The Legions of Fire (6 page)

C
orylus let his left fingertips slide along the wooden bench. He couldn't touch the wood with his right hand, because Alphena was there.
She's pressing so hard that if I stand up suddenly, she'll go shooting into the aisle
.

“Fiery as always with love of war and battles and struggles with foes,” Varus recited, “our heroic general snatched up his arms!”

As best Corylus could tell, a giant African dragon had just attacked Regulus's army. He'd been expecting to hear more about the Carthaginians, though he supposed it didn't matter much. Varus would have made real history ludicrous, so starting with an absurd notion was perhaps a more efficient plan.

“Shouting encouragement to his cavalry, tried by the war god on every field, he ordered them to charge the foe,” said Varus. His eyes were staring; Corylus didn't think he was reading the manuscript at all. He'd committed the work to memory and was letting it spew out like water from a tap.

Corylus was trying to stay awake. The room was warm, and the rhythm of his friend's voice affected him the way a tree shivers in a breeze. Corylus would nod off if he concentrated on the poem, and he didn't dare let that happen.

It would be awful if he fell asleep during Varus's reading. It would be far worse if he collapsed in giggles, and that was the likely result if he viewed the verse against the reality of war that he'd grown up with on Carce's distant frontiers.

The bench, the touch of wood … that was salvation. The boards were merely pine, but they'd been well seasoned and they were joined with mortises and tenons as clean as those of a ship. Corylus felt sunlight on the
north slope of the valley where the pine had been felled. It was fitting that a straight-grained tree like this one should have been shaped by an expert.

The Emperor in his wisdom had nominated Saxa to be governor of Lusitania, the province on the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The Senate had agreed by acclamation to the Emperor's slate of recommendations—which
was
wise, since the Emperor had never been of an easy disposition and was becoming steadily more irascible as he aged.

Saxa would need a considerable staff to govern a province. Corylus was pretty sure that he could wangle a junior judicial position through Varus. Saxa probably didn't know his son's friend from his cook's brother, but there was no reason he
wouldn't
grant the appointment.

That might be a quicker route to success than the path Corylus had intended: becoming a staff tribune in one of the legions and following the legionary commander at increasingly higher rank on his future postings. A civil career might even be safer, though Corylus guessed that a judicial gofer in a province as wild as Lusitania would have plenty of opportunity to get his head knocked in.

He liked the idea of working with words and ideas, and of convincing people to work together rather than forcing them to do as he said … but his father had been army, and Corylus's own upbringing was army. Also, he'd met enough barbarians—that wasn't just a term of insult on the frontiers—to know that force was the
only
convincing argument to many Germans and Iazyges and Sarmatians and Jupiter-knew-who-all-else.

Maybe it was different in the East. There the cultures had been ancient when Carce was inhabited by shepherds who lived on separate hills and stole one another's sheep, but Corylus knew the Rhine and the Danube.

“Hunching high and then low again,” Varus said, apparently visualizing his monster as a giant inchworm, “the creature rushed toward the attacking men.”

Corylus tried to imagine how you would fight a snake that big. A smile twitched the corners of his lips, so he quickly let his thoughts return to the grain of the wood.

Unexpectedly he entered a world of trees, cool and silent and perfectly graceful. They marched across plains and climbed hills in ragged columns. They sprouted from cliffs, their roots clinging to cracks where no animal could grip; they spread their branches to embrace birds and the breezes.

He forgot about Varus's poem; it became as meaningless as the whirl of
dust motes in yesterday's sun. Human activities flashed and vanished before Corylus's new sensibility registered them.

The world was an enormous green unity, all times and places in a single spreading carpet of trees. In the distance ice glittered north to all eternity. Fringing that sterile mass were cold marshes sodden with meltwater; spruce and cedars and larches grew there in packed profusion. Dead trunks slanted into the branches of their living kin and rotted in the air.

