Legions of Fire: Chapter One

    Corylus had ordered Pulto to wear a toga because he thought that he’d need his servant to swell the audience for the poetry reading by his friend and classmate Varus. Pulto hadn’t complained — he’d been a soldier for twenty-five years and the batman of Corylus’ father, Publius Cispius, for the last eighteen of them.

    On the other hand, the young master hadn’t specified footgear. Pulto had chosen to wear hobnailed army boots with the toga.

    Corylus grinned as they turned from the Argiletum Boulevard onto the street where the townhouse of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Varus’ father, stood. Pulto clashed along beside him, muttering curses. Hobnails were dangerous footwear on the streets of Carce. The stone pavers had been worn smooth as glass and were slimy besides: the most recent rain had been almost a month past, so more recent garbage hadn’t been swept into the central gutters and thence to the river.

    Corylus wasn’t an army officer yet, but he’d learned a few things growing up on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, where his father had been First Centurion of the Alaudae Legion and then Tribune in command of the 3d Batavian Cavalry. Sometimes letting your subordinates do just what they pleased was the most effective punishment you could visit on them.

    Pulto caught the young master’s smile and — after an instant of bleakness — guffawed in good humor. “By Hercules, boy,” he said, “you are the Old Man’s son. I keep thinking you’re the sprat I paddled for having a smart tongue. It’ll serve me right if I fall on my ass, won’t it? And have to get this bloody toga cleaned!”

    Corylus laughed. “Maybe you’re setting a new fashion trend,” he said. “Carce is too stuffy about style, I think.”

    He’d never have ordered Pulto to wear his boots, but the ring of hobnails on stone turned out to have an unexpected benefit. Wagons weren’t allowed inside the city until after dark, but peddlers, beggars, loungers and other pedestrians clogged streets, especially the old ones like these in the very expensive Carinae District. To people who came from regions recently annexed to the Republic of Carce — and many of the city’s poor did — the soldiers who’d done the annexing were still figures of terror.

    As a citizen of the world educated by Pandareus of Athens, Corylus was disturbed by the implications of why people scuttled to the side or even hunched trembling with their heads covered. As a citizen of Carce and a soldier’s son . . . well, he’d have been a liar if he’d claimed he didn’t feel a touch of pride. And it did make it easier to walk without getting his toga smudged.

    “How long do you guess this is going to go on, Master Corylus?” Pulto said, sounding resigned now instead of huffy. “Lord Varus’ reading, I mean?”

    When Corylus went to Carce to get the first-class education which Gaius Cispius wanted for his son and heir, Pulto had come with him. Corylus knew that his father didn’t expect him to live like a Stoic philosopher — Cispius had been a career soldier, after all, before he retired to the Bay of Puteoli and bought a very successful perfume businesses.

    He didn’t want his son to get in over his head if it could be avoided, however. The young master wouldn’t be able to bully Pulto into letting him do something stupid.

    And if trouble couldn’t be avoided, well, Pulto was a good choice there, too. He’d stood over the Old Man when a Sarmatian lance had knocked him off his mount. By the time the rest of the troop rallied to relieve them, the servant had seventeen separate wounds — but when the tribune woke up, he had only a headache from hitting the frozen ground. Pulto limped and his fringe of remaining hair was gray, but neither Corylus nor his father knew anybody who was more to be trusted in an alley in the dark.

    Pulto would rather face Sarmatian cavalry than listen to an epic poem, even if Homer himself were singing it. Unfortunately . . . .

    Varus was an erudite scholar and the only member of Pandareus’ students with whom Corylus could deal as a friend. He put enormous effort into his verse; nobody could’ve worked harder.

    But Varus wasn’t Homer. Dull didn’t begin to describe his poetry.

    “I expect he’ll finish by the eleventh hour,” Corylus said, feeling a pang of guilt. “I, ah, think so. I may stay longer to chat, but you can change out of your toga as soon as the reading itself is over.”

    “We stood a dress inspection for the Emperor the once,” Pulto said stolidly. He settled the fold of his toga where it lay over his left shoulder; it wasn’t pinned, which was all right if you were standing on a speaker’s platform but less good if you were striding along at a military pace. “That was at Strasbourg. I guess I can take this.”

    “We’re just about there,” said Corylus soothingly. “Ten paces, soldier.”

    He didn’t blame Pulto for disliking the toga, but it was the uniform of the day for this business — and in Carce generally, though the city was the only place in the empire where the old-fashioned garment was still in general use. In the provinces a citizen wore a tunic in warm weather and a cloak over it in the cold and wet. In Gaul a gentleman might even wear trousers in public without anybody objecting. The toga was for lawsuits and other formal occasions, like weddings and a son’s coming-of-age ceremony.

    Everything was formal in Carce. Even the slaves wore togas, at least the ones with any pretensions.

