Legions of Fire: Chapter Four

    Alphena took a deep breath. Porters were fitting the polished maple poles into the sockets of the family sedan chair in front of the house, and a gaggle of attendants milled in the street.

    Hedia, wearing an ankle-length linen tunic and a short wool cape dyed bright yellow, waited on the steps. Alphena had thought her stepmother might wear a thin silk synthesis as she did when she went out in the evenings, but apparently at mid-morning that was too blatantly racy even for her.

    The slut. Looking down her nose at everything and everybody, like a perfect ivory statue!

    At this hour there was little traffic on the cul-de-sac where Alphenus Saxa and seven other wealthy families lived, though people travelling between the center of Carce and the northeastern suburbs thronged the boulevard at its head. The Senate was in session; Saxa had gone off to the session, accompanied by the throng of clients who’d arrived at dawn to pay their respects to him.

    Venus be thanked, father really was at the Senate House instead of with his Hyperborean friend. The Emperor was addressing the Senate today. Any Senator present in Carce who didn’t attend would be marking himself for quick attention of a bad kind.

    Alphena marched past the doorman, startling him. “Good morning, Hedia,” she said. She was trying to sound coldly sophisticated, but she heard her voice wobble like a wren trilling. Her face went hot and she hoped she wasn’t blushing.

    Hedia turned; her maid hopped to the side with a twitter to avoid standing between them. Hedia wasn’t tall, and Alphena stood on the step above her besides. Even so, the older woman gave the impression that she was staring down from a great height.

    “Good morning, daughter,” Hedia said. “Usually at this time of day, you’re at your exercises, aren’t you?”

    Her voice was pleasant and cultured and cool. The only insult in it was, “your exercises,” but even that was a gibe only if you felt that it was unwomanly and improper for a girl in armor to swing a sword at a post.

    I have every right to exercise whatever way I want to! My brother could and I can too!

    “I’m coming with you to Master Corylus’ apartments,” Alphena said, hearing her own shrillness. “That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?”

    I’ve practiced this! I’m going to be calm. But she wasn’t calm, of course.

    “I’m going to see Anna, Master Corylus’ cook and housekeeper,” Hedia said. She sounded amused, but Alphena had seen her eyes narrow. “I presume her master will be in class in the Forum with your brother Varus, dear. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

    “Well, dear,” Alphena said. “You seem to think that you’re spending your time properly when you interfere in my life, don’t you? So I’m returning the favor. I guess you could say that I’m learning from you, do you see?”

    Hedia lifted her chin slightly. “I’m your mother, girl,” she snapped. “Keep a civil tongue in your head!”

    The attendants in the street had stopped chattering among themselves. They shifted so that they all stood with their backs toward their master’s wife and daughter. The rooms facing the street would be filling with servants also, crowding close to the window louvers and trying not to breathe loudly.

    Alphena was sure that if they were asked, everyone in the street would claim he — they were all men — hadn’t heard a word of the discussion between the women. The rest of the servants would claim to have been in the back of the house while it was going on. She was also sure that the row — and it was certainly becoming one — would be the only topic of conversation among the servants tonight and with neighboring households. Well, she didn’t care!

    “You’re my mother?” Alphena said. Her voice rose shrilly, and that made her even more angry than she’d been already. “You’re five years older than I am, that’s all! That’s pretty young for motherhood, isn’t it, dear?”

    Hedia was actually six years older that Alphena, but she knew that she wouldn’t be called on the petty falsehood. Hedia wasn’t petty.

    “Or do you mean that you’ve got so much more experience than I do?” Alphena went on. Words were bubbling out of her; she couldn’t control them any more than a cloud could control the rain sluicing down. “I’ve heard that you do. Is that where you’re going now, to get more experience? Is that why you don’t want your husband’s daughter along?”

    “Dear,” Hedia said calmly as she walked to the bottom of the steps where she stood close to Alphena. “I don’t think this is a good time or place for the discussion. I understand you being upset by the business yesterday. I’m upset too, and when I return we can talk about it quietly.”

    The German doorkeeper had vanished into his alcove; Alphena didn’t think he was smart enough to understand how dangerous this was for a slave, but at least he’d figured out that he shouldn’t stand obviously gaping at his betters.