Snow had fallen deeply around the trees. Frost drew traceries from the coarse grasses, but the runoff from the glaciers was too vast to freeze over as yet. Corylus understood that. He was part of the forest's sluggish omniscience.

Elephants with thick black hair and curved tusks moved through the trees in a loose herd. They were bigger than the species from the North African coast that Corylus had seen often in the amphitheater, bigger even than the occasional Indian elephant which had been trekked overland to tower above its African kin.

The creatures' feet were the size of storage jars, but for all their bulk they made less sound than men walking. Corylus could hear the deep rumble of their bellies, like sheep only many times louder; their trunks moved constantly to sweep in crackling branches. The elephants' jaws worked side to side, pulverizing sprays of conifer needles and occasionally dribbling the green mush out the sides of their lips.

The herd moved on, squealing brief notes to one another. Their dung was green and steamed where it splattered onto the snow; it had a resinous odor.

A lynx watched from a high branch, showing the same careful interest in the elephants as in the ice cap distantly visible from its perch. It didn't move. If the cat was aware of Corylus, it gave no sign of the fact.

Corylus drifted across the dank landscape, fully aware but having no more volition than a tree. The forest exists, but it neither plans nor cares.

Something cared. It was drawing Corylus along.

Before him was a grove of twelve great balsams. Water dripped from their dangling fronds, but the ground in their center was higher than the surrounding marshes. There stood two foggy human figures, bending toward a tripod where herbs smoldered on a bed of charcoal.

On the inward-facing sides, the bark of the balsams had been carved with elongated human features. Corylus drifted into the circle; the trees' slitted eyes turned to follow his invisible presence.

The scene sharpened as though someone had opened the shutter of a dark lantern, throwing light on what had until then been shadowed. First Corylus registered the ornate bronze tripod: three Chimeras gripped the edges of the brazier; their snake-headed tails were looped up into carrying handles. The piece was striking and unique, easily identifiable as part of the furnishings of Gaius Alphenus Saxa's town house.

Saxa, wearing a toga with the broad stripe of a senator, stood on one side of the brazier. Sweat glistened on his pinkish bald spot. He stared at Corylus in amazement.

The other man was inhumanly tall and so thin that his arms and legs made Corylus think of a spider. He wore a garment pieced together from small skins sewn fur-side in. He was barefoot, though the ground he stood on was frozen; his long black toenails resembled a dog's claws.

He glared at Corylus. His irises were a gray so pale that they were almost indistinguishable from the whites of his eyes.

The cadaverous stranger pointed. Corylus didn't have a hand to raise to defend himself nor a body to move away.

The forest fell out of reality. Saxa and the stranger were in Saxa's back garden. Cold had shattered the pear tree beside them; frost sprang from the pebbles of the walkway. The old coping around the natural spring in the far corner glowed with a faint saffron light.

Corylus gripped his bench. He was in the Black-and-Gold Hall with the aisle to his left and Alphena beside him. His head buzzed with pulsing whiteness, and everybody seemed to be shouting.

He was shouting too. “Where am I?
Where
am I?”

O
FF-DUTY SERVANTS
—most of the household staff was off duty most of the time—leaped to their feet and bowed as Hedia entered the suite of small rooms leading to the exercise yard. There'd been a game of bandits in progress. An under-steward now sat awkwardly on the game board, but one of the knucklebones they'd been throwing had escaped into the middle of the terrazzo floor when the mistress unexpectedly appeared.

“Go away,” Hedia said in apparent disgust. She didn't care that the servants were gambling illegally. She knew, though, that if her tone suggested that she was thinking of crucifying them, she would get a degree of privacy that was otherwise beyond imagining.

The twenty-odd people in the four small rooms scattered like blackbirds
startled from a barley field; at least one was still tying his sash. The under-steward ducked out but paused in the doorway. One hand stretched toward the loose knucklebone but his eyes were on Hedia; he suddenly vanished after the rest.

Hedia glanced at Syra. The maid looked studiously innocent. Very likely she was more than a casual friend of one of the people routed by their mistress's appearance.