    And speaking of pretentious slaves, Saxa seemed to have a new doorman, whose lip was curling upward as watched Corylus and Pulto approach. In the year Corylus had lived in Carce, he’d learned what to expect from that expression.

    Saxa let ground-floor rooms to shops on either side of the house entrance. There was a dealer in upscale leather goods for women on the far side; on the near side, a Greek jeweler named Archias bowed low to Corylus as he passed. Corylus had never done business with Archias, but the jeweler was unfailingly courteous to a friend of his landlord’s son.

 

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    If the doorman had been more observant he would’ve noticed that. He’d been picked for his impressive appearance rather than his brains, though: he was broad-shouldered and well over six feet tall, with blond, lustrous shoulder-length hair.

    Sneering at the two narrow purple bands on the hem of Corylus’ toga, he said with a strong South German accent, “Around to the back entrance if you’re looking for a handout. The Senator’s hours for receiving riffraff are long past.”

    “Do you suppose he’s one of the scum my father dragged to Carce in chains?” Corylus said, speaking German in a louder-than-conversational voice.

    “Might be a bastard of mine, young master,” Pulto rumbled back. “Venus knows the brothels at Vetera were mostly staffed with Suebian whores. About all the use I ever found for a Suebian, come to think.”

    From deeper inside the house, a female servant called cheerfully, “Agrippinus, you’d better get out here fast or you’re going to have to replace the new doorman!”

    The German had reached for the cudgel behind him, but the maid’s voice penetrated his thick blond hair as jeweler’s deference had not. Red-faced, he straightened. “Whom shall I announce, gentlemen?” he croaked.

    “Publius Corylus, a Knight of Carce –” as indicated by the twin stripes on the toga; a member of the middle class and very much below a senator in rank “– and his companion Marcus Pulto, by appointment to attend the public reading by their friend Gaius Alphenus Varus,” Corylus said, speaking this time in formal Latin.

    He was shaking with reaction. For a moment everything had blurred to gray in his sight except the necessary parts of the German’s body. Grab the left wrist and twist hard so that the blond head crashed into the transom. Pulto would kick the German’s knee sideways, breaking it, so Corylus could topple him into the street where they would both work him over with their boots . . . .

    “Master Corylus, how delightful to see you again!” said Agrippinus, Saxa’s major domo: plump, oiled, and very smooth. He spoke Latin like an aristocrat of Carce and Greek like an Athenian philosopher, but he was a former slave who’d been born in Spain. “And how pleased Lord Varus will be that you’re present for his literary triumph! Please, let me lead you into the Black-and-Gold Hall where Lord Varus will be reading.”

    Corylus had visited the house scores of times. Agrippinus knew he didn’t need a guide, but it was important that the doorman learn that the youth was a friend of the family rather than being one of the parasites who haunted great men’s doors in hopes of an invitation to fill out the dinner party. To underscore the fact, the major domo said over his shoulder, “I’ll want to have a discussion with you, Flavus, when Gigax relieves you at nightfall.”

    Agrippinus minced quickly through the entrance hall. Half a dozen servants stood there around the pool which caught rainwater from the in-sloping roof. They bowed, but Corylus suspected the gesture was paid not to the visitors but to the major domo. Agrippinus’ present aura of pompous formality was even more impressive than his toga of bleached wool with gold embroidery.

    Instead of continuing on into the office which was in line with the entrance, Agrippinus turned right to enter the portico surrounding the large garden in the center of the house. Saxa’s house had no exterior windows on the ground floor, but the garden acted as a light well and also provided flowers and fruit in a bustling city. The roofs over this main section of the house fed the pool in the middle of the garden, but they did so through downspouts and sunken pipes.

    The Black-and-Gold Hall interrupted the portico in the middle of the east side, opening directly onto the garden for the maximum of light. Ornate frames of gold paint separated the black panels of the walls, each of which had a golden miniature of a fanciful creature in the center. The dais on which Varus would read was against the back wall, but there was a triple lamp stand to either side.

    Just now Varus stood stiffly beside the dais. He was talking with Pandareus, who taught public speaking to a class of twelve youths including Varus and Corylus.

    Varus and Corylus also learned to love literature and Truth. Their classmates saw no value to literature except to add colors to an oration — and as for Truth, if they ever thought about it, was a danger which successful attorneys shunned.

    “By Hercules, the bloody room’s full!” muttered Pulto. He sounded amazed. So was Corylus, because the statement was undeniably true.

    “Please come to the front, Master Corylus,” Agrippinus said, starting down the center aisle. The room, thirty feet wide and nearly that deep, now held two files of benches which must have been rented for today’s event. The seats weren’t packed as tight as the bleachers of the Circus during a program of chariot races, but people were going to have to move if the newcomers were to sit down.