    “I’ve heard that Master Corylus’ cook is a wise woman, too!” Alphena said. She was listening to herself as though she’d just stumbled onto the conversation of two complete strangers. “Does she make potions, do you suppose? Does she make the sort of potion that your first husband swallowed the night he died?”

    For a moment, Hedia’s face had no expression at all. Alphena’s breath sucked in; she’d shocked herself with her words, an accusation of poisoning screamed in public. If anybody took it to the authorities, not only Hedia but Corylus would be in serious trouble. Hecate, make my tongue not have spoken!

    Hedia laughed, a silver trill that broke the brittle silence. Smiling, she patted Alphena on the arm and said, “You’re quite right, dear. You’re an adult, and you’re a part of this business — the whole household is. I shouldn’t have been treating you as a child.”

    “I’m sorry,” Alphena whispered. “I shouldn’t have . . . I didn’t know what I was saying.”

    She’d been looking into her stepmother’s eyes. For a moment Hedia had considered all aspects of the situation and all possible responses. She had chosen to laugh, but that was a choice.

    “Nonsense, dear,” Hedia said with another affectionate pat. She wasn’t hiding anger under pretense of cheerfulness: the scene really did amuse her. “Someone seems to be attacking your father by magic, attacking all of us I shouldn’t wonder, and of course you’re upset. I couldn’t be more pleased that you’re willing to help me get to the bottom of the business.”

    She turned to the sedan chair. The bearers were facing up the street. They must’ve been watching the women in the polished bronze fittings, though, because they stiffened immediately.

    “Scylax?” Hedia said. “Is the chair ready?”

    Pairs of men carried the chair, but another pair would trot alongside to take over every fifteen minutes — or less, if they were climbing hills. The chief bearer rose and turned, standing at attention.

    “Yes, milady!” he said. “We just finished putting the poles in, milady. It made a lot of noise, it did, and I almost didn’t hear you calling me!”

    “Well, run up to the boulevard and find another chair as well,” Hedia said, accepting the lie with an icy smile. “My daughter will be gracing me with her companionship. She’ll go with you and I’ll ride in the hired chair. Promptly, now!”

    The bearer trotted toward the Argiletum at the head of the cul-de-sac. He didn’t run, and his arms dangled instead of pumping back and forth as most people would have done. The chairmen were used to moving at a particular speed in a particular way, for as long as they needed to. Scylax wasn’t going to change his technique simply because he’d been told to do something other than carry the front half of a sedan chair.

    As they watched Scylax, Hedia slid her fingers down Alphena’s arm and let them rest on the back of her hand. “We’re going to be friends, dear,” she said. “It’s important that you and I be friends.”

    Alphena forced a smile. “Yes, mother,” she said, curling her hand around Hedia’s.

    The previous afternoon she’d realized that Lenatus and his friend Pulto had been killers, for all their politeness and the way they now bowed and scraped to the young mistress. They had been ready to kill again if they thought they should.

    What Alphena had seen a moment ago in her stepmother’s eyes was a colder version of the same thing. Hedia could be a very bad enemy.

 

---

 

---

 

    Varus wore the ivory head around his neck on a thin leather thong. Though he didn’t reach under his toga while he listened to Piso’s class exercise, his fingers curled with memory of how the talisman had felt.

    “You were a prostitute!” Piso said. His left arm was crossed over his chest, while he swept his right out to the side as though he were pointing at a meteor plunging toward the Forum. “You say that you remained chaste and begged for alms instead of surrendering your body to your clients, but the only evidence we have is your word. The word of an admitted prostitute!”

    Piso was declaiming from the rostrum in front of the Temple of Julius Caesar, facing his teacher and the remainder of the class in the Forum below. Pandareus and some of the students — Piso’s friends and sycophants, at least — had notebooks out, either waxed boards or thin sheets of wood to write on with a brush.

    Varus didn’t need notes to remember clever twists that his fellow classmates came up with. Besides, in Varus’ estimation, the chances of Piso doing so were slim to none.

    The subject set for Piso’s speech was whether a woman who remained chaste after being captured by pirates and sold into prostitution could legally become a Vestal Virgin. The situation was improbable, but it taught logic and technique as clearly as an ordinary case of legacy-fishing.

