The Legions of Fire (13 page)

“It looks very nice,” said Alphena to call attention to herself. She'd sent the Spaniard and the other servants down to wait in the street, which showed better judgment than Hedia would have expected.

“My daughter, Lady Alphena,” Hedia said coolly. “I've asked her to accompany me. I trust that is all right?”

“Bless me, your ladyship!” said Anna. “If you want to bring the whole Senate with you, I'm just honored. Though there'd be trouble finding them seats.”

Anna's outfit—a blue tunic, a cape which must've been cut down from an officer's red traveling cloak, and a yellow silk scarf to cover her hair—was neither tasteful nor simple. She wore rings on all her fingers, a mixture of silver and iron washed with gold. She had two necklaces, one of rock crystal and the other of painted terra-cotta manikins each no bigger than a thumbnail. The tiny dolls were individually ugly, but they had an unexpected force as their stubby hands clicked into contact and separated.

Alphena laughed. Anna smiled in a bemused way, but Hedia wasn't sure that she had intended a joke.

Anna touched the yellow scarf, patting it against her bun of hair. The strands that had escaped to the back and sides were frizzy and yellowish gray. “Though your ladyship?” she said to Hedia. “There are subjects that I wouldn't talk about in front of a senator, you know?”

Hedia sniffed. “Not in front of a senator or any other man,” she said. “But we're all girls together here, aren't we?”

Alphena was looking between the older women, her eyes flicking from one to the other. She looked younger when she was confused—as she was now.

Anna chuckled. “Here,” she said, pushing aside the curtain covering the pantry alcove beside the door. She lifted out a bowl of wine which she'd mixed before her guests arrived and set it on the small table in a corner of the room. The circular top was a section of pine trunk, carved and stained to look like expensive desert cedar. “We'll have something to drink while we talk.”

“Are there no servants?” said Hedia, raising an eyebrow toward the folding screen across the doorway to the adjoining room of the suite.

“Bless you, no there's not,” Anna said, bringing out the cups. They and the bowl were of layered glass, colored to look like the expensive murrhine ware turned from a British mineral which the locals called Blue John. “The boy was raised in camp, you see. He's offered to get me some help, but truth is I'd rather handle it myself.”

“But how do you do the shopping?” said Alphena as their hostess filled the cups. It was a tactless question, but it showed the girl had sharp eyes and could think.

Anna chuckled. “Crippled up like I am, you mean?” she said. “Well, that's true enough, but a couple of the girls on the fourth floor take care of that for less than it'd cost to feed a gofer of our own. I've done them a favor or two, you see.”

Love potions,
Hedia thought as she took the offered cup and sat down.
Love potions and herbs to cause abortions; the two went together, after all
.

The two storage chests in the corner had been covered with cushions for use as seats, with the table in the angle between them. There was a proper couch against the outer wall, but even at formal dinner parties women were more likely to sit than to recline on their left side as the men did.

Alphena hesitated; Hedia patted the cushion beside her and gestured Anna to the other chest. Anna settled onto it with a grunt of relief.

Turning her head as though she were looking out the window—there were three pots of herbs on the balcony—Anna said, “That's part of the reason I didn't want another pair of hands in the household, you see. They'd come with a tongue attached, you see, and there's stories enough already. Me being Marsian”—she met the noblewoman's eyes—“and all. Like every
Marsian woman's a witch! Ah, begging your pardon if I've misspoke, your ladyship.”

Hedia laughed. “You haven't, not at all,” she said. “And I think you'd best call me Hedia while it's just the three of us. As I said, we're all girls together here. As for witchcraft—we women can't do things the way men do, so we have to find our own ways.”

She sipped her wine. It was a good enough vintage to have appeared at her husband's table. She looked at Anna over the rim of her cup and raised an eyebrow in question.

The old servant sighed in relief. She drained her cup with less ceremony than wine so good deserved. “Aye, that's so, your ladyship,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “We don't have the strength that men do—”

She grinned at Alphena; Hedia thought for a moment that she might reach out and pinch the girl's cheek. The standards of an army camp were different from those of a noble household.