    “A moment, if you please,” Corylus said with a curt gesture to the major domo. “Pulto, you can suit yourself. While you’re welcome to listen to the reading with me –”

    “Venus and Mars, young master,” Pulto said, grinning broadly. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be in the gym chewing the fat with my buddy Lenatus till you’re ready to go home.”

    “Dismissed,” said Corylus, falling into military terminology naturally. Between Cispius and Pulto, ‘Army’ had been the household tongue when Corylus was growing up. His mother had died in childbirth; his nurse Anna had taught him the Oscan language and a great deal of superstition, but she hadn’t cared any more for round-about politeness than the men had.

    Anna was now Pulto’s wife. She was just as superstitious as she had been when Corylus was a child; but as he grew older, he’d come to realize that quite a lot of Anna’s superstitious nonsense was in fact quite true.

    Corylus nodded to Agrippinus; they resumed their way to the front. Gaius Saxa had obviously done what he considered a father’s duty to his son: he’d sent invitations to all his senatorial friends. They hadn’t come, of course, and Saxa wasn’t present either. They’d sent clients and retainers, though, men who were beholden to them and who made a brilliant show in the hall. Some of the Senators’ freedmen here were not only wealthier than Cispius, they had a great deal more power in the Republic than a retired tribune did.

    Varus would appreciate his father’s gesture, but the expensively decorated togas drove home the fact that Corylus and Pandareus were the only people in the audience who’d come to hear the poetry. And even they — well, Corylus was here out of friendship and Pandareus might well regard his presence as a teacher’s duty.

    Corylus grinned, then quickly suppressed the expression. The thought behind it was unkind to a friend. It was traditional that poets suffered. In Varus’ case, the problem wasn’t poverty or a fickle girlfriend: it was lack of talent. Which, for somebody who cared as deeply about his art as Varus did, was a far worse punishment.

    Agrippinus gestured toward the place which had just opened in the front row, on the right side of the center aisle. “Or would you care . . . ?” he said, tilting his head delicately toward Varus, whose back was to the room while he talked with his teacher.

    “No, I’ll speak to him after the reading,” Corylus said. Varus is nervous enough already . . . . He settled himself carefully onto the bench.

    Togas weren’t really intended to be worn while sitting down. Ancient Carce had transacted all public business while standing. A less stiff-necked people would’ve changed to a more comfortable formal garment before now, but a less stiff-necked people wouldn’t have conquered what was already the largest empire in history. A soldier’s son could get used to wearing a toga.

    Corylus had met Varus when they both became students of Pandareus a year before. Pulto had already known a member of Alphenus’ staff, however: Marcus Lenatus, the household’s personal trainer, was an old soldier and an old friend of Pulto from the Rhine. Corylus would have been able to exercise in the private gymnasium in a back corner of the house even if the Senator’s son hadn’t invited him to do so.

    The man on the bench beside Corylus was, from his conversation with the fellow to his other side, the steward of another senator whose master was planning a banquet in a few days time. It was the sort of thing that would’ve bored Corylus to tears even if the servants had tried to make him a part of the discussion. Agrippinus might feel it was politic to show deference to a friend of the family, but these men had no reason to pretend a mere knight was as interesting as a hare stuffed with thrushes which had been stuffed in turn with truffles.

 

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    Corylus smiled faintly. He supposed he wouldn’t turn down a portion of the lovingly prepared hare — so long as it came with bread and onions. That was a soldier’s meal. It wasn’t an accident that the frontiers of the empire stopped at the edge of where farmers plowed fields instead of grazing goats or cattle.

    Lenatus and the gym wouldn’t get much use if it weren’t for Corylus. Saxa only saw the trainer during the Saturnalia festivities when he visited each post of duty to give the servants their year-end tip. Varus sometimes tried to exercise, but he’d only begun coming regularly to keep Corylus company. Even then, he often sat on the masonry bench built out from the dressing rooms and jotted poetic inspirations in a notebook.

    Saxa didn’t care about the waste of money, of course. A private gymnasium was a proper facility for a man of his stature, so he had one.

    He also had day and night shifts of servants servicing the water clock in the central garden: a man to empty the quarter-hour tumblers; a man with a rod to ring each quarter on a silver triangle; and a third man with a bugle to sound the hour. Each servant had an understudy, ready to take over the duties in case the principal died of apoplexy while pouring, ringing or striking.

    Alphena, Saxa’s daughter by his first wife, used the gymnasium too. Corylus felt his face stiffen out of the smile that was its usual expression.

    The girl was sixteen, a year younger than Corylus and Varus. Alphena and her brother were both stocky and of middling height like their father, proper descendents of the sturdy farmers of Carce who had spread from their hilltop village to conquer a great empire.

    Alphena would never be a great beauty, but she was cute and full of an energy that would have made people notice her even if she had behaved with decorum. Which she most certainly did not.

    Corylus had realized even before he came to Carce that the only people who really set store on proper behavior were the solid folk in the middle ranks of society: peasant farmers and small businessmen. The poor were too busy scraping a living to worry about such things; even a youthful moralist could understand their attitude.

