The Legions of Fire (7 page)

“Yeah, except for the spear points coming the other way,” grunted Lenatus.

Both men chuckled. Their grins made them look both reassuring and ugly beyond words. Well, they were reassuring if they were on your side.

Hedia nodded toward the rack of swords. “Does my daughter, Alphena, practice with those swords also?” she said.

Pulto stiffened into professional blankness. Lenatus clacked the heels of his cleated sandals together and straightened to attention. “Yes, your ladyship,” he said, his gaze directed at something past her left shoulder. “She does.”

Hedia nodded. The trainer hadn't lied or made excuses, just stated the flat truth and waited for what would happen next.

Nothing, or at least nothing bad, would happen to him, because he had proved he was a man. Therefore his friend Pulto was probably equally trustworthy.

“As her mother, I hope she'll grow out of it,” Hedia said in a mild, conversational voice. “But I'm very much afraid that if I tried to forbid her, she'd go off to Puteoli and enroll in one of the gladiatorial schools. Not so, Master Lenatus?”

The men were smiling again. Pulto's cheeks swelled as he suppressed a guffaw.

“Your ladyship,” said Lenatus, “I think you're wise. She can't get into any real trouble hacking at a post here at home.”

He nodded to the armored dummy, which could be put in the middle of the yard for solo practice.

“But if she goes outside, she'll be sparring or worse. And that I won't let her do here, not if the master come down and ordered me to.”

“I do not believe my lord and master will give you such an order, lenatus,” Hedia said, speaking carefully. Nothing in her tone could be read as
mockery of her husband, but neither did the words allow any doubt that she meant them.

She made a moue. She was here to deal with her domestic problems, but not by discussing them with a pair of commoners. Switching the topic slightly to lower the emotional temperature before she got to the real question at issue, Hedia said, “Does anyone else practice here, Lenatus?”

“Well, the young master does sometimes,” the trainer said, just as careful in choosing his words as Hedia had been a moment before. “And—”

His eyes flicked left to his friend, but the men didn't exactly exchange glances.

“—sometimes he brings his friends here. Master Corylus, for one.”

Pulto nodded with stolid enthusiasm. Corylus was the only friend Varus brought here, of course: the only one interested in military-style exercise, and probably the only friend Varus had.

“The boy's bloody good,” said Lenatus, lifting both fists to display his thumbs.

“Which the Old Man's son bloody ought to be,” said Pulto. “And you know, the other kid—sorry, ma'am, Lord Varus …”

He shook his head, angry with himself to have referred to the son of the house in a patronizing manner. “Sorry!” he repeated, twisting the toe of his right sandal against the sand floor.

“Lord Varus gets a lot more exercise because of his friend,” said Lenatus with forced calm. “He says he knows he ought to, and having Corylus here helps him do the basics.”

“Do they spar?” said Hedia, suddenly curious.

“No, mistress,” said Lenatus, “that wouldn't be fair. But Corylus spars with me. There's tricks I can teach him, but I'll never be as young as he is again. And every time we mix it, there's less he doesn't know.”

“Your son gets a good workout, ma'am,” Pulto said earnestly. “At the start, you don't want to push them too hard. Then he watches some more and works on, you know, writing on tablets.”

“He asks Master Corylus words sometimes while he's sitting there,” Lenatus said, grinning. He nodded at the stone bench built against the wall between the two dressing rooms. “Remember the time he said he needed a word for spear that he could use in a line ending in a spondee?”

Both men chuckled. They were at ease again, treating Hedia as one of them. They didn't understand what she was about, but soldiers didn't expect
to understand things. She had known a number of them—officers, all the ones she could think of, but that was the same thing with an upper-class accent.

Soldiers learned to adapt to situations, though; and if something seemed to be good, well, they were thankful. It would change soon enough, depend on that!

“I said, ‘A bloody spear has always worked all right for me,'” said Pulto. “And Mercury bite me if the kid don't say, ‘Yes,
my bloody spear
. Two spondees! Perfect.'”

