The Centurion's Empire (2 page)

"Cold, so cold," he concluded. "Cold caressed me, cold sustained me . . . cold was my lover."

"The cold should have killed you," said Antonius. "You say your grandparents have a small farm near Hercula-neum?"

"At Boscoreale, near Herculaneum. Find them . . . say Vitellan Bavalius survived."

"Vitellan? A curious name for a Roman?"

"My mother . .. Egyptian . . . named me after . . . someone."

"I see. And who is your father?"

"My father, Marcus Bavalius ... centurion in legions. Legions dangerous, he said. Join a ship, he said. Safe, safe ... he
said."

"Where is your father?"

"At Alexandria . . . princeps prior. Warm there, too warm . .. heat kills, cold gives life."

"He's raving," grunted Antonius. "Still, he speaks as if educated, and his father has a middling good rank. His fam-
ily may reward us well for his return. Tradus, take the horse and ride to Boscoreale in the morning. Ask at the farms if
anyone has a grandson named Vitellan Bavalius. Tell them he was rescued by a poor crippled sailor."
Antonius sat by the fire and began to carve tenons from driftwood to sell to the boatbuilders. Outside the wind howled
and rain pattered on the roof. Tradus thought of his journey the following day and glanced resentfully at Vitellan before
climbing into bed.

". . . waves washed over me, chilled away my pain," Vitellan mumbled. "Beware fire, fire is death."

"My fire is bringing you back to life now," Antonius said as he fed wood shavings to the flames. "You should have died
out there. How did you endure five days in the water?"

"The cold is my friend, kept me alive ... the cold is my lover, in her embrace I'll live forever."
Domedia shivered as she sat beside Antonius, splicing the lengths of rope that they had salvaged. "Are the gods immortal
because their blood is cold?" she asked.

Antonius frowned at her. "Vitellan here is no godling. He's just a tough—and very lucky—boy. I know what you're
thinking, Domedia. Just remember how your mother died and stay out of his bed."

"But how did he survive so long in the cold sea?"

"Why are some men stronger than others? Why are your eyes so keen that you can see flotsam on the beach at twice the
distance your brother can? The talent to endure cold is Vitellan's particular blessing from the gods. It has already saved
his life once. Perhaps it will do so again."

Vitellan recovered and was soon reunited with his grandparents. They rewarded Antonius by making the former captain
an assistant overseer of the dozen slaves on their little farm. Antonius and his son died when Vesuvius erupted and
destroyed Boscoreale eight years later, in an odd vindication of Vitellan's delirious warning. Domedia escaped, having
married a boatbuilder by then and gone to live in Naples.

Two months after his ordeal Vitellan decided to join the army rather than return to the sea. Some months after that he
was put aboard a ship to Egypt, much to his horror, but

this voyage was free of disaster. He was to travel widely in the years that followed, and he served in Mauretania, Gaul,
the Germanic frontier, and the north of Britannia. It was in Britannia where he learned that by embracing coldness he
could indeed live forever, and in an act of petty revenge he designed and built the world's second human-powered time
machine.

I

venenum inunortale

N u s q u a m , t h e E u r o p e a n A l p s : 1 7 D e c e m b e r 7 1 , A n n o D o m i n i
Rome was near the height of its power in the second year of Vespasian's reign as emperor, and nobody would have
suspected that the Empire's fate hung by the life of a five-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Etruscan. Celcinius lay with his
ears and nostrils sealed with beeswax plugs, and his mouth bound shut. His body was frozen solid in a block of ice at the
bottom of a shaft two hundred feet deep.

Regulus held his olive oil lamp high as he entered the Frigi-darium Glaciale. He shivered, even dressed as he was in a
coat of quilted Chinese silk and goosedown. The sheepskin lining of his hobnailed clogs did no better to keep out the
cold, and the fur of his hood and collar was crusted with frost from his own breath. Wheezing loudly after the long trek
down through corridors cut through solid ice, he paused for a moment.

"There'd be something wrong were it not so damn cold," he panted to himself as he leaned against the wall, watching his
words become puffs of golden fog in the lamplight.

The Frigidarium Glaciale was a single corridor cut into the ice. It stretched away into blackness, as straight and level as
a Roman road. On the walls on either side of him were rows of bronze panels, each two feet by seven and inscribed with
names and dates. After a minute Regulus reluctantly heaved himself into motion again, shuffling down the corridor and
leaning heavily on a staff that bore the Tempo-rian crest of a winged eye. Its other end was tipped with a spike, so that it
would not slip on the ice of the floor.

He paused again by a panel marked with his own name and bearing twenty-six pairs of dates. There was something
strangely alluring about this cell cut into the ice, where he had spent 360 of the 437 years since his birth. Following his
own private ritual he knocked out the pins securing the top of the panel to retaining bolts set into the ice, then levered it
down with his staff. The hinges creaked reluctantly, shedding a frosty crust. Behind it was an empty space six feet long
and two feet deep.

Regulus stared into the little chamber, holding the lamp up and running his gloved hand along the surface of the ice. He
had been in there when Plato had died, and for the whole of Alexander the Great's short but remarkable career. Regulus
had, of course, been awake to attend the Temporians' Grand Council, the single time when all his fellow Temporians
had been awake together. That was when they had decided to abandon their Etruscan heritage and support Rome. The
Punic Wars and rapid expansion of Roman power and influence had followed, and Regulus had been awake to earn scars
in the fighting against Hannibal. There had been more years in the ice after that, until he had been revived in time to
cross the Rubicon with Julius Caesar. That time he had stayed awake for two decades, until after the defeat of Antony
and Cleopatra. He had returned to the ice again by the time Christ was born.