    But the very rich were if anything worse.

    Alphena wasn’t promiscuous, but that at least would have been an ordinary feminine failing. Alphena wasn’t feminine. She acted as though she were Saxa’s son, not his daughter, and the more masculine son besides. With Varus as her brother, that wasn’t much of a stretch.

    The stewards beside Corylus were discussing ways to make counterfeit mullets out of minced pork. At first that sounded reasonable to the part of Corylus’ mind that was listening; mullet was a very expensive fish. As the conversation continued, he realized that the fake fish were even pricier than the real thing, and that the greater cost was the reason they’d been chosen for the banquet. It wasn’t about food at all, just status.

    Corylus would much rather be in the gym with the two old soldiers, hacking at a post with a practice sword. He’d even rather –

    He eyed Varus’ stiff pose critically.

    Corylus would almost rather be preparing to read bad poetry to an audience of strangers and his teacher.

 

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    Varus felt a rush of gratitude when he saw Publius Corylus and his man at the entrance to the hall. Corylus had said he was coming and he’d never given anyone reason to doubt his word, but even so the relief of having a friend present was greater than Varus would have guessed.

    Pandareus wasn’t an enemy, of course, but just now as the teacher glanced over the poem Varus felt a sort of blind hatred. He imagined that a worm might feel the same way about the robin whose beak had just plucked him from a leaf.

    Varus smiled broadly. Pandareus shuffled the scroll expertly with his left hand, taking up the pages he’d skimmed while his right in perfect unison opened the unread portion. He glanced up from the verse and said, “A happy thought, Lord Varus?”

    “Master Pandareus . . . ,” Varus said, chilled as if he’d been asked to expound on a passage he’d read only moments before. “I know that I take myself far too seriously; I can’t help it. But at least I can laugh at myself for taking myself too seriously.”

    Pandareus said nothing for a moment, then smiled as broadly as Varus had ever seen. “The first rule of a philosopher is ‘Know thyself,’ Lord Varus,” he said. “I would say you’ve come farther in that study than many of my long-bearded colleagues who expound their wisdom in the Forum and at the dinners of the wealthy.”

    He went back to reading About the Heroic Life and Martyrdom of Publius Atilius Regulus. Varus intended it as his first trial at what he intended to make his life’s work: the epic of Carce’s struggle with Carthage. Indeed, perhaps it would still be unfinished at his death as Vergil had left his immortal Aeneid.

    Literature was a proper arena for a gentleman; especially for a gentleman who had no talent for war. Varus wasn’t a coward — he wouldn’t be declaiming his own verse to an audience if he were a coward — but the sight of blood made him squeamish.

    While Varus was writing, he could feel the thing beyond the words. Somewhere out there was the true ideal that he was striving for. But he couldn’t see it, nobody could see it, and no poet would ever reach it.

    Sometimes Varus told himself he was blessed above other men because he knew there was an ideal. At other times — and this was certainly one of those other times — it seemed to him that lucky people didn’t torture themselves by chasing the unobtainable. That was obvious when he looked at Pandareus’ other students.

    Corylus had an interest in literature, but he didn’t hold it in the sort of religious awe that Varus did. The other ten students were well-born — six, like Varus, were the sons of Senators — but they were at most interested in learning how to argue a case in court. That was a matter of extravagant language, flashy figures of speech, and skeins of logic which had been twisted until they screamed.

    But half the class didn’t care even about learning tools to use in court. They attended classes — or their fathers sent them to classes — because there was a cachet in saying you’d been taught by Pandareus of Athens — Pandareus the Sage, some of the parents called him, though Varus had never heard Pandareus himself use that boastful title. For them everything was appearance, not a pursuit of the ideal.

    Pursuit of the unattainable ideal.

    Varus’ mind was lost in a very present philosophy of life, but his eyes must have been focused on Pandareus. The teacher looked up and said mildly, “A very well prepared manuscript, Lord Varus.” He gave the volume a twitch to emphasize it.

    “Yes, master!” Varus said. He was relieved that he hadn’t squeaked; he felt seven, not seventeen. “I, ah, thought it would give a better impression to the audience if it were, ah, neat.”

    One of the clerks in Saxa’s business office had a fine hand, but in the end Varus had decided to go to Marcus Balbius who produced manuscripts for sale. In the main Balbius specialized in cheap reading copies by popular poets, but he had a sideline in presentation volumes; he’d been more than happy to produce a manuscript of the very highest quality for Varus.

    Pandareus went back to reading. Varus realized that his teacher was deliberately preventing him from compulsively going over the document during the last quarter hour before the declamation. He’d have worked himself into a state if he’d done that, and he wouldn’t have been able to prevent himself from doing it even though he knew better.

