Debt of Ages

Copyright © 1995 by Steve White
ISBN: 0-671-87689-9
ISBN: 978-0-671-87689-0
Cover art by Stephen Hickman
First printing, October 1995

To Sandy, as always.
—
To David Weber, for suggestions too
numerous to mention.
—
And to Geoffrey Ashe. If you love a
story enough, you don't care if it's
true; but finding out that it was true
all along is one of the little bonuses
that make life so much better than
merely "fair."

"This delightful book is a welcome sequel to
The Disinherited
. Mr. White's ability to capture a realm rich with detail and add adventure is without parallel. Anyone looking for a great read with a different twist should definitely place this title at the top of their list."
—Sherrilyn Kenyon,
Affaire de Coeur

"A mind boggling action-mystery. . . ."
—
Southern Book Trade

"A storyteller with marvelous instincts, Mr. White combines space opera high adventure with an enthralling peek into history."
—Melinda Helfer,
Romantic Times

"Mr. White commands our interest with an exciting variation of a favorite plot and engages our empathy with his nicely developed cast of characters."
—
Romantic Times

"Excellent hard-core SF . . . Highly recommended for [all readers] who like exciting extraterrestrial battle scenes served up with a measure of thought and science."
—
Kliatt

The Restorer was dying.

I knew him for the Restorer at the moment I first met him
, thought Sidonius Apollinaris, known to the world these past eight years as His Holiness Gaius II, keeper of the keys of Saint Peter.

Behind him stood most of the Consistory, filling the incense-heavy air with that sense of numb disbelief which pervaded the entire Sacred Palace, the entire City of Constantine around it, and the whole of Rome's reunified and expanded empire beyond that awaited the passing of him who had brought it all back from the edge of the abyss. But Sidonius was aware of none of the overdressed dignitaries with whom he shared the Imperial bedchamber. He stood over the bed and looked down into his old friend's face, worn down by war, the cares of empire and sixty-four winters, as well as by the sickness that was killing him.

The dark eyes fluttered open, glittering with recognition as much as with fever. "Sidonius," he said in a dry whisper to which he still managed to give a kind of firmness.

"Yes, Augustus, I am here."

The shockingly-aged face formed the famous grin whose boyishness had never seemed incongruous and still didn't. "There you go again, Sidonius! I never persuaded you to stop addressing me as 'Riothamus' even though I kept telling you we Britons only used the title on formal occasions. And after that it's always been 'Augustus'! Will you let me go to my grave still refusing to call me by my name, at least in private?"

All at once, Sidonius was no longer in the ornate room that the doctors insisted on keeping so stifling. He was on a beach at the mouth of the Loire twenty-two years before, standing in the chill salt wind with the men—all dead now, besides him—who had awaited the arrival of the High King of the Britons whose army was the Western Empire's last hope against the Visigoths.

I can still see the afternoon sun blazing forth through the first break in that day's overcast as he stepped from the boat, silhouetting him against the divine fire. But that fire burned even more strongly within him, burned with a force that could snatch back that which had been consigned to the irrecoverable past and defy the Fates themselves
(as always, Sidonius automatically chided himself for his lifelong weakness for pagan mythology). Yes, he had known that the British ruler with whom he had corresponded was destined to restore the Empire. He had known it with a simple, absolute certainty that, he guiltily acknowledged, not even the Church's doctrines could inspire in him.

That moment had remained with Sidonius through all the tumultuous, unbelievable years that had followed. His certainty had faltered that very winter when he had learned of the treason of the Praetorian Prefect of Gaul, whom he had once called friend. (What had his name been? Oh, yes: Arvandus.) But the Restorer's destiny was not to be deflected by betrayal, and the matter had been forgotten in the jubilation following the great victory at Bourges. That victory had banished the terrifying Visigothic threat to the realm of old nightmares from which one had awakened. And then had come a potentially disastrous digression, with rebellion calling the High King back to Britain. But he had returned to the continent somehow strengthened by his campaigning in the island's wild western hills. After that, events had moved with the seeming inevitability of a river's journey to the sea.

The Restorer had never ceased to insist that he had not sought even the Emperorship of the West, much less of a reunited Roman Empire. Sidonius was inclined to believe him. Looking back, it was hard to see how he could have avoided any one of the steps he had taken, or how each of those steps could have failed to lead to the step that had followed. After his ally the Western Emperor Anthemius had been murdered, Odoacer—who had succeeded Ricimer as Master of Soldiers at Rome—had moved against him. With no alternative save extinction, the Restorer had advanced into Italy, where on the victorious field of Pavia his British and Gallic and Frankish troops had proclaimed him Augustus of the West. That had been in 474, the year the Eastern Emperor Leo had died; his successor Zeno had never acknowledged that he had a legitimate fellow in the West, and after six years of uneasy coexistence had come the inevitable clash. Thinking back, Sidonius wondered how he could ever have doubted its outcome.
Me and most of the world
, he reflected, which always made him feel a little better. But if his confidence had wavered, his loyalty never had. And when old Pope Simplicius had died in 483, the ruler of the miraculously reunified Empire had let it be known that in his opinion the churchmen and citizenry of Rome could make no better choice for their new bishop than his old friend and supporter, that noted prelate and man of letters Bishop Sidonius of Clermont. For some odd reason they had agreed.

No, he could never forget those years. Nothing could dim their luster in his memory—not even the uncomprehending hurt and disappointment he had felt all too often during the years that had followed. And he heard himself form the same words he had spoken on that windy beach twenty-two years before, when it had all begun. "Very well . . . Artorius."

The Restorer smiled again. "Better! There may be hope for you yet, Sidonius!" Then he raised a hand from the bed and grasped the papal forearm with surprising strength. When he spoke, the whisper was fainter than before, but not with the faintness of failing strength. No, it was deliberate—these words were for the two of them alone.