    “Your children would be barred from becoming priests . . . ,” cried Piso. He clapped his right arm to his chest now and flung the left one outward. Like his voice, his gestures attempted by enthusiasm to make up for their lack of grace. “Because their mother had carried on a sordid occupation. Are we therefore to say that you are worthy of becoming a priestess yourself?”

    The varied business of the Forum went on untroubled by the declamation. At least three other classes were going on nearby, though the babble of business was enough to drown the speeches in the general noise.

    Occasionally passers-by would glance toward them, but the exuberant gestures had probably drawn their eyes. Piso looked enough as though he were hurling things from his raised vantage point that a prudent man would take heed.

    “Should the Consul give way to you if he meets you as priestess in the street?” Piso bellowed, changing the angles of his arms yet again. “To you, a woman whom a crippled Levantine properly approached if he still had two copper sesterces in his begging bowl!”

    There were cheers and stampings of applause from behind Pandareus and the semicircle of his students. Though the Senate was in session, the Emperor hadn’t made his appearance yet. Piso’s father and his political cronies had chosen to attend the boy’s declamation, doubtless planning to rush into the session if the glittering progress of a guard detachment warned them that the Emperor was on his way. The session was being held in the huge Julian Basilica today; the entrance was within fifty yards.

    What did the senators really think of the declamation? Perhaps they were impressed by it. This wasn’t an age which valued subtlety, and Piso certainly displayed the present virtues of noise and color to an impressive degree.

    “Do you say, ‘The pirate who captured me can attest my virginity’?” Piso demanded. He’d initially shown some variation in his gestures, but now he seemed to have settled on mirrored pairings of one arm crossed, the other extended. “Perhaps, but your witness won’t be able to visit you in your temple should you become a priestess!”

    Saxa had never come to one of Varus’ declamations. He’d attended early classes occasionally, though he wasn’t an orator himself and didn’t pretend to care about technique or about literature more generally.

    Varus had never cared for argumentative declamations like the present one anyway. They were the stuff of courts and public assemblies, where a bold lie which couldn’t be uncovered was more effective than any amount of calm reason.

    Philosophical declamations were far more attractive to him. Varus had been quite pleased with the way he’d brought his audience to consider whether Alexander should sail from the mouth of the Indus River and turn east, attempting to cross the globe-girdling Ocean. He’d summed up on the one hand that water was the First Element and should not be conquered by any man, even Alexander; and on the other that this would be the longed-for moment when human civilization and the world should have the same boundaries. Pandareus had spoken highly of some of his figures of speech, and even Piso’s claque had jotted notes.

    But Saxa hadn’t been present. Varus smiled with rueful affection. For as far back as he could remember, his father had been an antiquarian: a man who enjoyed unearthing odd scraps of knowledge. He had a great deal of information, but he hadn’t been able to organize it in any fashion more complicated than a vertical stack.

    More recently, though, his researches had descended into what could only be described as blatant superstitions, sillinesses that were unworthy of the attention — let alone the belief — of an educated man. And Saxa did believe in them. He not only practiced magical rituals himself, he let a self-proclaimed Hyperborean wizard lead him in the gods knew what directions.

    Though Varus no longer saw the twelve dancers, they chanted in his mind as their demon companions hissed in unison. It was a dream, but it haunted his waking hours. It was a dream!

    “You wheedled would-be customers to give you as alms what they had intended to pay as the price of your body!” said Piso. “Well and good — you remain a virgin. But is this the art which a priestess uses when speaking to the goddess of the hearth? Surely not! Yours was a whore’s trick and a whore’s manner. Your very demeanor is an affront to chaste Vesta!”

    Corylus stood to Varus’ left. His notebook was out for courtesy’s sake, but he wasn’t jotting anything down. Varus knew that his friend disliked Piso even more than he himself did, but he was unfailingly polite when they interacted.

    On the frontier where Corylus had been raised, life was harsh and weapons were never far to seek even in the most civilized surroundings. As the chant seethed in his blood, Varus realized for the first time that his friend was always courteous because he was constantly aware of violence, not despite the fact. Varus didn’t doubt what Corylus was capable of if the necessity arose, but Corylus understood better than the other students the difference between what was necessary and what was simply possible.