    Pandareus was being kind to him. Varus would still rather have been standing on a dune in the Libyan Desert than watching his teacher roll the volume forward and stop, roll and stop; his lean face all the while as expressionless as that of a vulture.

    The volume shimmered. The roller sticks had been gilded, and red silk ribbons fluttered from their ends. The papyrus had been pumiced smooth before being whitened, and the calligrapher’s hand was flawless as well as being unusually legible for a work of art.

    Varus honestly didn’t know what the manuscript had cost. Whenever Balbius presented the account, Agrippinus would settle it just as he did those from vintners, poulterers, fullers, and all the rest of the tradesmen who supplied the household of a wealthy senator. Saxa wouldn’t notice the amount any more than he noted what Hedia, his new young wife, spent on dressmakers.

    “Ah . . . ?” Varus said, struck by a sudden fear. “Master, though the manuscript was professionally prepared, I really did write the verse myself. On wax notebooks. Every bit of it.”

 

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    Pandareus paused and stared at him. “You may set your mind at rest, Lord Varus . . . ,” he said. His dry voice was all the more cutting for not having any emotional loading whatever. “I did not imagine that this –”

    He waggled the volume again. The gesture gave the impression of the mistress of the house holding a dead rat by the tail as she gingerly removed it from the kitchen.

    “—had been plagiarized.”

    Varus felt his face glow. “Sorry, Master,” he muttered. He shuffled, glancing toward the audience just to avoid looking at his teacher. His eyes caught Corylus in the front row. He looked up toward the ceiling immediately. It was bad enough being here as Pandareus judged him; it would be even worse to be judged in front of his only friend. Being reminded that Corylus was present helped settle him again, though.

    Corylus’ father, Publius Cispius, was wealthy by the standards of most people — but not by the standards of the senators’ sons who were the majority of Pandareus’ students. Besides facing ordinary snobbery, Corylus was an army brat — raised in camps along the frontier instead of the relatively civilized surroundings of a provincial city. He might have had a very difficult time of it in school, especially since Piso, the acknowledged leader of the class, had a cruel streak.

    It wouldn’t have helped Corylus that he was a real scholar instead of a numbskull more familiar with swagger sticks than with the rollers of a book; his scholarship might even have made it worse. And it certainly didn’t help that he and Varus had become friends. Gaius Alphenus Saxa was powerful enough that his son wouldn’t be bullied, even by a Calpurnius Piso, but to extend his protection farther would require that Varus have an active personality instead of being a loner, and a rather puny loner besides.

    Corylus was tall and had fair hair from his Celtic mother. Presumably he’d gotten his slender build from her also, but Piso had learned the first afternoon following class that ’slender’ didn’t mean ‘weak’. He’d shoved Varus and found himself with his right arm twisted up behind his back and his thumb in a grip that could obviously dislocate it any time Corylus wanted to.

    Another boy — Beccaristo, son of a wealthy shipper from Ostia and Piso’s chief toady — tried to jump Corylus. He fell screaming when Corylus brought his heavy sandal down on his instep.

    Piso had shouted for his entourage of servants to help. None of them moved. Corylus’ man hadn’t said a word, just watched with his right hand under his toga. The thing he was gripping would be about the right length for an infantry sword.

    Corylus had released Piso then. He’d straightened his toga and grinned, not saying a word. And Varus had said, “Master Corylus, would you care to come home with me for some refreshment? I’d like to discuss the Epilion of Callimachus which the Master cited in his lecture.”

    Varus warmed at the memory. It was probably the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life. It had cemented his friendship with Corylus at the very beginning of their relationship.

    Pandareus rolled the volume closed with the same smooth grace as he’d been reading it. “Thank you for the early look, Master Varus,” he said formally as he handed it back. “I await your reading with interest.”

    The water clock reached the tenth hour, the time set for the declamation. The bugler called over the ringing of the quarter-hour gong.

    Apollo and the Muses, be with your servant, Varus whispered under his breath as he mounted the podium.

    As if to make him even more uncomfortable than he already was, his sister Alphena came marching down the aisle without so much as a maid to accompany her. She gave a peremptory gesture to the freedmen beside Corylus and sat down in the front row, glaring up at Varus.

    She looked furious.

 

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    The real problem was Nemastes the Hyperborean, but Alphena wasn’t allowing herself to think about that. She was as angry as she ever remembered being. How dare my stepmother tell me that I need to get married! Why doesn’t father stand up to her?

    This was one of those times that Alphena wished she weren’t quite as smart as she knew she was. Much as she fumed over Hedia — who was only six years older, even though she was on her second husband already! — Alphena knew that underneath she was afraid, not angry.

    She was afraid for her father. Ever since he met the Hyperborean wizard, Saxa had been acting strangely. He’d always been, well, a bit of a fool about the supernatural. Her father was a Senator of Carce and one of the most powerful men on Earth, so it was unkind of Alphena to suspect that he was unusually willing to believe in Higher Powers because he knew how incapable he was to intelligently exercise the authority he’d been given.

