The Legions of Fire (5 page)

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 had 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.

“I thought of dragging Lady Alphena out by the ear,” Hedia said in a low but conversational tone.

Syra's eyes were open again; the words made her blink. “The young lady is very athletic,” the maid said carefully. She obviously wasn't sure whether her mistress was joking. “She practices in the gymnasium almost daily.”

Hedia let her smile spread slightly. “I wasn't proposing to put on armor and duel her,” she said. “If you haven't had it happen to you, Syra, you can't imagine how painful it is to have someone twisting your ear. You'll walk along with them rather than do anything that pulls harder on it.”

She mused on the Black-and-Gold Hall. It wasn't anything to do with Alphena which had stopped Hedia from acting on her first impulse; rather, it was the embarrassment the scene would have caused Varus.

He wasn't the kind of man—boy—that Hedia would ordinarily have paid any attention to. He was a quiet little fellow, bookish and above all
earnest
. Sometimes that was a pose: Hedia had let one of her first husband's philosophical friends grope her beneath a bust of Zeno in his library because the split between appearance and reality amused her.

In Varus's case, it was poetry rather than philosophy—they were much of a sameness, of course, just words either one—but Varus couldn't have been more serious about His Art. Hedia took her duties as mother seriously. She wouldn't think of turning the boy's first public recital into a farce.

She listened critically a little while longer. Varus seemed to be doing quite well at creating a farce on his own. Perhaps tomorrow she could take him aside and discuss with him more suitable ways for a young man of his station to become part of public life. Misery might have made him malleable.

Her lips tightened. Syra noticed the minute change in expression and winced, so Hedia forced herself to smile again.
If I move quickly enough, I can marry Alphena off and save her from her father's ruin
.

There was nothing she could do for Saxa's son, though. Varus was doomed even if Hedia encouraged him to go to the right sort of drinking parties and perhaps introduced him to women who would like to polish the education of a boy who seemed younger than his years.

Hedia didn't care about Varus, but she cared quite a lot about Saxa. If there'd been a way to snatch her husband's male issue from the disaster, she would have done so.

Saxa was a bit of a mystic and a bit of a fool. The best Hedia could say for his physical approaches to her was that they were well intentioned and perhaps not the clumsiest of her considerable experience. But he was
kind
, a genuinely decent man, and one who could see the real heart of things more clearly than anyone else she knew.

Saxa's offer of marriage close on the heels of the death of his cousin, Calpurnius Latus, had been as surprising as it was welcome. Hedia hadn't murdered Latus—indeed, it was likely enough that fever, not poison by his hand or that of another, had carried her husband off. It wouldn't have been hard to suggest otherwise, however, and Latus's well-connected family had a considerable legacy to gain if the widow was executed for his murder.

All the whispers had stopped when Saxa married the widow. A cynic might suspect that he had simply scooped the legacy from the other relatives. Nobody who knew Saxa would believe that, however: he was not only staggeringly rich, he was as little interested in money for its own sake as any man in the Senate.

Perhaps Saxa had seen an excitement in Hedia which his life had lacked to that time. As for Hedia herself—

She paused, thinking. Saxa had given her safety, a debt which she would repay to the best of her ability. But he unexpectedly had brought her a kind of sweetness which she hadn't to that point imagined.

Saxa was a silly old buffer, but she loved him. Which was something else she hadn't imagined would ever happen.

There were voices at the front door; the German accent of the handsome new doorman was unmistakable. Immediately servants appeared from nooks and crannies. This sometimes made Hedia think of the way roaches scrambled if you walked into the pantry at night with a lamp.

She stepped into the reception hall. A pair of the attendants who'd left with Saxa in the morning were jabbering directions to Agrippinus. The
majordomo must have been in the office … though how he'd gotten there without Hedia seeing him pass completely escaped her.

“Mistress,” he said with a bow. “Our lord the Senator has requested that a lighted brazier be placed in the back garden for him and a companion. They will be arriving shortly.”

“Then you had better do it,” said Hedia, dismissing him with a crisp nod.

The two messengers started off with Agrippinus. “
Not
you, Bellatus,” Hedia snapped to the one whose name she remembered.

Bellatus froze as though he had taken an arrow through the spine. “Mistress?” he quavered.

“Will my lord's companion be Nemastes the Foreigner?” she asked.

“I, ah, believe he might be, noble mistress,” the servant said. He knelt, more to hide his face than to honor her, she thought.

“You may go,” Hedia said, her tone mild and ironic.

