Legacy

Copyright © 1995 by Steve White
ISBN 10: 0-671-87643-0
ISBN 13: 978-0-671-87643-2
Cover art by Larry Elmore
First printing, February 1995

The Disinherited

with David Weber:

Insurrection
Crusade

To Sandy, again and forever.
And to Jennifer, Adrienne and Maria Tatiana, to whom the future belongs.

"It is, of course, premature to congratulate you, my dear Sidonius. We must observe the proprieties and wait until your election has become official." Bishop Faustus of Riez chuckled patronizingly. "Nevertheless, we all know that the final decision is a mere formality. I have absolutely no doubt that I will soon—perhaps before the year is out—be able to greet you as a colleague in Christ, our new Bishop of Clermont!"

Sidonius Apollinaris inclined his head graciously and wrapped his cloak more tightly around his shoulders against the unseasonably raw wind blowing in from the Bay of Biscay on this overcast spring afternoon.
Amazing that it's so chilly, given the amount of hot air Faustus pumps out!
He immediately regretted the thought—the old man had been a staunch supporter in his own maneuverings for the Bishopric of Clermont. Not that Sidonius' lack of clerical background had been any handicap—he wouldn't be the first bishop to start that way. And being the son-in-law of Avitus, who had briefly been Emperor of the West, certainly didn't hurt. Still, Faustus deserved his gratitude. And as one of the most distinguished churchmen in Gaul he certainly merited courtesy, especially in light of his parentage—the parentage that no one
ever
mentioned in his hearing.

"Thank you, Excellency," Sidonius said in his courtier's voice. "I have looked forward to this opportunity to personally convey my belated best wishes upon your birthday." Maybe that was part of the problem; Faustus had never been one to use ten words where twenty would do, but now that he had attained the exceptional age of sixty he was getting positively garrulous. A man of his years had no business out here shivering with the rest of the welcoming committee. But of course it was incumbent upon him to be here. And he was hardly in a position to be fulfilling his duties in Riez just now.

Sidonius, on the other hand, had more or less invited himself. No one had really tried to discourage him. As a distinguished landowner of the Auvergne, litterateur of some note, city prefect of Rome until recently, and the likely Bishop of Clermont, he carried too much weight for anyone to openly object to his presence. And, despite the hazards and hardships of travelling, he was not about to miss this chance to meet the man who, he suspected, was the most remarkable of the many with whom he had corresponded. The man who had set in motion the scene before them here in the Loire estuary.

The fleet of ships had sailed as far inland as the Loire was navigable, anchoring here near Nantes. That the island of Britain had produced such a swarm of seagoing craft had generated unspoken amazement. But they all knew that the High King Riothamus had revived the old Saxon Shore Fleet, as he was trying to revive so much else. Before long, a procession of boats had started bringing ashore the carefully bred warhorses that had carried Riothamus' famous cavalry galloping over Saxon and Pict, fetlock-deep in barbarian blood.

Now, now, let's not wax poetic
, Sidonius chided himself.
I've written so many congratulatory poems—to poor old Avitus, and then to Majorian a few months later, and now to Anthemius—that it's in danger of becoming a joke. Besides, unlike them, Riothamus isn't Emperor of the West. Yet.

Or is he something more?

Now, wherever did such a strange thought come from?

He grew aware of Faustus' drone. "Yes, my dear Sidonius, I am certainly not getting any younger. My health, by God's mercy, continues to be good, though my eyesight has deserted me to such an extent that writing has become quite impossible. And I fear my joints will not soon let me forget this damp chill today. I know full well that I cannot expect to weather many more winters."

"Come, Excellency! You'll bury us all."

"No, I do not complain—especially if I depart leaving you as Bishop of Clermont. For I know that you will be a voice for the
true
Catholic faith in the councils of the Church in Gaul! Otherwise, I fear my soul would depart burdened by the sin of despair. Everywhere, all around us, the Arian heresy rises like a tide, threatening to drown us all in damnation with its horrid, perverse doctrine that the Father and the Son are of
like
substance, rather than the
same
substance, as every true Christian must affirm. . . ." Color mounted in Faustus' cheeks, and Sidonius knew there was no stopping him now.

Faustus was bound to be a fire-eater on the subject of heretics, having only last year been driven from his bishopric and sent scurrying to Soissons by the Arian Visigoths.
Earnest theologians all
, Sidonius reflected drily.
No doubt they debated the nature of the Trinity while stealing the candelabra
. But Faustus' obsession dated back much further than that—back to his youth on the misty island that had put forth the fleet now filling the Loire estuary.

Old as Faustus was, it still came as a shock to realize that he had been born just a couple of years after the day—the last day of 406, to be exact—when the Suevi and Vandals and their rabble of allies had crossed the frozen Rhine into a Gaul that had been stripped of troops by Stilicho to defend Italy, and the world had begun to go horribly wrong.

No hope had existed for the provincials of Gaul save the legions of Britain, which had landed under the usurped command of a lowborn lout whose only recommendation was the auspicious name of Constantine. The barbarians had continued their looting undisturbed while the Empire had put down his clownish bid for the purple, and Alaric the Visigoth had raped inviolate Rome herself, shattering the spell of centuries. Afterwards, the Empire had hired the Visigoths to slaughter their fellow barbarians, paying them with the lands of southwestern Gaul—which they were now finding too narrow—and people told each other that all was restored. But the restoration was a patchwork thing—and it did not include Britain, which the Emperor Honorius had graciously permitted to arm itself while awaiting succor from an Empire that had none to give.

