The Legions of Fire (60 page)

Varus straightened. “You didn't put us in danger, my Teacher,” he said formally. “And speaking for myself …”

He took a deep breath. For a moment he felt as though he were again breathing the clear cold air of the clouds above the island of the Twelve.

“Master Pandareus,” Varus said. “The cosmos is wide and more accessible than philosophers would have us believe. The education and intellectual rigor which you work to instill in your students fitted me to act in that cosmos and to return to my home.”

Instead of answering immediately, Pandareus looked about the hall. Corylus and his servant were walking toward the door. Corylus caught Varus's eye and raised an eyebrow; Varus nodded his friend on. They would meet tomorrow to discuss this, but not now. At the moment Varus wasn't in shape to talk more about what had happened.

Hedia and Alphena stood side by side, holding hands. Each reached across the other placing right hand in left, so that their arms were interlaced. Their apparent closeness was as much a surprise as any of the other things which Varus had seen since the afternoon of his poetry reading.

The women would probably like to leave also, but Saxa was speaking forcefully to Sempronius Tardus, who as commissioner tonight was in charge of the temple. Saxa appeared to be blaming his fellow senator for what had happened. He couldn't really believe what he was saying—Nemastes was scarcely the fault of Tardus—but it was a better direction in which to turn thoughts than a more truthful one. This would all be hushed up quickly, by the commissioners for sacred rites and by the unanimous Senate.

Varus smiled. It was a pleasure to watch his father dealing ably with a crisis. There were more ways to protect Carce than to stand in the middle of the Tiber bridge, facing the massed Etruscan armies.

“Teacher?” Varus said, since Pandareus still hadn't spoken.

Pandareus met his gaze again. “I've never doubted that there were many things in this world which I didn't and couldn't understand,” he said. His smile was wistful but still a real smile. “However I didn't expect so many of them to be”—he gestured with both hands—“so close to me, so to speak.”

“Yes, master,” Varus said. “But education allows us to meet the unknown and deal with it.”

“Education and also courage, I would add,” Pandareus said. “But you citizens of Carce have never lacked for courage, have you?”

He sighed, then smiled broadly. “In any case, I certainly hope that you're correct about being able to deal with the unknown. Because the star chart Menre showed me also indicated that something is approaching us from the waters to the west. And it is no more our friend than Nemastes was.”

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Available in November 2015 by Tom Doherty Associates

A “Tor Hardcover” ISBN 978-0-7653-2081-0

Copyright   2015 by David Drake

Help us, Mother Matuta
,” chanted Hedia as she danced sunwise in a circle with eleven women of the district. The priest Doclianus stood beside the altar in the center. It was of black local stones, crudely squared and laid without mortar—what you'd expect, forty miles from Carce and in the middle of nowhere.

“Help us, bringer of brightness! Help us, bringer of warmth!”

Hedia sniffed. Though the pre-dawn sky was light, it certainly hadn't brought warmth.

The dance required that she turn around as she circled. Her long tunic was cinched up to free her legs, and she was barefoot.

She felt like a complete and utter fool. The way the woman immediately following in the circle—the wife of an estate manager—kept stepping on her with feet as horny as horse hooves tipped Hedia's embarrassment very close to fury.

“Let no harm or danger, Mother, menace our people!”

The things I do to be a good mother,
Hedia thought. Not that she'd had any children herself—she had much better uses for her body than to ruin it with childbirth!—but her current husband, Gaius Alphenus Saxa, had a seventeen-year-old son, Gaius Alphenus Varus, and a daughter, Alphena, a year younger.

A daughter that age would have been a trial for any mother, let alone a stepmother of twenty-three like Hedia. Alphena was a tomboy who had been allowed to dictate to the rest of the household until Saxa married his young third wife.

Nobody
dictated to Hedia, and certainly not a slip of a girl who liked to
dress up in gladiator's armor and whack at a post with a weighted sword. There had been some heated exchanges between mother and daughter before Alphena learned that she wasn't going to win by screaming threats anymore. Hedia was just as willing as her daughter to have a scene, and she'd been threatened too often by furious male lovers to worry about a girl with a taste for drama.

“
Be satisfied with us, Mother of Brightness!
” Hedia chanted, and the stupid
cow
stepped on her foot again.

A sudden memory flashed before Hedia and dissolved her anger so thoroughly that she would have burst out laughing if she hadn't caught herself. Laughter would have disrupted the ceremony as badly as if she had turned and slapped her clumsy neighbor.

I've been in similar circumstances while wearing a lot less,
Hedia thought.
But I'd been drinking and the men were drunk, so until the next morning none of us really noticed how many bruises we were accumulating.

Hedia wasn't sure that she'd do it all again; the three years since that party hadn't turned her into a Vestal Virgin, but she'd learned discrimination. Still, she was very glad for the memory on this chill June morning.

“Help us, Mother Matuta! Help us! Help us!”

After the third “Help us,” Hedia faced the altar and jumped in the air as the priest had told her to do. The other dancers carried out some variation of that. Some jumped sooner, some leaped forward instead of remaining in place as they were supposed to, and the estate manager's wife outdid herself by tripping and pitching headfirst toward the altar.