“And Corylus doubled up laughing so I caught him a ripe one on the helmet,” said Lenatus. “Which hadn't been the way the match was going before then, let me tell you.”

Hedia joined the laughter. Still smiling, she said, “The problem I have is a specialized one, Master Pulto. And of course it requires discretion—”

“I'll get right out of here,” Lenatus said. He was still holding his corselet of steel hoops. He turned to swing it into the alcove beneath his helmet.

“No!” said Hedia. “Master Lenatus, I said discretion. If Pulto wouldn't discuss the situation with the friend on whom his life has depended, he'd be a fool. I don't need fools.”

She looked between the two men and said, “That's correct, isn't it?”

Pulto shrugged. He didn't meet her eyes. “I guess neither of us would be standing here now if it wasn't for the other, a time or two,” he muttered.

“Yes,” said Hedia crisply. Then, “Master Pulto, I need magical help. I understand that your wife is a witch.”

Lenatus grunted as though he'd been punched low. Pulto grimaced and said to the sand, “Your ladyship, Anna is a Marsian and they always say that about Marsians. You know that.”

“I'm in need, Master Pulto,” Hedia said. “We all in this family are in danger, as I suspect you know. I would like to speak with your wife, Anna.”

Lenatus played with the sash of his sweat-stained tunic, then looked at his friend. Pulto raised his eyes to Hedia and said, “Lady, Anna has rheumatism and can't manage stairs very well. Even if she, you know, did know something. We're up on the third floor, you see; not a, not a private house like this.”

“In fact I intend to visit Anna rather than bring her here,” Hedia said, which hadn't been her plan until the words came out. It really was a better idea, though. There'd be whispers that Saxa's wife was looking for a love
charm or an abortion—but nothing nearly so dangerous as the truth. “Tomorrow, shall we say? At about midday?”

She phrased the statements as questions, but of course they weren't.

“Ah …,” said Pulto. His friend was watching but keeping silent. “Ah, I guess all right if, you know, if the Senator is all right with it?”

“My husband does not insult me by trying to control my comings and goings, sirrah!” Hedia said. She hadn't raised her voice but there was a whip on the end of her tongue.

The men straightened to attention. “Yes
sir
!” Pulto said.

There was shouting—screaming, some of it—from the front of the house. “Whatever is that?” Hedia said.

Lenatus tossed one of the practice swords to Pulto and kept the other. They went out the door together.

Hedia ran after them. Lengths of hardwood wielded by these old veterans were good things to have in front of you in trouble.

“I
F THE MONSTER
'
S BREATH
has unmanned you, I will ride on boldly and fight it alone!” Varus said. As he declaimed, he heard a distant rhythm. He supposed it was his fearful heart beating.

Pandareus took notes with an odd expression. He didn't suffer fools gladly, and surely Varus was proving himself a fool like few others.

Varus's soul had shriveled in misery. He was a clumsy wordsmith. He'd managed to conceal that from himself until now, but when he performed his work in public, his mind compared it with all the other literature he'd read or heard.

Varus had known he wasn't Vergil, but he wasn't even Ennius, who had the excuse of antique coarseness. His words had no soul, and because
he
did have a soul, he couldn't deny his failure.

I can see you,
Varus whispered to the Muse.
I see you, but my tongue doesn't have the words to describe you
.

His voice sang on, empty and pointless. He wished the earth would open beneath him, but the poem continued to roll on like the Tiber in muddy spate.

Varus's mind slipped, step by shuddering step, out of the present. The insistent rhythm was outside of him, outside of the world. Its beat filled the empty vessel which failure had left of Gaius Alphenus Varus, would-be poet. Voices were chanting.

A cone of raw, rust-colored rock lifted from the ocean. It was hard to
see. A dank northern mist bathed it, but there was something wrong with the air also. It was as though Varus were watching through layers of mica.

Things moved on the narrow beach below the cone. Portentous things, but they were invisible except—

The cosmos toppled like a lap marker at the racetrack, bringing up a different face. Varus still felt the disjunction, but he was on the other side of it.

