The Legions of Fire (14 page)

Corylus hadn't fully realized how much he counted on the apartment being a safe haven in a city of strangers. He felt a flash of violent resentment, which embarrassed him just as violently. Nobody looking at him could've guessed he was more than normally startled to find company in his front room, though.

“Oh!” said Alphena; she jumped up. She looked as startled as Corylus was. To his surprise, that made him feel worse than he had before.

“Master Corylus,” said Hedia. She rose as supplely as a cat stretching. He wouldn't have thought there was room for her to get out without shoving back the seat or the table, but she did it easily. “Lady Alphena and I were just taking our leave. Thank you for your gracious hospitality, and please convey our appreciation to your servants.”

“Ah,” said Corylus. He hadn't expected the formality, but of course it was the right course under these unusual circumstances.
Hedia likely picks the right course every time, at least by her own lights
. “Your presence honors my dwelling, your ladyship.”

“I've asked a favor of your Anna here,” Hedia said. She nodded vaguely in the old woman's direction, but her eyes continued to hold Corylus's own. “I trust you won't regard this as too much of an imposition?”

“No, your ladyship!” Corylus said. “Anything you need, just ask!”

The words tumbled out so quickly that he almost got his tongue tangled in his teeth. Alphena colored again.

“And I hope you'll direct your servant to provide what help Anna may require?” Hedia continued, raising an eyebrow.

“Umph,” said Pulto as though a blow had gotten home on his belly. Hedia hadn't looked at the old veteran, and he didn't respond to the indirect order he'd just gotten, but Corylus knew how he felt about it.

Pulto would do what he was told, though. Duty was duty.

“I'm sure that whatever you ask will be important to my well-being, your
ladyship,” Corylus said carefully. “Some recent events seem to threaten not only Carce but the world. I—”

He stopped. He didn't know how to phrase what was a feeling and a memory rather than a considered opinion.

“That is,” he said, “I trust your ladyship's judgment, and I'm sure that you have the best interests of the Emperor and the Republic at heart.”

“Thank you, Master Corylus,” Hedia said. Her smile was cool, but it quirked like a fishhook at one corner of her mouth. “Now I wonder, sir; would you mind walking partway back to the house with me? I know it's out of your way, but you seem a healthy young man. I have some questions about perfume, you see.”

“Why, of course,” said Corylus. He felt the way he had on the morning when the ice had broken and dumped him into the Rhine.
Venus and Mars, what is she really asking?
“Ah, though I don't really, I mean I'm not an expert … though my father, I mean …”

“I'm sure you'll be able to enlighten me sufficiently,” said Hedia. There was laughter in her eyes, but it didn't quite reach her tongue. “And it will be quite decorous, as you'll be walking beside my chair through the public streets. You know the way, of course.”

Alphena stared at her as though she'd walked in on her stepmother looting a temple. Anna had been bustling in the pantry, but now she stuck her head out and said, “Pulto, I have things to talk to you about. The boy can make his way to Senator Saxa's house and back without you to hold his hand this time.”

“Yes, I know the way,” Corylus said. “I, ah …”

“Then we'll be going,” Hedia said, nodding at the door to the stairs. “My daughter and I have business to attend to tonight, so we need to get back.”

“I wonder,
Mother
,” said Alphena, her voice pitched higher than it had been when she spoke a moment before. “Why don't you take our chair and I'll ride back in the one you hired?”

“Not at all, dear,” Hedia said, looking toward the girl with soft amusement. “I'm sure Master Corylus doesn't mind that he's walking beside a rented chair. It's not as though he's going to be talking to the bearers, after all, is it?”

As he listened to the interplay, Corylus realized that the bearers would be total strangers, not members of the household staff who might gossip to their fellows. Had Hedia planned this all along?

Alphena stood stiffly with her fists clenched at her sides. Then without a further word or a look backward, she marched out the door. Hedia, still with a faint smile that could have meant anything, drifted after her.