    Alphena stamped into the Black-and-Gold Hall without any clearer notion than knowing that she would shock everyone by being the only woman in the audience — and that Hedia wouldn’t follow her here. As soon as she was inside, she remembered seeing Publius Corylus coming up the street a moment before her stepmother drew her aside for an unwanted discussion.

    Corylus was in the front row, so Alphena strode down the aisle toward him. When one of the wealthy freedmen seated there glanced up, she showed him her left fist with the thumb raised. That was the way the audience voted death in the amphitheater.

    The freedman shot from the bench like a lion prodded into greater liveliness with a torch; he’d obviously understood Alphena’s mood. Very possibly he had heard stories about the would-be poet’s sister when he asked about the event he’d been ordered to attend.

    The freedman to whom he’d been talking looked up in surprise; he saw Alphena bearing down like an angry weasel. He scampered also, though his fat friend’s absence had cleared enough space already.

    Corylus looked startled, then faced front and pretended to not to notice that Alphena had sat down beside him. For a moment, she’d started to let fear break through her mind’s surface of anger; Corylus’ action brought the anger back to full blazing life.

    Alphena wasn’t interested in Corylus; not that kind of interested. He was only a knight after all, and even that by sufferance: his father had managed to stay alive for twenty-five years in the army and had his status raised from ordinary lummox to knight. She knew that soldiers were necessary on the frontiers to keep out the even cruder barbarians beyond, but it seemed to Alphena that they should stay in the border districts instead of coming here to Carce.

    Of course Corylus wasn’t a soldier himself; and though Alphena knew he intended to become one, she found it hard to imagine the youth as what she imagined a soldier was. Maybe . . . .

    Alphena didn’t blush, but she pressed her lips together more closely. She was smart, not bookish smart like her brother but in the way that let her look at people and things and understand how they fit together. When parts didn’t fit, one had the wrong shape. In this case, she knew that the mistake could be in what she thought a soldier was, instead of in the shape of Corylus who planned to become one.

    She still wasn’t interested in him. Of course!

    Alphena had been the only person to use the gymnasium for over a year. Lenatus had informed Saxa that Alphena wanted the sort of lessons he’d expected to give Varus. He’d hoped his employer would order him to do no such thing. The Senator instead acted as though he hadn’t heard the statement.

    Lenatus had been angry and embarrassed to train a woman, but Saxa paid well. The first thing a new servant in his household learned was that the master wanted to have a quiet life — and that if the daughter of the house was angry, she would make her father’s life a living hell until he did what she wanted.

    Lenatus thereupon had gotten on with his job which, in the household of Gaius Alphenus Saxa, turned out to be training a young girl as though she were to become a soldier — or a gladiator. After a while he’d more or less gotten used to it. Alphena had heard him tell the cook that it was like learning to drink ale instead of wine when he’d been stationed in Upper Germany: it wasn’t the way it ought to be, but that didn’t matter.

    Then Varus had offered his new friend use of the facilities.

    Alphena had watched Corylus the first time he exercised. Corylus had protested, but Varus wouldn’t stand up to his sister. In part she was being contrary — she did quite a number of things because she knew that other people would rather she didn’t — but she was also proving that nobody in the household could prevent her from doing what she wanted.

 

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    As for Lenatus, he’d taken his master’s lesson to heart: he pretended he didn’t hear either party to the argument.

    Corylus had at last gone ahead with his basic drills, despite the audience. He couldn’t order around the family of the man from whom he was accepting a favor. Alphena had colored when he said, “When in Carce, one follows the customs of Carce,” and bowed low to her, however. He’d made the light comment sound more insulting than a tirade from a bearded Stoic philosopher.

    “Gentlemen of Carce!” squeaked Varus. Oh, Venus and Mars, he sounds so young! “I welcome you on my own behalf and on behalf of Senator Gaius Saxa, my noble father and patron!”

    The audience shuffled its feet dutifully, indicating its appreciation of the greeting. Alphena turned and glanced back, wondering if Saxa had come in after she did. She couldn’t see the whole room — she was shorter than most of the richly dressed freedmen — but she knew that the Senator’s presence would have caused a stir.

    Saxa was probably off with Nemastes again; he seemed to spend all his time with the Hyperborean. He had never pretended to care about literature, of course, so he probably wouldn’t have been present at his son’s reading regardless.

    Saxa was a good father in most fashions. He never ranted at his children about their behavior, and he supplied the money for their whims without objection or concern. He even seemed to care about their well-being, though he viewed them from a foggy distance.

    Alphena didn’t love Saxa; that would be like saying she loved the ornamental pond in the garden. But she liked him a good deal, and she certainly didn’t want her existence to change so that he was no longer part of her life. One way or another, Nemastes the Hyperborean meant change.

