto was his servant, the social and intellectual inferior of a well-educated knight of Carce. However, Pulto was also the fellow who had taught the Old Man's son the things a young man needed to know in and around a military camp. Sometimes the teaching had involved a switch or even a fist, because failing to learn the lessons could mean the next time they were rehearsed with steel in the hands of people who definitely wouldn't have the boy's best interests at heart.

Pulto hadn't touched the boy in years, of course. From the tone of his voice, though, Corylus was afraid that the discussion was going to be more unpleasant than a beating.

The barmaid brought over cups, a mixing bowl, a bronze carafe of water, and a jar that must have held at least a gallon of wine. It had a tapered base to be set in sand or a hole in the counter sized for it; here she leaned it into a corner of the booth. She was a slight, older woman with crinkly hair—probably a Moor, as her name suggested—but she handled the awkward load with less trouble than Corylus would have taken with it.

He grinned; there were tricks to every trade. Some of Pandareus's other pupils, who'd been schooled only in words and literature, hadn't learned that. The education Corylus had gotten on the frontiers was broader; and in some fashions, he thought, much better.

Pulto hefted the jar onto the crook of his right elbow, his index finger through one of the loop handles, and poured a generous slug into the bowl. Corylus added water from the carafe, mixing it two parts to one without asking Pulto if he wanted it stronger.
If we're going to have a difficult discussion, we're going to have it sober
.

Pulto didn't comment, but he drank down his first cup and refilled it before he looked at Corylus across the table. “So, boy, I'm going to tell you about your mother, Coryla.”

“The Celt who Father married when he commanded the fort on the Upper Rhine,” Corylus said. Until the wine touched his lips, he hadn't realized how very dry he was. He forced himself to sip instead of slurping it down as instinct urged him to.

Strictly speaking, soldiers on active duty weren't permitted to marry. It was common for men in the frontier garrisons to enter into permanent arrangements with local girls, however. These would be recognized when they got their diploma of discharge.

That required both parties to survive, of course. Coryla had died giving birth, but her son had become a citizen of Carce as soon as Cispius had lifted him outside the door of the hut and named the child as his legitimate offspring.

“Right,” said Pulto, “only she wasn't a Celt. And she wasn't a Helvetian either, which is what most of the folk in the district were—stragglers, those that come down from the mountains after Caesar chopped the main lot of them back in his day, and maybe some that hightailed it ahead of his cavalry.”

“Not Celtic?” Corylus said. He finished his wine. There were any number of tribes in the empire, of course, not to mention those—like the Hyperboreans—who lived beyond the borders but mixed with civilized peoples. The fact that he'd been told a lie about his mother's race was much more disturbing.

“No, and don't ask me what she was,” Pulto growled. “She and her mother had a language they spoke to each other sometimes, and it wasn't anything I've heard elsewhere.”

He emptied the mixing bowl to fill both their cups; there was plenty more in the jar, and if they ran out of water, the barmaid would bring another carafe. “They tended a hazel coppice—government property, you know. Growing straight saplings for spear and arrow shafts. It was a big plantation and just the two of them to work it, but they didn't seem to have any trouble. Only the locals, you see … the locals, they didn't like them.”

“Go on,” Corylus said. His mouth was suddenly drier than before he'd had the first cupful.

“There was a sacred grove, two big hazels, along with the saplings,” Pulto said. “The Helvetians had brought their religion from the mountains with them, and the grove wasn't part of it. Coryla and her mother didn't need help, so it didn't seem to matter a lot. The Old Man—”

Pulto gestured with his cup. He would have sloshed wine onto the table if he hadn't drunk it down so far already.

“—his dad, and
his
dad before him had been nurserymen down on the bay”—Puteoli—“so he started spending time with the women. I guess something might've happened anyway, but one night there was Pluto's own storm, lightning and hail and more wind than I'd ever seen. We lost the roofs of half the barracks and thought we were lucky.”

“And the grove?” Corylus said, not raising his voice.

Pulto poured more wine deliberately into the bowl, then added the water himself. He kept the mixture the same, two waters to the slug of wine.

When he had finished, he looked up and said, “A lot of the saplings lost their leaves, but the wind wasn't a problem even when it bent them double. The biggest hazel came down, though, struck by lightning, and then the whole thing blew over. And the old woman, she died too. Had a seizure.”

Pulto grimaced and guzzled the cup of wine he'd refilled while speaking. “Hecate knows how old she was,” he muttered. “Mostly barbs are a lot younger than they look right off when you meet them, but I'm not sure the old lady was. Anyway, the Old Man took up with the daughter, that's Coryla, and things went along pretty much the way they had. And it wasn't too long before you—”

He gestured, then refilled the cup.

“—were on the way.”

Pulto had splashed wine when he last filled the cups. He used his little finger to draw a line with it before the last of the puddle settled into the terra-cotta surface. Corylus waited silently, sipping from his own cup. The story was coming at the speed Pulto was comfortable telling it.