So the Britons, left without the troops who had followed Constantine to the continent and to their deaths, just as their fathers had followed Magnus Maximus to theirs in 383—no question about it, that island was almost as notable for usurpers as it was for inedible cooking—had placed themselves under the protection of powerful landowners. Some were half-pagan brutes, like Ceredig and Cunedda on the frontiers. But others had had larger ideas, like Vortigern of the Gewessei. As a youth he had married the considerably older Sevira, daughter of Magnus Maximus, the larger than life Spanish adventurer whose name was still one to conjure with among the Britons. The matrilineal ideas of the native Celtic people had never altogether died out, and the
mana
of Maximus had descended through Sevira, whose mother had been British. Vortigern's primacy among the British lords had been one fruit of that marriage; Faustus had been another.

Looking at the self-satisfied old man before him, Sidonius tried—and failed—to imagine Faustus as a rebellious youth. What had touched the son of the newly installed High King of Britain? Had it been Vortigern's second marriage? The story was that Faustus never referred to Vortigern's second wife as anything other than "the pagan sow." Sidonius had always felt that Vortigern had been blamed too harshly for his solution to the Pictish threat, in the early days of his High Kingship. He had merely been following a time-honored Roman precedent by using barbarian
foederatii
, even as the Empire had used the Visigoths. But if the Visigoths were barbarians, then the Saxons were howling savages, untouched even by heretical forms of Christianity. They reeked of the old death cults from Europe's foggy, sinister North—the same breed of two-legged beasts who had established themselves here on the lower Loire. And Vortigern, lacking the Empire's ability to overawe them, had married the daughter of their chieftain, replacing Sevira who had died giving birth to a second son at an age beyond that at which most women bore children . . . or, for that matter, lived.

Or was the official reason the true one? Vortigern, while seeking a popular base for his artificial High Kingship, had sponsored the Pelagian heresy that had won the hearts of many of the islanders. Sidonius lacked Faustus' fervor on the subject of heresy in general; had he not visited the Visigothic court at Toulouse during the reign of the late lamented Theoderic II and found it almost disturbingly refreshing in its simplicity? But the British-born Pelagius had gone beyond metaphysical hairsplitting—he had actually denied original sin, and asserted the freedom of the
individual
—even individuals of the lower orders—to make autonomous moral choices! It had all died down, but Sidonius still shuddered at the thought of such madness. Did the man really have no conception of the chaos he could have loosed on the world?

At any rate, the young Faustus' two wellsprings of discontent had flowed together in his twentieth year. Vortigern had married Renwein the Saxon, and Bishop Germanus of Auxerre had landed in Britain to combat heresy, furiously anathematizing the High King. Faustus had publicly broken with his heretic father and joined the church in protest, departing for the continent with Germanus. Vortigern had never been the same again. Renwein had failed to produce a male heir, and as the years passed, the Saxons had changed from watchdogs to wolves, tearing at the throat of Britain. In his last years, Vortigern had been a shadowy, almost pathetic figure. He became more and more detached from the epic of resistance, whose hero, Ambrosius Aurelianus, had refused to seek the High Kingship even while Vortigern was letting it slip away. Instead Ambrosius, a Roman of the old school, had entered the service of the new High King, who had caught the scepter before it could slip into nothingness, and consigned Vortigern to a twilight so obscure that his very death had gone unremarked.

Apparently, Faustus was talking even more than usual to calm his apprehension at meeting the man who had held the British High Kingship to which Faustus—son of Vortigern and grandson of Maximus—arguably had a better right. The old bishop had long ago relinquished all political ambitions . . . but would Riothamus know that?

Faustus paused for breath in mid-tirade and Sidonius, hearing Tertullian's diffident cough behind him, turned gratefully.

"A thousand pardons, Prefect," his secretary said, giving him as a courtesy the title he had only recently relinquished. "The High King is coming ashore, and the other distinguished lords request your presence—and yours, Excellency—on the beach."

"Thank you, Tertullian. Shall we go, Excellency?" They started down the path from the bluff, Tertullian following at a discreet distance.

"Where
did
you find him?" Faustus asked in a voice touched with the sin of envy.

"He came from nowhere and joined my staff in Rome," Sidonius replied. "His references were a bit obscure, but I'm glad I took him on in spite of all the mystery. He's made himself absolutely indispensable to me, as you know."

Faustus did know. He shot a surreptitious look backwards at Sidonius' secretary. "But where is he originally from? He's not a Gaul, obviously."

"I couldn't help being curious about that myself. He told me that his family originally came from India, in the time of the late Republic when there were still Greek-ruled states there. He says they moved west, living in Mesopotamia until the Sassanids took over, later moving to Italy and becoming completely Romanized. Of course," he added emphatically, "he's a Christian of unimpeachable orthodoxy, as all his family have been for some time."

Privately, Sidonius was still a bit curious. Tertullian didn't look much like an Indian—at least as he visualized the inhabitants of that far off subcontinent. He might have a lot of Persian and Syrian blood, but still. . . .

They rounded a bend in the trail, and the delegation stood before them on the beach. It was a fair-sized group, as it must be to represent all the factions involved.
Caesar, Caesar! How many parts would you say Gaul is divided into now?
At least five, Sidonius thought: the Visigoths of the southwest; the British colonies of Armorica (or Little Britain as it was being called), whose allegiance was to Riothamus; the Burgundians of the southeast, barbarians but fairly reliable Roman allies; and the two whose representatives stepped forward now.

"Greetings Excellency, Prefect," said Syagrius, King of the Romans, as he had styled himself since succeeding to the Kingdom of Soissons, which his father Aegidius had set up twelve years ago while loudly proclaiming his continued loyalty to the Empire whose general he had been. Sidonius suppressed a smile, for it was a title no one had held since Tarquin the Proud, of whom Syagrius had probably never heard. Contrary to the general rule that successful usurpers' heirs were cultivated idlers, Syagrius was neither. He was, however, capable of a dignified courtesy.