    “The filthy River Baroda slowly plows the sandy wastes of Libya,” Varus said, beginning to chant his poem. His voice had settled out of its initial squeak, but it had no more life than the plash of rain into the cistern in the entranceway.

    Alphena had heard established poets and professional singers whom her father had invited to dinner parties. Some of them were better than others, but she couldn’t compare even the worst of them to what she was hearing now. Her brother’s delivery was as dull as watching concrete set.

    Nemastes had appeared two weeks earlier as a petitioner at Saxa’s morning levee. The Hyperborean was only a short step up from the outright beggars who crowded every rich man’s doorstep until the servants ran them away, but because he claimed to be a wizard he’d been admitted to the office after Saxa and his more important clients had exchanged greetings.

    Nobody seemed to know what had happened then, but Saxa and the Hyperborean had spent most of their waking hours together ever since. Indeed, Saxa had announced that Nemastes would be moving into the town house –

    But that plan had collided with Hedia. Nemastes might well be a wizard, but Saxa’s third wife had proved a match for whatever magic he was using on the Senator. There’d been a blazing argument — Hedia was petite, but her lungs and projection could match a professional actor’s — at the end of which the two men had left the house. Saxa had returned alone later that evening.

    “A dragon a hundred cubits long lived near that fateful bank, in a grove like the Avernian entrance to the Underworld,” chanted Varus. His expression mingled terror with resignation. Alphena wondered in a clinical fashion whether that was how men looked when they were waiting to be executed.

    She hadn’t respected her brother until she realized that Publius Corylus did respect him. Of course a rich man’s son would always have men — and women, of a sort — crawling about him. Varus had stayed free of parasites, however, in much the fashion in which he had the mud wiped from his shoes when he’d been caught outdoors in the rain.

    Corylus wasn’t a toady trying to cadge wine and dinners at the tables of the wealthy. He treated Varus with the respect owed a senator’s son — and treated Saxa, when they occasionally met, with the greater respect owed a senator; but it was always the respect which a free man owed his social superiors, not cringing servility. He’d befriended Varus as a still-more-learned scholar.

    Corylus didn’t behave in an improper fashion toward Alphena. She’d have cut him off at the ankles if he had, but with a sense of smirking satisfaction; he was, after all, a handsome youth though a member of the lower orders. Instead, ever since their first loud argument about her presence in the gym, he pretended not to be aware of her existence. Which is just what he’s doing now.

    Alphena’s lips set in a hard line. With the two freedmen gone, there was room on the bench for three Alphenas. She squiggled closer to Corylus, bringing her left thigh in contact with his right.

    He didn’t twitch, not even to move away. She would have gotten as much reaction from a statue. He seemed completely lost in her brother’s poem, though how anybody could really listen to that twaddle was beyond her.

    “The monster split the earth and raised its glittering head to the stars,” Varus chanted. His hawk-featured teacher was jotting in a notebook of waxed boards, though his eyes never left the boy’s face. Judging from Pandareus’ expression, he wouldn’t have anything pleasant to say to Varus at the end of the session . . . but maybe that was unfair. He might be serious rather than fierce.

    Alphena hadn’t taken well to Hedia when Saxa brought his new wife home. His first wife, Marcia, had given him both his children but died of fever a week after Alphena was born.

    Sometimes Alphena wondered what it would be like to have known her mother, but now that she was a teenager, she knew that she had seen as much of Marcia as most of her acquaintances did of their mothers. Even when the parents remained married, the wife’s social life was more important than the child-rearing duties which could, of course, be delegated to a slave or an inexpensive peasant woman.

    Saxa had then married Secunda, her mother’s younger sister. Alphena remembered seeing her several times in the three years or so the marriage had lasted. Secunda had flitted occasionally through her life with a train of maids and pages, perfectly dressed. Each time, she dipped her fan toward the children, gave them a gracious smile, and continued on her way.

    Alphena imagined that Secunda had a lovely, melodious voice, but she’d never heard it. She wondered if Varus had.

    After the divorce — Alphena couldn’t even guess when that had been; she’d been young, and neither the marriage nor its dissolution seemed to have been matters of great moment, even to the couple itself — the affairs of the Senator’s household had gone on in a very placid fashion. Alphena’s nurses and other female servants had made sure that she learned What Men Are Like — but frankly, her father had never struck her as that sort of man. Indeed, often he didn’t seem to be any sort of man.

    Thus when Saxa suddenly married the widow of his cousin, Calpurnius Latus, the mere fact had been a terrible shock to Alphena. Hedia herself had been a much worse surprise. Unlike Secunda — and probably Marcia — she had immediately become involved in every aspect of the household, including her husband’s sixteen-year-old daughter.

    Even a girl brought up to prize the feminine virtues of good breeding and decorum would have found the situation a wrench. Alphena had early on set out to be the son which her brother certainly was not. The new marriage had made her blaze like a funeral pyre even before she heard the stories about her stepmother which the servants were only too happy to retail. If so much as half of them were true, Hedia was a fast woman and no better than she should be.