“—not even you, little one. I've heard about you, sure, but that's not the way. You listen to”—she nodded forcefully toward Hedia—“your mother here. She knows a thing or two, I'll be bound.”

“What I know at the moment …,” said Hedia. Even without the cheek pinch, she thought her stepdaughter might burst like a dead dog. This wasn't the time to laugh at her, though. “Is that Nemastes the Hyperborean is a danger to my husband and our whole family. I presume you've heard about Nemastes?”

Anna snorted. “Not from my man or the boy either,” she said, pouring more wine for herself when her guests waved it off. “But that something was going on, sure. I could smell the magic on them each time they'd been to your house, milady. Though I hate to say it.”

“Smell?” Alphena blurted in amazement. Her cup was raised, but Hedia didn't think the girl had begun to drink. “I don't understand?”

Anna shrugged. “Smell, feeling, call it what you like,” she said. “I don't know how to name it if you haven't noticed it yourself. And you haven't?”

“No, I don't think so,” Hedia said. She placed her empty cup on the table, a little closer to Anna to answer the question the hostess would surely ask. “We've come to you because you know things that we don't, mistress. But we're not in doubt that there's something wrong with Nemastes and whatever he's doing.”

Alphena took a gulp of wine. “He's awful,” she said, glaring at her companions as though they were going to argue with her. “I can tell when he's around because my skin prickles. And when he's looking at me, I feel
slimy
.”

Hedia smiled, though she found the girl's comments—and Anna's knowing glance at her—disquieting. “Well, I've been called insensitive before,” she said. “Nonetheless, I knew something had to be done even before the business yesterday at my son's reading.”

She looked at Alphena. “I wasn't in the hall when it happened,” she said, “but you were, dear. What did you see?”

“I didn't see—,” Alphena began angrily, but she stopped herself. She swallowed, forced a weak smile of apology, and continued in a quiet tone. “I'm not sure what I saw. I thought a painted sphinx flew off the wall. And I thought things were coming up from a pit underneath me.”

She's young, but she's no more flighty than I am. Nevertheless something has frightened her
.

Alphena licked her lips. She seemed more composed now that she'd forced herself to think about what had happened. She said, “There wasn't really a pit. The floor was the same to my feet, I just couldn't see it.”

“If you'd been my daughter, girl …,” Anna said, giving Alphena a look of sharp appraisal.

Hedia bit back a harsh—well, harsher—response and said only, “Which of course she isn't, mistress, she's the daughter of the noble Alphenus Saxa. Whose Hyperborean companion concerns at least me and Alphena.”

“I spoke out of turn, your ladyship,” Anna said, nodding into as close to a bow as she could manage while seated at the table. “Sorry, I'm an old fool who never had a child of her own, you see.”

“Quite all right, my good woman,” Hedia said. The thought of Alphena being brought up as a witch had taken her aback in a very unpleasant fashion. It was bad enough that the girl dressed as a gladiator! “This business is enough to put anyone on edge.”

Anna looked at Alphena again, this time pursing her lips in thought. “You say the floor was still there, child,” she said, “and in this world that must have been so. But there are other worlds than ours, you know. It sounds like this Nemastes was bringing another one close—or maybe closer than that. It's good that it didn't go on beyond what it did.”

“I don't think it was Nemastes,” Alphena said toward the mixing bowl on the table. “I think it was my brother, or something using my brother. He
was saying funny things about fire. And I could see the fire, but—” She lifted her hands, then laid them flat to either side of the cup before her. She still didn't look up. “I don't know how I saw it. Not with my eyes.”

“When Pulto and me got married after his discharge,” Anna said carefully, “I promised him that I wouldn't do anything, you know, serious. A little charm or a potion to help friends, well that's just neighborly.”

She gave her companions a lopsided smile and shrugged. “But after he and the boy come home yesterday—and they didn't tell me a thing except that you might be coming by, your ladyship. But it was all over them, especially the boy, like they'd been rolling in pig shit. Begging your pardon.”