The old man was secretly a litde claustrophobic, and disliked both being in the Frigidarium Glaciale and the prospect of
some day returning to his assigned cell there. He heaved the bronze panel back into place. "Never again," he promised
himself as he scanned the dates in the dancing lamplight, then he turned and shuffled farther down the corridor of the
Frigidarium Glaciale like a short, arthritic bear.

At a vacant cell he took a metal tag from his robes, slid it into a bracket and sealed it into place. He studied the entry for
a moment before moving on.

"Vitellan Bavalius, eh?" he chuckled softly to the name on the panel. "You're the lad who survived five days in a cold
sea after that troopship sank last September. You don't know about us yet, lad, but you are destined to join us -and sleep
in this hole. We're watching you now, and you are very promising. You're a strong, natural leader, and you have great
resistance to the cold. Those are perfect qualifications to become a Temporian and live for a thousand years."
Regulus patted the tag with Vitellan's name like a teacher encouraging a good student, then walked down to the very end
of the Frigidarium Glaciale. The panel bearing Cel-cinius' name was alone in the wall at the end of the corridor.
Regulus turned and glanced behind him, more through habit than paranoia. The entrance had now faded into blackness,
but the corridor was empty as far as he could see. He released the pins and pried the panel out to reveal a block of
rammed snow, from which emerged leather straps bound with a wax seal. He allowed himself a little smile: the imprint
in the seal was his own: 217 years earlier he had been acting as the Frigidarium Glaciale's Master of the Ice for the first
time when Celcinius had returned to the ice. Satisfied, he swung the plate back and checked the dates inscribed in it.
Celcinius was ninety-four in terms of years awake. That was bad. It would be a difficult revival.
Regulus slowly made his way back down the length of the Frigidarium Glaciale, past the 370 other bronze plates, and
stopped at the thick, metal-bound oak door. With a twinge of shame he realized that he had not checked the reading in
the lock when he had entered. "Memory's going too," he muttered, taking a stylus and wax tablet from the folds of his
heavy robes and peering through a slit in the lock's housing. Three numerals were visible, and Regulus noted them. He
was about to pull the door shut when he realized that he had not locked the door behind him while he was inside the
Frigidarium Glaciale. "Lucky nobody's here to see all this," he said, pulling the door shut. Taking an iron key nearly a
foot in length he locked the door, unlocked it, then locked it again. The lock's mechanism was the most advanced in
existence, and had been installed only five years earlier. It incorporated a counter-wheel that recorded the number of
openings and closings, and could not be reset. He noted down the second—and now correct— reading.

"If my memory's as bad as that I'll not get out alive," he muttered as he pulled his fur-lined mittens back on.
The Frigidarium Glaciale was not located in a glacier, but was cut into unmoving, stable ice in a deep ravine between two
mountain peaks. Regulus cautiously walked down a

flight of steps carved out of the ice and along another passage. At the bottom was a door, in fact every twenty feet there
was another door to seal in the cold air. There were no guards down here, but it was still a dangerous place for intruders.
One door opened onto a walkway above a deep pit with long, sharp spikes at the bottom. The walkway was designed to tip
unwary visitors off if they did not reset a group of levers in the right sequence at the halfway point. Beyond this was a
vault of ice blocks that would collapse unless a lever back at the previous door was moved to the correct notch first.
Finally there was a cage of metal bars, and beside it three wheels with numbers engraved on the rims. Set the wrong
code on the wheels and the lower passage would be automatically flooded with water piped from a heated cistern two
hundred feet above. The right code alerted a slave in the palace to start his horse turning a windlass to raise the elevator
cage. Regulus entered the cage and pulled the door shut. He reached back out through the bars and set the wheels to the
correct code.

After an interval that never failed to unnerve him the cage jerked slightly, then began to move upward. He leaned back
against the bars and sighed a long plume of condensed breath. Perhaps his memory was not so bad after all, perhaps his
lapses in the actual Frigidarium Glaciale had only occurred because his life had not been at stake down there. The olive
oil lamplight showed stratified layers in the ice and occasional stones as he made the slow journey upward. He had a
name for every embedded stone that he passed;' he had made the trip hundreds of times. All that seemed to change was
the intensity of the cold. For the last few feet the shaft was lined with marble blocks.
The cage emerged into a torchlit stone chamber, then stopped. A woman in her late fifties was waiting for Regulus,
shivering within several layers of pine marten fur. She unlatched the cage door while the slave in charge of the windlass
threw the anchor bolts at the base of the cage. Regulus was trembling almost convulsively as she led him to a little alcove
that was heated by air piped from a distant furnace. The warmth slowly eased his distress.

"I
told
you to take an assistant," she said as she poured

him a cup of warm, spiced wine from a silver flask on an oil-burner stand.

"The rules are the rules," he replied between chattering teeth.

"Do you know how long you were down there?"

He ignored the question. "Well Doria, the seal on Celcinius' body is intact," he reported, then gulped a mouthful of
wine. "Everything is as it was during my previous inspection. I can authorize his release if the Adjudicators vote for it."

"He was eighty-nine last time he was revived," said Doria, putting a pan of wax on the oil-burner. "According to the
Revival Ledger he hovered near death for six days. I'll not vote for revival. Not just now, anyway."

"The last unpaired date on his panel shows that he was ninety-four at the time of his last freezing."

"I know, I know. It is in my own records." Doria closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Surely we can make our own
decisions by now. We don't need his sanction."

"Perhaps not, but the Adjudicators are still calling, for his sanction," Regulus said as he rubbed the circulation back into
his hands. "That's why they want him revived."

"If he dies, what then?" asked Doria.

"If he dies we have lost our founder," he replied with resignation.

"Precisely," she said with some vehemence, now leaning forward and tapping the heated stone bench. "We lose our
greatest unifying symbol."