    In addition, rumor said that not fever but poison offered by his wife had carried off Calpurnius Latus. Was her father out of his mind?

    “The monster filled its vast gullet and its poison-pregnant belly with full-grown lions which it snatched as they came down to the Bagrada to drink!” chanted Varus. The snake that lived in the Temple of Feminine Fortune — the spirit of the temple, the priest said — ate morsels of bread sopped in milk, but one was expected to provide a silver piece to the priest also if you wished to be certain that your prayer would be honored.

    It would take a great deal of bread and milk to feed a snake the size of the one Varus had invented. Alphena wouldn’t have thought lions were so common in Libya that they made a reasonable alternative, though.

    She felt the solid presence of Corylus’ thigh, but his mind seemed to be in another world. He wasn’t so much avoiding Alphena as unaware of her existence.

 

---

 

    Alphena had intended to ignore her stepmother, but Hedia hadn’t permitted that to happen. The day after Saxa brought his new wife home, she had made an inventory of the townhouse. Agrippinus had guided her, but even then Alphena had realized that Hedia was in charge.

    The servants treated Alphena like a small dog with a tendency to bite; they respected and feared their new mistress, which was quite different. That had been another case in which Alphena would have been less angry if she hadn’t seen the reality of things so clearly.

    Hedia was all the things Saxa’s daughter was not: beautiful, sophisticated, and sleek. Alphena had thought it would be easy to hate her; and perhaps she did, but she found she respected Hedia as well. The older woman was as much at war with society’s view of Proper Womanhood as Alphena was, though their techniques could scarcely have been more different.

    And Hedia was a lot more successful in her revolt.

    “The monster roared!” sang Varus. “It was louder than the booming East Wind, more violent than the tempest which shakes the sea bare to its depths!”

    Why does she does she insist that I get married? Alphena thought. And then with a silent wail she added, And why does Corylus ignore me? I’ve seen him look at her!

    She shivered. The room was crowded and should have been uncomfortably warm at this time in the afternoon, but she’d felt a chill touch her spine. Corylus was as cold and distant as the image of Jupiter Best and Greatest in his temple on the Capitoline Hill.

    Alphena tried to be angry with her stepmother, but she knew in her heart that Hedia meant well by her. So why does she insist I get married?

    She was afraid she knew the answer.

    “We fled,” sang Varus, “breathless with terror — but in vain!”

 

---

 

    Hedia stood in the doorway to the portico around the central garden. Her expression was as calm and aristocratic as those of the death masks of her husband’s noble ancestors hanging from the walls of the reception room behind her. Both had been whitened, her face with rice flour and white lead for the wax which decades and even centuries had turned black.

    Hedia doubted that the ancestral masks were angry. She made it a point of pride that people around her couldn’t read her emotional state, but obviously she wasn’t as successful as she would have hoped: her personal maid, Syra, was in a state of terror.

    Hedia patted the girl’s wrist with her left hand. “It’s quite all right, dear,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

    Syra’s lip quivered. Her eyes were fixed on the great purple flowers of the cardoons in the garden, but tears dribbled from their outer corners.

    Does the fool think I’m going to have her tortured to death because my stepdaughter won’t listen to me? Hedia thought in a fury. How dare she! She raised the folded fan in her right hand –

    And caught herself with a sudden giggle. Syra had been with Hedia for five years, through her first marriage. She was a perceptive girl. Sometimes rather too perceptive for her own good.

    There were over two hundred servants in Saxa’s townhouse. Syra was the only one Hedia could see at the moment, and the maid would have fled too if she had dared. They all knew that the mistress was angry, and they weren’t sure that there was any limit on the kind of punishments that anger could lead to.

    Normally servants swarmed in every room unless you ordered them out, and even then they’d be listening at doors and from outside under the windows. A rich man and his spouse had no more privacy than did the members of a poor family crammed six or ten to a tenement apartment.

    Which was why Hedia was furious about her husband’s stupid behavior. She didn’t know what this Nemastes was doing, but she was quite certain that when the Emperor heard about it — when, not if — he and his inquisitors would take a dim view.

    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 only seen him once, he could have 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 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 weedy 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’ 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 or another, had carried her husband off. It wouldn’t have been hard to suggest otherwise, however, and Latus’ well-connected family had a considerable legacy to gain if the widow were 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. Sometimes Hedia thought of the way roaches scrambled if you stepped 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 major domo must have been in the office . . . though how he’d gotten there without Hedia seeing him pass completely escaped her.

    He bowed. “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 be at least six and a half feet tall — he towered a hand’s breadth above the German doorman — but he was skeletally thin.

    Nemastes’ eyes were large and brown. There was nothing remarkable about them in 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 townhouse 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’ servant.