“That's how it felt to me too,” Alphena said. Her smile was real, though faint. “Not that I've ever rolled in pig shit really, but what it seemed like.”

Acting on instinct instead of by plan—and she usually planned things, particularly the things that other people thought were done without thinking—Hedia put her arm around the girl's shoulder and gave her a hug. Then she opened her short cape and removed the little fabric-wrapped object she'd pinned there. She handed it across the table to Anna.

“I would have brought you some of Nemastes' hairs,” she said, “but he's as bald as an egg. His whole body's bare so far as I could see—and I assure you I've seen as much of it as I care to, no matter what you may have heard about me.”

Alphena lifted a shocked hand to her lips. Anna guffawed as she undid the bundle, a twig from the frost-killed pear tree.

“Nemastes—Nemastes and my husband, that is,” explained Hedia, “were in the back garden when this tree was killed. It was the same time when Varus was reading. I think—well, there must be some connection, mustn't there?”

Hedia was uneasily aware that the gymnasium where she'd been talking to the veterans was adjacent to the garden. The masonry wall was high enough to block words unless Saxa and the Hyperborean had been shouting, but she felt that she should have had some inkling if, well, a tree-killing storm had been going on a few feet away.

She hadn't been aware of anything unusual going on during the reading either, not until she listened to the frightened babble of the audience pouring out of the room. She looked from Anna to Alphena and smiled wryly.

Anna held the twig between the tips of her index fingers. She felt Hedia's eyes and looked up.

“I'm apparently not sensitive at all,” Hedia said. “But I suppose I don't need to be, since both of you are.”

Alphena turned to her. “You were sensitive enough to try to stop Nemastes before anybody else did,” the girl said. “That's why we're here. I don't see any use in the way I feel.” She shrugged with her whole body, her face scrunched up. “Slimy. Awful.”

“We've a long way to go before we know what's useful and what isn't,” Hedia said briskly. She turned to Anna and continued. “Will the stick be helpful, mistress?”

This was the first time Alphena had spoken to her in a tone that wasn't either angry or sullen. Hedia didn't dare remark on the fact or she would spoil the moment—the start of an improved relationship, she hoped.

“It may,” Anna said judiciously. She eyed her companions. “It should. It's the full moon tonight. I'll be off to the old graveyard on the Aventine to gather some things I'll need.

“Herbs, you mean, Anna?” Alphena asked.

The older woman looked at Hedia—who kept her face expressionless—and then to the girl. “Things, dear,” she said deliberately. “Some herbs, yes.”

“Oh,” said Alphena. “Oh, I'm s-s …” She turned her head away as her voice trailed off.

“I'll need your help, your ladyship,” Anna said. “Not with my end—I wouldn't ask you for that, of course. But I hope you'll talk to my Pulto. When we were married, like I said, I gave up serious business. He didn't tell me to, but it's what he wanted and I did it. Now, though …?”

“Yes,” said Hedia. “I'll make it clear to your husband that I've asked you to do certain things for me.”

Pulto would accept anything a noble demanded, Hedia knew. If she asked
him
to dig up ancient graves, he would obey. He wouldn't like it, but—her smile was cold—he'd been a soldier. As he'd said, he was used to doing things he didn't like.

“That will be helpful, your ladyship,” Anna said, nodding in relieved approval. “And now, if my ears haven't tricked me—”

The door opened. Corylus strode in, followed by Pulto.

“—I'd say my men were home!”

C
ORYLUS STEPPED TO THE SIDE
as he entered the apartment; if he'd stopped in his tracks he'd have blocked the doorway for Pulto. That was
training, however. His first instinct had been to freeze when he walked in the door talking over his shoulder to his servant and saw Alphena out of the corner of his eye.

“Hercules!” Pulto blurted as he saw the visitors. They'd known that the women would be visiting Anna, but they—or at least Corylus—had put out of their minds the possibility that Hedia and Alphena might still be present when they returned from the Forum.