    Corylus’ declamations were forceful and closely reasoned, but he didn’t gesture nor did he use the flourishes and allusions that would have made his speeches more striking. His wide reading — he wasn’t as widely read as Varus, of course, but given the limited opportunities he would have had on the frontier, his knowledge was remarkable — would have allowed him to sprinkle colorful passages from the great poets and historians whether Latin or Greek.

    It didn’t seem to bother Corylus that Piso and his cronies sneered — behind the backs of their hands — at what they called his lack of erudition. As a Knight of Carce Corylus wasn’t eligible to enter the Senate, and he’d been bluntly dismissive when Varus had asked if he hoped to make his name as a lawyer.

    Corylus spoke as a military officer would when suggesting a course of action to a superior or explaining it to his juniors. Varus decided that if the sneers didn’t bother his friend, he could learn to ignore them also.

    “This court, this goddess –”

    Piso thrust out both arms to point at the round temple of Vesta beside where his audience stood. He looked like a bad statue of Phaethon dragging on the reins as the horses of the Sun ran away.

    “– this sacred sky of Carce –”

    He pointed straight up, though his face still glowered at his audience.

    “– allow only one answer: you must be barred from the priesthood!”

    Piso’s father and his fellow senators called, “Huzzah!” and stamped their feet loudly. The other students applauded also, ranging from the enthusiasm of the speaker’s cronies to the polite tap of Corylus’ right foot. Even Pandareus gave a nod which could be taken as approving.

    Piso stepped down from the rostrum and bowed at the waist, sweeping his arms back to the sides as though he were about to dive into a swimming pool. He was smiling with triumph; the neck of his broad-striped toga was as wet as a used towel.

    There’s never only one answer, Varus mused, lost in his own thoughts. There are often thousands of answers, and all of them may be wrong.

    In his mind the dancers whispered Nemastes must die. They had no other answer, and their voices were compelling.

 

---

 

    Hedia’s chair rocked to a threatening halt. The hired bearers looked scrawny compared to Saxa’s team, but they were fit and they got much more experience than the household slaves did. They hadn’t slipped once on the way to Corylus’ apartment on the Viminal Hill. Judging by Alphena’s cries from the following vehicle, the girl hadn’t been so lucky.

 

---

 

    Though Hedia had no complaint about the bearers, the chair itself was another matter. Syra had thrown a cushion over the stains on the wicker seat, but one of the clamps attaching the poles to the chair frame was loose or possibly broken. Hedia swayed unpleasantly at every turn on the way, and as they stopped she was afraid that she was going to pitch over on her face with the chair on top of her.

    “Right here, your ladyship!” cried the courier who’d run ahead to point out their destination. He was new to the household; a young fellow from somewhere in Spain, with curly hair and a good build. “On the third floor, right here!”

    He seemed to fancy himself. He had some reason, but not as much as he thought.

    Hedia smiled coldly. That was generally true of men, she’d found. Women too, she shouldn’t wonder, but they didn’t interest her in the same way.

    Instead of squatting with his partner to take the weight of the chair off their arms, the leading bearer looked over his shoulder at Hedia. She supposed he’d found that raising the weight was more work than simply holding it balanced till he was sure about what his fare intended.

    “Mistress?” he said. “Are you sure about this? The block looks all right, but it’s not the kinda district we usually take quality folks like you.”

    “By Nergal, Blaesus,” grunted the bearer behind her. He spoke in Trade Greek, but his accent came from much farther east than that. “We never took anybody like her anywhere before, did we?”

    “My man seems sure,” Hedia said, “so put me down and –”

    “Yoo-hoo, your ladyship!” called a woman on the tiny third-story balcony jutting from the building to the right. “I’m here, bless you for coming!”

    She waved frantically with her right arm and gripped the railing with her left. If Hedia judged correctly, the way she hunched involved more than just that she was looking at someone below her. The rheumatism Pulto had mentioned wasn’t an excuse to try to avoid a visit that embarrassed him.