Corylus glanced over his shoulder as he followed the women. Pulto met his eyes and shrugged. “Keep your shield up and your head down, boy,” the veteran muttered. “You're on the east bank now, believe me.”

The German side of the river
. Corylus grinned as he trotted down the stairs. He intended to be a soldier, after all, and soldiers had to take risks.

Outside somebody was shouting, “Bring the vehicles for the noble ladies Hedia and Alphena!” When Corylus got outside, he saw it was the oily-looking pretty boy who'd been standing in the stairway when he and Pulto came home.

One of Saxa's servants, he supposed, though not one he remembered seeing before. There were two sedan chairs, one of them Saxa's own with the burl maple inlays. They'd been parked down the side street in the shade rather than at the front of the apartment block. Even so Corylus felt a fool not to have noticed them, especially with their coveys of servants.

Pulto hadn't noticed the chairs either, though. The business yesterday had made them both jumpy—and apparently in the worst possible way: they so focused on cloudy fears that they weren't seeing things around them that might be important.

Alphena pushed a servant out of the way and threw herself onto the household vehicle. She couldn't make the bearers drop it—which seemed to have been what she intended—but she did make it sway to the side. The bearers were braced to take her weight, so she had shoved the chair from an angle.

The smarmy servant placed himself beside the hired chair and offered Hedia his arm; the bearers watched the byplay with bored disinterest. Hedia flicked a finger and said, “Iberus, run back to the house and announce that Lady Alphena and I are on the way.”

She turned to Corylus and said, “Will you please hand me into the chair, Master Corylus?”

The servant gaped transfixed for a moment, but judgment smothered his bruised ego in time. He spun and jogged down Long Street before Hedia took further notice of him.

“Your ladyship,” Corylus muttered. He thrust his arm out for Hedia to grip. In fact her fingertips barely brushed his skin; Hedia didn't work out the way her stepdaughter did, but she was obviously fit.

The vehicles and attendants started toward the center of the city with Alphena's chair leading. There were servants both in front and behind, but none of the household were close to Hedia and Corylus.

Alphena seemed to be urging her bearers to speed up. That was a bad idea: trained pairs had a fixed pace. If they changed it they were likely to get out of step with one another, making for a rough ride; in the worst case they might even fall.

“Ah, you wanted to know about perfume, your ladyship?” Corylus said.

“Of course not, dear,” Hedia said with a throaty chuckle. “And I don't want to know about Vergil's poetry either, which I suspect would interest you a great deal more.”

She turned to look at him. The hired bearers were keeping a good pace, but to the left Corylus matched it easily by lengthening his own stride by a thumb's width from route march standard.

“And I'd like you to call me Hedia,” she said. “In fact, I insist on it. You wouldn't refuse a lady's request, would you, Corylus?”

“Ah …,” said Corylus. “I would comply as best I could within the bounds of propriety. Hedia.”

Her laugh trilled. “You're a diplomat,” she said. “And much more intelligently cautious than I would expect from someone your age.”

She looked him up and down, leaning toward him slightly to watch his legs scissoring on the pavement. Just as glad for the silence, Corylus looked ahead and to his side of the street.

Old two-and three-story buildings lined the boulevard. Though Carce was growing with the expansion of the empire, the need for taller structures hadn't generally moved this far out from the Forum yet. Corylus's own apartment block was an exception, a replacement for three smaller buildings destroyed by fire only a year and a half ago.

“You don't move like a lawyer,” she said, raising her eyes to his face again. “You move more like a wolf.”

“I don't plan to be a lawyer,” Corylus said. He was aware of her to his right through the corners of his eyes, but he continued to look forward. “I'm going to enter the army as a tribune next year”—he started to say, “your ladyship,” but caught himself—“Hedia. Master Pandareus teaches us to speak, but he also teaches us to think, those of us who want to. Varus and I are learning a lot besides rhetoric.”

“Umm …,” said the lady noncommittally. “At your age, I'd been
married for a year. The first time, that is. I suppose you've heard various stories about me, Corylus?”