Bellatus scampered away.
That's just as well,
thought Hedia with a faint smile.
If he'd stayed a moment or two longer, I'd have slashed him across the face with my fan
.

Clicking the ivory slats open and closed, Hedia took her position in front of the tiled pond in the entranceway. The edges of the fan had been painted while it was slightly ajar, then closed and gilded. If you ruffled the slats
just
right, you saw a nude girl on one side and a simply charming youth on the other.

Hedia continued to smile as she watched through the open outside door at the end of the hall. The messengers couldn't have been very far ahead of Saxa and the Hyperborean.

The servants had vanished again, all but Syra, who was looking determinedly toward the garden instead of out into the street. The maid couldn't flee, but she could pretend she was somewhere else.

There was a bustle outside. The doorman stepped into the street and bellowed, “All hail our noble master Gaius Alphenus Saxa, twice consul and senator!”

That was what Flavus meant to say, at any rate. Between his poor grasp of Latin and a German accent that made everything sound as though he had a mouthful of pork, you had to know what the words should be to understand him.

The crowd of clients bowed and saluted in the street. There were forty
and more of them on a normal day, men who either owed Saxa service or hoped for a favor. Favors could range from occasional dinners and a small basket of coins during the Saturnalia, to support in an election or during a court proceeding. The Senator would never have to face the dangers of the streets alone.

Indeed, for poor men out at night a rich man's entourage was one of the greater risks. A band of enthusiastic clients would beat a tipsy countryman with the same enthusiasm that they would lavish on a real footpad. More, in fact, because the robber would probably be armed and dangerous to tackle.

Saxa entered, his head cocked over his shoulder to talk with the man behind him. He didn't notice his wife for a moment. When he did, he stopped, looking startled and embarrassed.

“Good evening, dear,” he said. “I, ah … I'm afraid I don't have time to chat just now.”

Saxa was fifty-two years old; plumpish, balding, and with the open face of a boy. At the moment he looked rather like a boy caught masturbating when his mother walked in. Hedia smiled with more humor than she'd felt before that image came to her.

Nemastes the Hyperborean stepped to Saxa's side; the outer doorway was too narrow for them to have entered together. He dipped to one knee to acknowledge the mistress of the house. He must have been at least six and a half feet tall—he towered above the German doorman—but he was skeletally thin.

Nemastes' eyes were large and pale. There was nothing very remarkable about them at a quick glance, but Hedia had never seen the fellow blink.

“We have family business, my lord, regarding the future of your daughter,” Hedia said. Her words were those of a subservient wife, but her tone would leave a stranger with no doubt regarding the real distribution of power in the household. “Perhaps you can meet with your acquaintance some other day.”

Nemastes rose and waited impassively. He didn't bother to scowl at Hedia or sneer; rather, he waited for her to get out of the way as he might have done if a herd of swine had blocked his path.

Normally Saxa's clients would have entered the hall with him and taken their leaves individually in ascending order of rank. It was Nemastes' presence that had held them outside. In the street they could keep their distance from the Hyperborean while still accompanying the Senator, but the
hallway might have squeezed them into closer contact, which they all preferred to avoid.

“Ah, my pet, not now, I'm afraid,” Saxa muttered, staring at his hands as he wrung them.

“My lord,
now
,” Hedia said. Paving stones would have more give to them than her voice did. “I intend to hold a marriage divination for Alphena at the full moon, which is tomorrow night. She is your daughter and we must discuss the arrangements.”

“Whatever you decide, dearest,” Saxa said, fluttering his hands miserably. “We have to, that is, I have to—”

“Husband,” said Hedia. She didn't raise her voice, but each of the syllables she clipped out could have broken glass. “We—”

“Hedia, I really must go!” Saxa said. “Master Nemastes and I have business to transact now, men's business! Good day!”

Head high, back straight, and face set in misery, Saxa stamped through the door to the courtyard and continued around the pool to the rear suite of rooms. The back garden was the end of the lot on which the town house stood, closed on three sides by high walls.

Nemastes stalked along after him, looking more than usually like a praying mantis. He didn't bother to glance at Hedia, any more than a traveler would be concerned with the pigs which had briefly delayed him.

Hedia sighed. There was very little that she couldn't get a man to do without help, but this business was exceptional.

She walked into the courtyard, staying on the far side from the Black-and-Gold Hall so as not to disturb the reading.

Hedia was going to the gymnasium. She needed a magician, and that meant she needed the aid of Corylus's servant.