    Hedia got out; Alphena was climbing from the household chair. Local people stared at the visitors, but they seemed to be cheerfully interested instead of hostile. The score of attendants accompanying the women could have kept them away regardless, but even the children seemed satisfied to gawp at a respectful distance.

    “Wait for my return,” Hedia said to the lead bearer. “And if you’ve managed to attach the chair more firmly before I go back, there’ll be a silver piece for you.”

    “Ahura’s balls!” said the rear man. “We’ll take care of it, lady-sir. We bloody well will!”

    “I’ll lead, your ladyship!” cried the Spaniard. He strode to the door, swaggering and making shooing motions with both arms. “Make way for the noble Hedia, wife of our noble senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa! Make way!”

    Hedia frowned; that might’ve been a good way to catch a handful of rotten cabbage. Instead the three old women sitting on the door sill got out of the way with an appearance of good humor.

    They bowed low to Hedia. She smiled graciously as she swept past and said, “Thank you, good ladies. I hope you’re well on this fine morning.”

    The staircase was lighted by street-facing windows at each floor and a mica-covered skylight above the fifth landing. It was clean, though the large jar for night soil on the ground level must not have been emptied that morning. Hedia climbed briskly, but even so Alphena’s slippers shuffled on the treads too closely behind her.

    The door on the third floor swept open and the woman from the balcony stepped out. “Your ladyship!” she said. “I’m Anna, Master Corylus’ nurse from the very day he was born. I’m honored, we’re all so honored, that you’re coming. I told the girls in the building, but I don’t think they believed me till you stopped just now.”

    The materials used to build an apartment block became increasingly light — which meant flimsier — at each story upward; rents went down in the same proportion. This third-floor suite was large and well lighted, and though it was above the masonry level, the walls were wood rather than wicker.

    Anna must have understood Hedia’s glance of appraisal. She said, “Yes, if Master Corylus wished, he could’ve had something on the second floor and closer in to the Forum. Master Cispius is a careful man but not tight, and he’s doing right well in the perfume trade, I don’t mind to tell you. But the young master liked this one. You can look right over to the Gardens of Maurianus.”

    She surveyed the apartment possessively. The wooden floor had been brought to a high polish instead of being covered with a mosaic design as would have been more common, and the furniture, including the storage chests, was tasteful and of simple excellent, design.

    “It looks very nice,” said Alphena to call attention to herself. She’d sent the Spaniard and the other servants down to wait in the street, which showed better judgment than Hedia would have expected.

    “My daughter, Lady Alphena,” Hedia said coolly. “I’ve asked her to accompany me. I trust that is all right?”

    “Bless me, your ladyship!” said Anna. “If you want to bring the whole Senate with you, I’m just honored. Though there’d be trouble finding them seats.”

    Anna’s outfit — a blue tunic, a cape which must’ve been cut down from an officer’s red travelling cloak, and a yellow silk scarf to cover her hair — was neither tasteful nor simple. She wore rings on all her fingers, a mixture of silver and iron washed with gold. She had two necklaces, one of rock crystal and the other of painted terracotta manikins each no bigger than a thumbnail. The tiny dolls were individually ugly, but they had an unexpected force as their stubby hands clicked into contact and separated.

    Alphena laughed. Anna smiled in a bemused way, but Hedia wasn’t sure that she had intended a joke.

    Anna touched the yellow scarf, patting it against her bun of hair. The strands that had escaped to the back and sides were frizzy and yellowish gray. “Though your ladyship . . . ?” she said to Hedia. “There are subjects that I wouldn’t talk about in front of a senator, you know?”

    Hedia sniffed. “Not in front of a senator or any other man,” she said. “But we’re all girls together here, aren’t we?”

    Alphena was looking between the older women, her eyes flicking from one to the other. She looked younger when she was confused — as she was now.

    Anna chuckled. “Here,” she said, pushing aside the curtain covering the pantry alcove beside the door. She lifted out a bowl of wine which she’d mixed before her guests arrived and set it on the small table in a corner of the room. The circular top was a section of pine trunk, carved and stained to look like expensive desert cedar. “We’ll have something to drink while we talk.”

    “Are there no servants?” said Hedia, raising an eyebrow toward the folding screen across the doorway to the adjoining room of the suite.

