The Legions of Fire

T
HE
L
EGIONS OF
F
IRE

 

TOR BOOKS BY DAVID DRAKE

Birds of Prey

Bridgehead

Cross the Stars

The Dragon Lord

The Forlorn Hope

Fortress

The Fortress of Glass

From the Heart of Darkness

Goddess of the Ice Realm

The Gods Return

The Jungle

Killer
(with Karl Edward Wagner)

The Legions of Fire

Lord of the Isles

Master of the Cauldron

The Mirror of Worlds

Mistress of the Catacombs

Patriots

Queen of Demons

Servant of the Dragon

Skyripper

Tyrannosaur

The Voyage

T
HE
L
EGIONS OF
F
IRE

DAVID DRAKE

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

Copyright © 2010 by David Drake

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-2078-0

First Edition: May 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Sarah Van Name, a fellow Latinist

Dan Breen is my first reader. He catches things that I miss and, even more important, forces me to look at things that I passed as “Well, that's about right.” When I tell myself that something's about right, it means it really isn't right.

Dorothy Day and my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, archived my texts as usual, protecting me against electronic disasters, my own screw ups, and the possibility of a moderate-sized asteroid targeting my part of the country. (Don't laugh: there are a lot of asteroids up there!)

Karen (again) and Joe Benardello each provided extremely specialized information that I couldn't have gotten in any other way. I hope I have used their help in fashions that won't embarrass them.

Computers died in the creation of this book. I'm sorry, but they did. One I simply worked to death. As for the backup machine, I was working away (outside on the porch, as usual) when a squall hit, blowing the rain in horizontally. My son, Jonathan, replaced the first with its nearest modern equivalent; he then got the backup working again, to my great delight.

My wife, Jo, continues to feed me extremely well and to keep the house running, while also reminding me of the normal incidents of human society (a birthday party tomorrow night, the dental appointment next week, and so on).

I could work without my circle of friends and family. The books would not be as good, though, and I would certainly not be as good.

My thanks to all those above; and thank
heavens
that I'm not alone.

First and foremost,
The Legions of Fire
is a novel about a fictional city named Carce (pronounced CAR-see) and the empire which Carce rules. It is not a novel about Rome and the Roman Empire in a.d. 30, under the emperor Tiberius.

Having said that, a reader who knows a little about Roman history and culture will find similarities with my Carce. A reader who knows a great deal about Rome will find even more similarities. I'm not writing a historical novel, however, or even a historical novel with fantasy elements.

The fantasy elements which I've used here, like the historical and cultural elements, are real. The Cumean Sibyl did exist; so did and do the
Sibylline Books
, which a committee of senators examined when Rome was in particularly grave danger (for example, after the disaster at Cannae).

I prefer to use real things instead of inventing pastiches which I hope will sound right. The magical verses of this novel come from the
Sibylline Books
and (for reasons which will become clear to the reader) from the
Völuspá
, a Norse prophetic poem. (Occasionally you will find lines from other poems of
The Elder Edda
as well.)

There are various literary borrowings throughout
The Legions of Fire
. This wasn't research on my part, exactly: I read classical literature for fun, and I found it easier to snatch something from (for example) the elder Seneca, or the Homeric Hymns, or Silius Italicus, than to invent it myself. (This is the first time in forty-odd years that I've found familiarity with Silius Italicus to be useful knowledge.)

One final note: the word “servant” occurs frequently in this novel. In Carce as in ancient Rome, the word generally means “slave.”

I've heard intelligent people state that classical slavery wasn't as bad as slavery in America's antebellum South. You can make a case for that, but I consider it along the lines of arguing that the Spanish Inquisition wasn't as bad as the Gestapo.

A Roman householder had the power of life and death—and sexual control—over the slaves in his or her “family,” and this power could be extended to freed slaves as well. I'm not writing a political tract, but the reader should be aware of this background in order to understand the social dynamics of
The Legions of Fire
. A servant in Victorian England might lose her position if the mistress became angry. A servant in Rome—or Carce—could lose considerably more.

I've had a lot of fun in trying to make a foreign culture accessible to modern readers. The fact that the culture is (pretty much) real and is one of the major underpinnings of Western civilization made my task even more fun.

But I'm not an educator. I'll have succeeded if you readers also have fun with my story.

D
AVE
D
RAKE

www.david-drake.com

T
HE
L
EGIONS OF
F
IRE

C
orylus 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's 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 town house of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Varus's 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 last 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 Third 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 the streets, especially 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.