"Sidonius, you will see me again."

"Why, of course, Augustus." Sidonius reverted to formality in his puzzlement. "There can be no doubt of it. We will see each other again, before the throne of God, when—"

"No!" The grip tightened on his arm, and the whisper took on a compelling urgency. "I don't mean that. I mean in this life! I'm telling you this because I want you to be prepared, and not doubt your sanity nor fear for your soul. You must dismiss all thoughts of the black arts, and accept what your eyes and ears and mind and heart tell you. . . ."

The whisper faded to nothing and the grip went slack, for the effort had been too much. Damasius the Syrian stepped forward and examined his imperial patient with that look of sharp concentration which all physicians cultivated, a mask behind which yawned bottomless ignorance.

"He must rest now, Your Holiness. I fear he has exhausted himself."

Sidonius nodded and stepped back from the bedside.
Whatever was he talking about?
he wondered.
Nothing, probably. His mind is going, and he can no longer command it to reason. Not even the force of will which hauled back the outgoing tide of history can hinder death in its work of dissolution.

"Remember," he told the physician, "I am to be notified when the end is at hand." Then he turned from the bed and looked around the room, so very Greek in its massive, mosaic-encrusted somberness. Equally Greek were most of the men and eunuchs in the room, the high officials of state and church. Then he saw a new face, and he froze.

It seemed amazing that Acacius could have entered the room silently, moving under the weighty vestments of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Even more amazing was his audacity in being here at all, knowing that the Pope of Rome, his bitterest enemy, was bound to be present.
Well,
Sidonius thought, his habitual good nature reasserting itself,
perhaps he feels sincere affection for this dying man. He certainly has every reason to. And I will
not
create a scene here!

He nodded stiffly to the Patriarch, who acknowledged with what he had to admit was probably superior grace. Then he turned and left the room, moving with that natural stateliness that people assured him he had acquired by virtue of the weight he had put on in recent decades.
I hope that's true,
he thought as he made his way along corridors and past the occasional statue-like figures of white-uniformed Scholarian Guards.
It would be good to have some recompense in exchange for wind and vigor! But I mustn't complain. At fifty-nine I should be thanking God that I'm still alive, not whining to Him about the loss of youth.

He reached the top of the marble stairs that led down from the imperial apartments to the first floor. Here he paused, and gazed out the wide windows that gave light to the landing. They gave little light now, for it was approaching twilight. Sidonius looked out at the terraced gardens that sloped down to the Sea of Marmara, where lights were winking to life on passing ships. He liked this view, for the palace itself and the adjacent hippodrome blocked from sight the teeming hive that was Constantinople.

At one time I dared hope that he'd move the principal Imperial residence back to Rome, where it was in the great days before the world began to go wrong, when the first Augustus ruled as
Princeps
among his fellow citizens, not as an Asiatic god-emperor inhabiting a world of ceremony and splendor far above his subjects' cringing heads. But Rome was always hopeless as a location for the Imperial capital, from the military standpoint. The logistics were all wrong. And, of course, most of our wealth and people—and our most dangerous enemies—are in the East. All of this was as true for Artorius as it had been for Constantine. As in everything else, he made the only possible choice.

Later, though . . .

At first Artorius had been a breath of fresh air in this place. But then the wind had settled, and everything had been as before: the eunuchs, and the ceremonies and hierarchies they had devised and eternally elaborated (
A substitute for what they've lost?
Sidonius wondered); and the clerks and notaries who did the everyday business of the state with an inefficiency they defended with a stubbornness fit to shame the Saxons, for any change could only be to their disadvantage.
There's no way the empire can function without them,
Sidonius reflected bleakly.
No one else knows how to play the games they themselves have invented for the purpose of making themselves indispensable.

He sighed and shook his head. He shouldn't complain about the way the restored empire was governed.
It's like my advancing age,
he reminded himself.
Consider the alternative!
No, the decisions that had wedged him and his old friend apart over the last few years had concerned not the things of Man but those of God. . . .

"Sidonius! Your Holiness, I meant to say!"

Sidonius turned and smiled at the man bounding up the staircase. The clouds lifted from his mind for the moment. It was impossible to stay depressed around Ecdicius.

"Noblissimus," he greeted, using the proper form of address for the heir to the Empire.

"Well, now that we've got all
that
out of the way—greetings!" Ecdicius reached the landing, not even breathing hard after an ascent that would have reduced Sidonius to a state of gasping exhaustion, and clasped forearms with his brother-in-law. Ecdicius flashed the smile that transfigured his engagingly ugly face, and Sidonius reflected as always on how much he was like his adoptive father the Augustus.

Ecdicius had not yet reached adolescence when the twenty-year-old Sidonius, scion of another of the aristocratic Gallo-Roman families of their set, had come to seek the hand of his older sister Papianilla. Sidonius still thought of him as the wiry, restlessly-energetic boy for whom the villa in the Auvergne had seemed too confining.
God, what a brat he was,
he recalled, in the wake of every man who ever courted a girl with a younger brother. But that boy had survived the whirlwind of events that had soon followed—his father Avitus's brief reign as Augustus of the West and subsequent murder, and the "Marcelliana" conspiracy in which Sidonius had almost been implicated. And later, in his mid-twenties but already grown into the kind of man that other men instinctively follow, he had raised a private cavalry unit that had distinguished itself at the Battle of Bourges. He had subsequently become one of Artorius's leading cavalry officers, with a reputation for taking hair-raising risks and emerging alive through sheer dash. When the childless Restorer had found it politic to adopt an heir, he hadn't found the choice a difficult one.