    “Bless you, no there’s not,” Anna said, bringing out the cups. They and the bowl were of layered glass, colored to look like the expensive murrhine ware turned from a British mineral which the locals called Blue John. “The boy was raised in camp, you see. He’s offered to get me some help, but truth is I’d rather handle it myself.”

    “But how do you do the shopping?” said Alphena as their hostess filled the cups. It was a tactless question, but it showed the girl had sharp eyes and could think.

    Anna chuckled. “Crippled up like I am, you mean?” she said. “Well, that’s true enough, but a couple of the girls on the fourth floor take care of that for less than it’d cost to feed a gofer of our own. I’ve done them a favor or two, you see.”

    Love potions, Hedia thought as she took the offered cup and sat down. Love potions and herbs to cause abortions; the two went together, after all.

    The two storage chests in the corner had been covered with cushions for use as seats, with the table in the angle between them. There was a proper couch against the outer wall, but even at formal dinner parties women were more likely to sit than to recline on their left side as the men did.

    Alphena hesitated; Hedia patted the cushion beside her and gestured Anna to the other chest. Anna settled onto it with a grunt of relief.

    Turning her head as though she were looking out the window — there were three pots of herbs on the balcony — Anna said, “That’s part of the reason I didn’t want another pair of hands in the household, you see. They’d come with a tongue attached, you see, and there’s stories enough already. Me being Marsian –”

    She met the noblewomen’s eyes.

    “– and all. Like every Marsian woman’s a witch! Ah, begging your pardon if I’ve misspoke, your ladyship.”

 

---

 

    Hedia laughed. “You haven’t, not at all,” she said. “And I think you’d best call me Hedia while it’s just the three of us. As I said, we’re all girls together here. As for witchcraft — we women can’t do things the way men do, so we have to find our own ways.”

    She sipped her wine. It was a good enough vintage to have appeared at her husband’s table. She looked at Anna over the rim of her cup and raised an eyebrow in question.

    The old servant sighed in relief. She drained her cup with less ceremony than wine so good deserved. “Aye, that’s so, your ladyship,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “We don’t have the strength that men do –”

    She grinned at Alphena; Hedia thought for a moment that she might reach out and pinch the girl’s cheek. The standards of an army camp were different from those of a noble household.

    “– not even you, little one. I’ve heard about you, sure, but that’s not the way. You listen to –”

    She nodded forcefully toward Hedia.

    “– your mother here. She knows a thing or two, I’ll be bound.”

    “What I know at the moment . . . ,” said Hedia. Even without the cheek pinch, she thought her stepdaughter might burst like a dead dog. This wasn’t the time to laugh at her, though. “Is that Nemastes the Hyperborean is a danger to my husband and our whole family. I presume you’ve heard about Nemastes?”

    Anna snorted. “Not from my man or the boy either,” she said, pouring more wine for herself when her guests waved it off. “But that something was going on, sure. I could smell the magic on them each time they’d been to your house, milady. Though I hate to say it.”

    “Smell?” Alphena blurted in amazement. Her cup was raised, but Hedia didn’t think the girl had begun to drink. “I don’t understand?”

    Anna shrugged. “Smell, feeling, call it what you like,” she said. “I don’t know how to name it if you haven’t noticed it yourself. And you haven’t?”

    “No, I don’t think so,” Hedia said. She placed her empty cup on the table, a little closer to Anna to answer the question the hostess would surely ask. “We’ve come to you because you know things that we don’t, mistress. But we’re not in doubt that there’s something wrong with Nemastes and whatever he’s doing.”

    Alphena took a gulp of wine. “He’s awful,” she said, glaring at her companions as though they were going to argue with her. “I can tell when he’s around because my skin prickles. And when he’s looking at me, I feel slimy.”

    Hedia smiled, though she found the girl’s comments — and Anna’s knowing glance at her — disquieting. “Well, I’ve been called insensitive before,” she said. “Nonetheless, I knew something had to be done even before the business yesterday at my son’s reading.”

    She looked at Alphena. “I wasn’t in the hall when it happened,” she said, “but you were, dear. What did you see?”