Corylus remembered how Pulto had grunted when Hedia had told him to help his wife with her magic. He felt the same now. The breath went out of him; he didn't miss a step, but his right foot slipped a trifle because he didn't place it with the care that the slick-worn paving stones required.

It's probably best to tell the truth. It's always best to tell the truth
.
Usually
.

“Your ladyship,” Corylus said. He looked at her as they paced along; their eyes were on a level. “
Hedia,
I'm sorry. Hedia, I'm not from Carce and I don't run in the same circles you do. Early on there was some talk in class from the other fellows, but I think they were just trying to ride Varus because he and I were friends. And”—
how much to say?
—“because that did kind of involve me, I got involved in it and it stopped. Anyway, I wouldn't trust Piso if he walked into the room wet and said it was raining.”

He didn't know how Hedia was going to react to what he'd just blurted. After an expressionless moment, she gave him a slow smile and said, “Piso, yes. Well, he
wouldn't
like me, dear. I was married to Calpurnius Latus, his uncle, you see. And I'm afraid the marriage wasn't a success.”

“Well, if Latus was anything like Piso …,” Corylus said. His voice had dropped to a growl. He looked ahead again because he didn't want Hedia to mistake the hard anger in his expression as something directed at her. “Then it wasn't your fault. Hedia.”

“That's very sweet of you, Corylus,” she said, “and my first husband was certainly a nasty little thing. But there were faults on both sides. There generally are, dear.”

“Well, it's none of my business,” Corylus muttered to the air. He wanted to break into a run. He wanted to be back in the apartment. He
wanted
to be back in the clean forest glades in Germany; either side of the Rhine would have been all right.

He remembered the forest he'd dreamed of while Varus read his epic; the place with the shaggy elephants, where Saxa and the Hyperborean had been sacrificing. But the men had been in the garden of Saxa's house here in Carce then. What had Corylus really seen?

“I'm sure some of the stories you heard were true,” Hedia continued calmly. “Even if you heard them from my nephew by marriage. In some cases, I doubt dear Piso could have made anything up that would have been more, well, colorful. Did he accuse me of poisoning Latus, though?”

“I didn't believe it,” Corylus said.

The snarl was on his face as well as in his voice. A fruit seller who'd dodged toward the chair through the screen of attendants now jumped back, breaking off his spiel at “These're the finest—”

“I'm glad to hear that,” said Hedia, “because it's not true.
I
didn't poison him, at any rate. Latus had other interests, you see, and it's been my experience that men of a certain sort are more likely to be jealous bitches than real women are. But there was fever about in Baiae that summer, and I honestly believe that a fever carried away my husband.”

Corylus coughed, then swallowed, to have something to do other than speak. He didn't know how to react when a woman he knew only slightly—a noblewoman!—started talking about, well, these sorts of things.

Which he
had
heard about, of course. And if he was really honest, he'd have to admit that he'd believed at least a little part of what he'd heard.

“I care very deeply for my husband Saxa,” Hedia said. “He's a wonderful, kind, old man. By marrying me he saved me from being beggared if not worse after Latus died, and he truly loves me for what I am.”

Corylus risked a glance at her. She smiled impishly and said, “Or despite what I am, if you want to put it that way. I'm sure a lot of people would.”

“M-ma'am, I don't know about that,” he said. “I don't know anything about, well, that.”

“I doubt that's true,” Hedia said with another chuckle, “but let it stand. Saxa is a very sweet
older
man. And he wouldn't have been an athlete even when he was younger, I'm afraid.”

Corylus didn't speak. He thought about the subject of Piso's oration and began to grin despite himself. He wondered how Pandareus would react to a declamation on the subject “A freeborn lady offers her body to all comers. She then asks to become a priestess, claiming that because she refused payment for her services she did not carry on a sordid occupation.”

“You're laughing, Corylus?” Hedia said with the least bit of edge in her voice.

“Piso was declaiming this morning,” he said truthfully. “He struck me as mechanical and bombastic. But very loud.”