The cone was a great volcano. The sides were too steep to have a real beach where they rose from the sea, but waves had battered a notch in the coarse rock. On it, licked by spray, twelve tall men danced about the ivory image. They were nude and hairless.

Hyperboreans,
Varus thought, for they were all so similar to his father's friend Nemastes that they could have been copies of the same statue. Their expressions were cold and angry, and they looked more cruel than stoats.

As the tall men danced, they chanted. At first the sound was as raucous as crows calling in a field of stubble and seemed empty, but Varus began to understand its patterns. Similarly, the rhythms of the dance wove together into a great whole and merged with the dancers' wild cries.

In the center of the ring was an ivory carving of a man's head. It wore a fur cap over its ears and was no bigger than a thumb. The figurine drew Varus inward.

The dancers watched Varus as they shuffled on their round; their eyes were hungry. Flickers like the blue flames of sulfur began to lift from the broken rocks. The wisps waved in time with the dance, rising and keeping pace with the jerking feet of the dance.

The flames brightened and became demons of blue fire. Ribs showed beneath their tiny scales, and their very bodies were translucent. Their skulls were like those of lizards, and their lipless mouths twisted in grimaces of fury. They danced like marionettes, under the compulsion of the Hyperboreans.

The chant roared in Varus's ears. The dancers, human and demon alike, stared at him as they paced their circle.

Varus reached out to the ivory miniature. He wasn't sure he had a body, but he could feel the vague, slick warmth of the yellowed ivory.

Almost
Varus could grasp the pattern of the dance. That pattern was that of the whole cosmos. He raised the figurine, staring into the carven eyes of someone more ancient than Varus could grasp even with his new understanding.

The Hyperboreans grinned, and the demons licked slaver from their pointed jaws. The chant was too loud for the cosmos to hold. Varus almost—

There was a crash and blinding light; the pattern burst. Varus pitched forward. He was shouting.

“F
EARLESSLY WITH A WINGED ARM
our Regulus hurled his spear through the air like a thunderbolt,” Varus droned.

Does that sort of thing make sense to men?
Alphena wondered. Certainly the freedmen farther down the row from her looked comatose. As for Corylus, he might as easily have been carved from a tree trunk.

When Varus spoke normally he sounded, well, normal. His voice had been spiky and nervous when he started his reading, but it was lots worse now. He seemed dead, or at least like he wished he were dead.

Though at this moment, Varus's voice sounded like blocks of stone being dragged across one another at a building site. Alphena remembered that she'd come here by her own choice when nobody would've forced her to come. Listening to her stepmother go on about Alphena having to get married didn't seem like such a bad thing now.

She couldn't walk out once she'd sat down, though. She and Varus hadn't been close, exactly, but they'd bumped around together in a household where their father didn't pay much attention and there wasn't anybody who even pretended to be their mother. Varus had never tried to tell his sister how to behave. There were plenty of brothers who tried to be stricter than their fathers were, she knew.

Alphena didn't feel that she owed Varus support in this silly poetry business, but it would be stabbing him in the back if she came to his reading and then walked out in the middle of it. He cared about his poetry, though Juno knew why. Insulting it publicly would be the worst thing she could do, and he didn't deserve that.

What was wrong with Corylus? Alphena pressed her thigh against his again, but it was like hitting a padded wall. He didn't even feel warm anymore. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and his breathing was so light that she had to watch carefully to see the tiny flutters of his chest.

“The earthborn monster blazed with rage,” Varus said. “He was a stranger to fear and had never before known pain.”

He recited like he was running through the list of vegetables which he'd been asked to return with from the family villa just east of Carce. His eyes
were open and staring, but he'd stopped turning the scroll forward. His body was as rigid as that of Corylus here on the bench.

Why
doesn't Corylus notice me?
Alphena had seen the way he looked at Hedia out of the corners of his eyes when they happened to meet. When Corylus realized Alphena was watching him watch her stepmother, he blushed. He trotted toward the gymnasium so quickly that he trod on the heel of his own sandal and almost fell.