    “I didn’t see –” Alphena began angrily, but she stopped herself. She swallowed, forced a weak smile of apology, and continued in a quiet tone, “I’m not sure what I saw. I thought a painted sphinx flew off the wall. And I thought things were coming up from a pit underneath me.”

    She’s young, but she’s no more flighty than I am. Nevertheless something has frightened her.

    Alphena licked her lips. She seemed more composed now that she’d forced herself to think about what had happened. She said, “There wasn’t really a pit. The floor was the same to my feet, I just couldn’t see it.”

    “If you’d been my daughter, girl . . . ,” Anna said, giving Alphena a look of sharp appraisal.

    Hedia bit back a harsh — well, harsher — response and said only, “Which of course she isn’t, mistress, she’s the daughter of the noble Alphenus Saxa. Whose Hyperborean companion concerns at least me and Alphena.”

    “I spoke out of turn, your ladyship,” Anna said, nodding into as close to a bow as she could manage while seated at the table. “Sorry, I’m an old fool who never had a child of her own, you see.”

    “Quite all right, my good woman,” Hedia said. The thought of Alphena being brought up as a witch had taken her aback in a very unpleasant fashion. It was bad enough that the girl dressed as a gladiator! “This business is enough to put anyone on edge.”

    Anna looked at Alphena again, this time pursing her lips in thought. “You say the floor was still there, child,” she said, “and in this world that must have been so. But there are other worlds than ours, you know. It sounds like this Nemastes was bringing another one close — or maybe closer than that. It’s good that it didn’t go on beyond what it did.”

    “I don’t think it was Nemastes,” Alphena said toward the mixing bowl on the table. “I think it was my brother, or something using my brother. He was saying funny things about fire. And I could see the fire, but –”

    She lifted her hands, then laid them flat to either side of the cup before her. She still didn’t look up.

    “– I don’t know how I saw it. Not with my eyes.”

    “When Pulto and I got married after his discharge,” Anna said carefully, “I promised him that I wouldn’t do anything, you know, serious. A little charm or a potion to help friends, well that’s just neighborly.”

    She gave her companions a lop-sided smile and shrugged. “But after he and the boy come home yesterday — and they didn’t tell me a thing except that you might be coming by, your ladyship. But it was all over them, especially the boy, like they’d been rolling in pig shit. Begging your pardon.”

    “That’s how it felt to me too,” Alphena said. Her smile was real, though faint. “Not that I’ve ever rolled in pig shit really, but what it seemed like.”

    Acting on instinct instead of by plan — and she usually planned things, particularly the things that other people thought were done without thinking — Hedia put her arm around the girl’s shoulder and gave her a hug. Then she opened her short cape and removed the little fabric-wrapped object she’d pinned there. She handed it across the table to Anna.

    “I would have brought you some of Nemastes’ hairs,” she said, “but he’s as bald as an egg. His whole body’s bare so far as I could see — and I assure you I’ve seen as much of it as I care to, no matter what you may have heard about me.”

    Alphena lifted a shocked hand to her lips. Anna guffawed as she undid the bundle, a twig from the frost-killed pear tree.

    “Nemastes — Nemastes and my husband, that is,” explained Hedia, “were in the back garden when this tree was killed. It was the same time when Varus was reading. I think — well, there must be some connection, mustn’t there?”

    Hedia was uneasily aware that the gymnasium where she’d been talking to the veterans was adjacent to the garden. The masonry wall was high enough to block words unless Saxa and the Hyperborean had been shouting, but she felt that she should have had some inkling if, well, a tree-killing storm was going on a few feet away.

    She hadn’t been aware of anything unusual going on during the reading either, not until she listened to the frightened babble of the audience pouring out of the room. She looked from Anna to Alphena and smiled wryly.

    Anna held the twig between the tips of her index fingers. She felt Hedia’s eyes and looked up.

    “I’m apparently not sensitive at all,” Hedia said. “But I suppose I don’t need to be, since both of you are.”

    Alphena turned to her. “You were sensitive enough to try to stop Nemastes before anybody else did,” the girl said. “That’s why we’re here. I don’t see any use in the way I feel.”

    She shrugged with her whole body, her face scrunched up.

    “Slimy. Awful.”