“It was just Coryla to work the coppice and her pregnant besides, but that didn't seem to be a problem,” Pulto went on, continuing to play with the tile. “Just about every sapling kept straight and they didn't have a bug problem. Coryla—her and her mother—had a right good sum put by from bonuses when the assessors from the Quartermaster's Department accepted each crop. And then come the night you were born.”

Corylus nodded to show he was listening. He tried to take a sip of wine and found his cup was empty. He set it down and reached for the mixing bowl. He gave up on that because his hands were shaking.

“Well, there was other women in the cantonment,” Pulto said to the
table. “Women who'd come with the cohort from previous stations. The local women, even the ones who'd shacked up with troopers, they wouldn't have anything to do with Coryla, but there wasn't trouble finding help with the lying-in. It all went pretty well, not that the Old Man nor me was looking at anything but the bottom of wine cups—and we
weren't
mixing it, boy, you can count on that. But everything was fine. Only the barbs”—he waved his left hand before him—“the locals, I mean, but they was barbs, they got into the plantation while Coryla was out of action and they cut down the other big hazel. And your mother, she died.”

“In childbirth?” Corylus whispered.

“Sure, in childbirth!” Pulto said. “Hecate knows, boy. She'd born you and she died. Women die all the time, right?”

The bowl was empty. Instead of refilling it, Pulto lifted the jar and drank directly from the spout. Still balancing the heavy jar on his arm, he said in a raw growl, “Well, that was destroying army property, right? The hazel tree. So the army held their investigation, that was the Old Man. And there might've been some complaints to higher authority about just
how
he did the investigating, but as it turned out the locals were all killed while resisting the duly constituted authorities.”

“All of them?” Corylus said. He could scarcely hear his own voice.

Pulto nodded emphatically. “Every bloody one,” he said. “And the girls in the cantonment who must've known what was up but didn't warn anybody, they resisted too.”

He poured unmixed wine into Corylus's cup, then swigged more from the jar. “Your father was a popular officer, boy,” he said. “Not lax. Troopers don't respect a lax officer even when he's easy on them in peace. It won't always be peace, you see, and the veterans know it. But the Old Man always looked out for his men, so when this happened—”

Pulto shrugged. His grin was much like the one he'd had at the door of the gymnasium when he said nobody was going to disturb Corylus and his friends.

“—nobody questioned his orders. And afterward, nobody talked to outsiders about what had happened. Till I did just now, because after that business today, I thought you maybe ought to know.”

There was a hint of challenge in Pulto's voice as he met his master's eyes.

“Yes,” said Corylus with a crisp nod. “I see that. Thank you for—”

For what, exactly?

“—for your loyalty to my father and myself, Pulto.”

He cleared his throat and went on. “Now, do you think we're ready to go back to the apartment? Because I'm to meet Pandareus and Varus at Jupiter on the Capitol tonight, and I'd like to get some food in me before that.”

He patted his cup, empty again. “To settle the wine,” he said with a grin which after a moment became natural.

Pulto set down the jar and stood, grinning even more widely. “Ready and willing, young master,” he said. “And I'll pay the score here, if you don't mind.”

The old soldier shook his head with a look of wonder. “For seventeen years I've wanted to tell you the story,” he said. “Doing it now, well, it's a weight off me that I'm bloody pleased to be shut of.”

Hooking his left index finger through one loop of the wine jar, he sauntered toward the counter, where Maura would measure the damage with a rod. He was whistling “The Girl I Left behind Me.”

Corylus followed. His mind was full of more questions than he'd had before this sudden dose of truth from his servant.

And he wondered even more about what they would learn tomorrow from the guardian of the
Sibylline Books
.

V
ARUS SAT ON THE CURB
around the spring in the back garden. The stonework beneath him was ancient; the garden wall kinked to enclose it. Instead of marble or even patterned tiles, the blocks were volcanic tuff: porous and sometimes light enough to float, but able to support more than an equal weight of concrete. The stone looked black, but it was light gray beneath the stains of algae and centuries.

Varus's hands were in his lap, closed over the ivory head. He wasn't looking at the figurine, nor was he really conscious of anything else in the present world.

A wagon drawn by mules pulled up in the alley behind the house. As it did so, a flock of house servants led by Agrippinus entered the garden from the house proper. Waddling self-importantly with them was a middle-aged man with Greek features.

The majordomo saw Varus. “Quiet down!” he rasped to his companions.

Instead of obeying, the stranger bowed low to Varus and said, “My noble lord, I am Decimus Livius Gallo, chief attendant of the Temple of Tellus. I—”

“Shut up, you fool!” snapped Agrippinus. Unasked, a pair of husky under-stewards grabbed Gallo by the shoulders and jerked him back so that he was no longer addressing Varus. “You don't speak to your betters in
this
household unless they give you permission first!”

Varus turned slightly, his eyes tracking the freedman—he would have been the slave Gallo who took the name of Livius, his former master, when he was freed—without interest or full comprehension. He was in a reverie of sorts.