It would serve her right if she knocked her few brains out!
Hedia thought; but that wasn't true. Being clumsy and stupid wasn't really worthy of execution. Not
quite
.

The flutist who had been blowing time for the dance on a double pipe halted. He bowed to the crowd as though he were performing in the theater, as he generally did. Normally the timekeeper would have been a rustic clapping sticks together or perhaps blowing a panpipe. Hedia had hired Daphnis, the current toast of Carce, for the task.

Daphnis had agreed to perform because Hedia was the wife of a senator and the current Governor of Lusitania—where his duties were being carried out by a competent administrator who needed the money and didn't mind traveling to the Atlantic edge of Iberia. Saxa, though one of the richest men in the Republic, was completely disinterested in the power his wealth might
have given him. His wife, however, had a reputation for expecting people to do as she asked and for punishing those who chose to do otherwise.

The priest Doclianus, a former slave, dropped a pinch of frankincense into the fire on the altar. “Accept this gift from Lady Hedia and your other worshipers, Mother Matuta,” he said, speaking clearly but with a Celtic accent. “Bless us and our crops for the coming year.”

“Bless us, Mother!” the crowd mumbled, closing the ceremony.

Hedia let out her breath. Syra, her chief maid, ran to her ahead of a pair of male servants holding their mistress' shoes. “Lean on me, Your Ladyship!” Syra said, stepping close. Hedia put an arm around her shoulders and lifted one foot at a time.

The men wiped Hedia's feet with silken cloths before slipping the shoes on expertly. They were body servants brought to Polymartium for this purpose, not the sturdier men who escorted Lady Hedia through the streets of Carce as well as outside the city, lest any common person touch her.

The whole purpose of Hedia's present visit to the country was to demonstrate that she was part of the ancient rustic religion of Carce.
The things I do as a mother's duty!
she repeated silently.

Varus joined her, slipping his bronze stylus away into its loop on the notebook of waxed boards on which he had been jotting notes. He seemed an ordinary young man, handsome enough—Hedia always noticed a man's looks—not an athlete, but not soft, either. A glance didn't suggest how extremely learned Varus was despite his youth, nor that he was extremely intelligent.

“The reference to me,” Hedia said, “wasn't part of the ceremony as Doclianus had explained it. I suppose he added it on the spur of the moment.”

“I've already made a note of the usage,” Varus said, tapping his notebook in acknowledgment. “From my reading, it appears that a blood sacrifice—a pigeon or a kid—would have been made in former times, but of course imported incense would have been impossibly expensive for rural districts like this. I don't think the form of the offering matters in a rite of this sort, do you? As it might if the ceremony was for Mars as god of war.”

“I'll bow to your expertise,” Hedia said drily. There were scholars who were qualified to discuss questions of that sort with Varus—his teacher, Pandareus of Athens, and his friend, Publius Corylus, among them; but as best Hedia could see, even they seemed to defer to her son when he spoke on a subject he had studied.

When she married Saxa Hedia had expected trouble with the daughter. It was a surprise that both the children's mother and Saxa's second wife, the mother's sister, had ignored their responsibilities so completely—letting a noblewoman play at being a gladiator!—but it was nothing Hedia couldn't handle.

Varus, however, had been completely outside Hedia's experience. The boy wasn't a drunk, a rake, or a mincing aesthete as so many of his age and station were. Hedia's first husband, Gaius Calpurnius Latus, had been all three of those things and a nasty piece of work besides.

Whereas Varus was a philosopher, a pleasant enough fellow who preferred books to people. That was almost as unseemly for the son of a wealthy senator as Alphena's sword fighting was. Philosophy tended to make people question the legitimacy of the government. The Emperor, who
was
that government, had every intention of dying in bed, because all those who had questioned his right to rule had been executed in prison.

Even worse, Varus had set his heart on becoming a great poet. Hedia was no judge of poetry—Homer and Vergil were simply names to her—but Varus himself was a very good judge, and he had embarrassed himself horribly with the disaster of his own public reading. Indeed, Hedia would have been worried that embarrassment might have led to suicide—Varus was a
very
serious youth—had not a magic disrupted the reading and the world itself.

In the aftermath, Varus had given up composing poetry and was instead compiling information on the ancient religion of Carce, an equally pointless exercise, in Hedia's mind, but one he appeared to have a talent for. This shrine was on the land from which the Hedia family had sprung, and they had been the ceremony's patron for centuries. Her only personal acquaintance with the rite had come when an aunt had brought her here as an eight-year-old.

Hedia had volunteered to bring Varus to the ceremony from a sense of duty. His enthusiastic thanks had shown her that she had done the right thing. Doing your duty was
always
the right thing.

“Oh, Your Ladyship!” cried a stocky woman rushing toward them. Minimus, a big Galatian in Hedia's escort, moved to block her, but the woman evaded him by throwing herself prostrate at Hedia's feet. “It was such an honor to dance with you. You dance like a butterfly, like gossamer in the sunshine!”

Light dawned: the estate manager's wife. The heavy-footed cow.

“Arise, my good woman,” Hedia said, sounding as though she meant it.
She had learned sincerity by telling men what wonderful lovers they were. “It was a pleasure for me to join my sisters here in Polymartium in greeting the goddess on her feast day.”