    “We’ve a long way to go before we know what’s useful and what isn’t,” Hedia said briskly. She turned to Anna and continued, “Will the stick be helpful, mistress?”

    This was the first time Alphena had spoken to her in a tone that wasn’t either angry or sullen. Hedia didn’t dare remark on the fact or she would spoil the moment — the start of an improved relationship, she hoped.

    “It may,” Anna said judiciously. She eyed her companions. “It should. It’s the full moon tonight. I’ll be off to the old graveyard on the Aventine to gather some things I’ll need.

    “Herbs, you mean, Anna?” Alphena asked.

    The older woman looked at Hedia — who kept her face expressionless—and then to the girl. “Things, dear,” she said deliberately. “Some herbs, yes.”

    “Oh,” said Alphena. “Oh, I’m s-s . . . .” She turned her head away as her voice trailed off.

 

---

 

    “I’ll need your help, your ladyship,” Anna said. “Not with my end — I wouldn’t ask you for that, of course. But I hope you’ll talk to my Pulto. When we were married, like I said, I gave up serious business. He didn’t tell me to, but it’s what he wanted and I did it. Now, though . . . ?”

    “Yes,” said Hedia. “I’ll make it clear to your husband that I’ve asked you to do certain things for me.”

    Pulto would accept anything a noble demanded, Hedia knew. If she asked him to dig up ancient graves, he would obey. He wouldn’t like it, but –

    Her smile was cold.

    – he’d been a soldier. As he’d said, he was used to doing things he didn’t like.

    “That will be helpful, your ladyship,” Anna said, nodding in relieved approval. “And now, if my ears haven’t tricked me –”

    The door opened. Corylus strode in, followed by Pulto.

    “– I’d say my men were home!

 

---

 

    Corylus stepped to the side as he entered the apartment; if he’d stopped in his tracks he’d have blocked the doorway for Pulto. That was training, however. His first instinct had been to freeze when he walked in the door talking to his servant over his shoulder and saw Alphena out of the corner of his eye.

    “Hercules!” Pulto blurted as he saw the visitors. They’d known that the women would be visiting Anna, but they had — or at least Corylus had — put it out of their minds the fact that Hedia and Alphena might still be present when they returned from the Forum.

    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 the seat or the table back, 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’ 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 wellbeing, 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 to the door to the stairs. “My daughter and I have business to attend 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 prettyboy 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 swarmy 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 of the silence, Corylus looked ahead and to his side of the street.

    Old two or 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’ 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 were 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.”

    “I’m not surprised that it remains a pattern in the family,” Hedia said. Her lips pouted slightly, then relaxed into a grin. “Corylus dear, I really do care about my husband and my family. My first concern is to remove the danger which threatens them. You’re my ally in this, a valuable ally. I assure you that I won’t do anything that makes it difficult for us to work together.”

    Corylus sighed with a combination of relief and an embarrassment greater than he’d felt earlier. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “Ah, Hedia. I don’t know what’s going on, but it scares me. I’m glad I have friends like you and Varus to, well, help figure it out.”

    “The noble ladies Hedia and Alphena are home!” cried the runner, Iberus, from the steps of Saxa’s townhouse.

    Corylus looked around in surprise. They’d arrived, all right. A good thing there hadn’t been a German warband lurking in ambush.

    He grinned broadly. He wasn’t sure that a dozen Germans would be more dangerous than getting involved with Hedia might be.

    Agrippinus came out to pay the hired bearers, but Alphena took him aside before he got off the porch. The major domo handed the purse he was carrying to an underling who in turn came toward the chair.

    Hedia got out and looked at Corylus over the vehicle. “Would you care to use the gymnasium now?” she asked. “I find that sometimes exercise is the best way to deal with a day of mental frustration. Or just a drink?”

    “No thank you, your ladyship,” Corylus said. It had been a faster trip than he’d expected. “I’ll be meeting Varus and, ah, friends tonight, so I have things to get ready.”

    Hedia glanced at Alphena, who was still talking forcefully to the major domo. “I understand,” she said. “I’ll be going out with my daughter tonight also. But perhaps another time.”

    Corylus turned at started back. He heard Hedia call, “And may all our endeavors prosper, Master Corylus!”