“What's the name of that under-steward, Syra?” Hedia asked in a conversational tone.

“Ursus, I believe, mistress,” Syra said without meeting her mistress's eyes. She kept her voice calm, but she blushed down to the top of her tunic.

Hedia smiled, not from what she'd learned—she didn't care about that—but because she'd learned it using observation and her mind. She nodded, silently directing Syra to open the door into the exercise yard.

Knowing that Pulto and Lenatus were comrades from the army, Hedia had expected to find them sharing a carafe of something from Saxa's storeroom and chatting about old times. Instead she'd heard slams and grunts as she entered the rear apartments.

When the door opened, the men sprang apart and faced her. For a moment they were nothing human: they'd been sparring in full armor and now glared at her with eyes slitted between shield tops and the beetling brass brows of their helmets.

“Hercules!” the man on the right said. He threw down his fat wooden sword and straightened, sweeping off his helmet. He was Lenatus, which meant—

“Mistress, very sorry!” the trainer said. He hadn't done anything more than marginally improper, but he obviously considered it a sign of trouble when the lady of the house visited his domain for the first time. “I, ah, needed to keep my skills up, so I asked a friend of mine to exercise with me!”

—that the other man was Pulto, whom Hedia had come to see. He set his wooden sword in the rack and took off his helmet. He stood with it in his right hand and his shield, a section of cylinder made from laminated wood, still in his left.

Pulto was politely expressionless, but his stance was wary. He was a freeman and not a member of Saxa's household, but he obviously felt that
Hedia's lack of direct authority over him wouldn't be much protection if she wanted his hide. She supposed soldiers got used to being in that sort of situation.

“It's quite all right, Lenatus,” Hedia said breezily. “I was hoping to have a few words with your guest here. Master Pulto, isn't it? That is, while your master is attending my son at the reading.” She waved a gracious hand. “If you'd like to go on, please do so,” she said. “I only need a minute or two after you've finished.”

Syra looked at her in shock; that made Hedia want to slap her.
Of
course
I don't mean it, girl, but these men aren't stupid enough to think that I do!

“Time I quit anyhow, ma'am,” Pulto said in evident relief. “I'm so out of shape I embarrass myself. It's a bloody good thing the Old Man wasn't watching me waddle around just now!”

He placed his helmet on top of a post in a wall niche, then unfastened the stout leather thong stretching from the top of his shield to a hook in the armor over his right shoulder blade. That spread the shield's considerable weight to the other side as well as taking some of it off his arm.

“Oh, you weren't doing too bad, buddy,” said Lenatus as he disarmed also. “If you take a couple weeks to shape up, you'll be ready for carving up Germans and all the other fun and games.”

Hedia watched the men without expression. They were pretending that things were normal and that the lady of the house wasn't about to make some unfathomable upper-class demand that they would have to obey. She had spoken only of Pulto, but they were friends; neither was going to leave the other alone in the soup.

With abrupt decision, she looked at her maid. “Syra,” she said, “go back to my suite and set out clothing for dinner. I'll wear the violet synthesis, I believe, and the gold jewelry from Ephesus.”

The men had been unlacing each other's armor; they paused. Syra blinked in surprise and didn't move either.

“Now, girl!” Hedia said. The maid squeaked and vanished back toward the front of the house.

“You gentlemen can relax,” Hedia said, letting her voice take on a slight throatiness. She closed the door. “I need a favor and I hope you can help me, but you won't either of you be harmed by this business whatever your answer is.”

The men looked at each other. “Ma'am?” Pulto said, carefully.

Hedia picked up the sword which Lenatus had dropped. It was startlingly heavy.

Her surprise must've shown. Lenatus took it from her with a grin and set it in the rack below the one Pulto had been using. “They're wood right enough, mistress,” he said, “but there's lead in the hilt and they're double the weight of an issue sword.”

“You practice with these,” said Pulto, “and it's like going on leave when it's the real thing. Well, that's the idea.”