The Legions of Fire (9 page)

“Not that I've ever seen,” said Corylus. There was harsh certainty in his voice.

“Nor I,” said Alphena. “Brother, you know you didn't have that when you were reading. You were holding your poem!”

“I don't know, then,” Varus said. He closed his left fist over the figurine again. In sudden anger he snarled, “It's mine now, anyway.”

“Varus?” said Corylus in surprise.

Varus winced. “I'm sorry,” he muttered, rubbing his temples with his right fingertips and the knuckles of his left hand. “I have, I guess it's a headache. My head throbs.”

“Brother?” said Alphena. Varus wouldn't meet her eyes. “What did you see? You weren't the person reading at the end, were you?”

“I don't know,” Varus whispered. “I don't know! I saw a dance; I think I remember dancers. But I don't remember anything about it.”

He looked up. “What did I do with my manuscript?” he said. He opened his left hand slightly to peer at the figurine again, apparently making sure that it hadn't changed back into a roll of papyrus. “Did I leave it in the hall?”

“You destroyed it on the dais, Lord Varus,” Pandareus said. “In a very thorough and determined fashion. Why did you do that, do you suppose?”

“I did?” said Varus in amazement. “Why on earth did I do that?” He looked up with a wan smile and added, “I don't suppose much was lost by that. I don't think I'm going to gain fame as a poet.”

Corylus put his hand on his friend's shoulder. Pandareus smiled coldly and said, “Regarding the heroic exploits of Regulus, I agree with your estimate. The lines you sang after you departed from your prepared manuscript, however—those had elements of real power. Did you compose them on the dais?”

“Master, I don't know,” Varus said simply. “I don't have any memory of what happened after I started to read. Except that I think someone was dancing. Maybe I was dancing myself?”

“Not that we in the audience noticed,” said Pandareus.

He pursed his lips, tapping his notebook against the palm of his left hand. “There is a great deal going on,” he said, “and I can see only the surface. From what you boys tell me, you saw even less.”

Varus grimaced; Corylus nodded firm agreement. Both were alert now.

“Therefore, I want both of you to join me tomorrow night at the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter,” Pandareus said. “My friend Priscus—”

“Atilius Priscus?” Varus said in surprise.

“Yes, Senator Priscus,” Pandareus said. “Are you surprised that a mere teacher of rhetoric would claim a respected senator as a friend?”

“No sir, not at all,” Varus mumbled, lowering his eyes again.

“You might well wonder,” the teacher said in a milder tone. “The Senator has a remarkable library. I applied to read his copy of
On the Stars
by Thrice-Learned Hermes. Our acquaintance ripened through a mutual love of scholarship.”

He coughed, then continued. “He's on duty tomorrow. I'll send a messenger to him to expect us at the temple at the beginning of the second watch. You're both agreeable?”

Varus nodded. Corylus grinned and said, “I'm glad somebody has a plan. I don't, and … Master, I'm not a fearful man, I hope. But the dream I had disturbed me.”

“Master Pandareus?” Alphena said. She spoke without the humility the youths, his pupils, put in the title. “Why do you think Priscus will understand the business better than you do? You were there, after all, and he wasn't.”

“I don't think my learned friend
will
understand it,” Pandareus said, allowing his lips to spread in a slight smile. “We won't be visiting him for that. He's one of the commissioners for the sacred rites, however.”

“Oh …,” whispered Corylus, who must have seen what Alphena so far did not.

“Yes, that's right,” said Pandareus, his smile still broader. “Tomorrow night Priscus will have the
Sibylline Books
in his charge.”

A
PAIR OF SERVANTS
at the top of the back stairs gaped as Hedia stepped quickly toward them. She was forcing herself to keep a ladylike demeanor and not to skip steps.

“Where's your master?” she snapped. The servants didn't speak, but one nodded toward the suite behind him. His Adam's apple bobbed.

There hadn't been much doubt in her mind. When Saxa was badly pressed, he fled to his private apartment at the rear of the second floor. That had been an inviolate sanctum in the years before he had remarried.

Hedia found herself smiling as she swept past the servants. She wasn't sure whether she was more angry than frightened or the other way around, but she was quite sure that she and her husband were going to discuss what had happened today. Propriety and wifely subservience be
damned
.

The door to the suite was closed—but not barred, which was good. Hedia flung it open and strode inside. If necessary she would have brought the porters to batter the panel down with the poles from the sedan chair.

Half a dozen body servants fluttered at her entry. They were pretending to be busy and also pretending not to be staring at their furious mistress.

Hedia made a quick shooing motion as though she were flicking something unpleasant from her fingers. “Get out,” she said to the servants collectively. She didn't raise her voice. “Close the door behind you.”

Saxa stood at the window, his hands gripping the ledge. His pretense was that he was absorbed in the view up slope of the Palatine. Hedia waited till the servants had scuttled out, the last of them banging the door shut, before she said mildly, “Husband, what's going on?”

“Dearest, there are things you can't understand,” Saxa mumbled without turning around. “I'm sorry, but you simply have to trust me.”

The bedroom was decorated as a seascape. The small stones of the mosaic flooring were set in a stylized wave pattern, and water nymphs cavorted with fish-tailed Tritons on the walls. Plaster starfish and crabs were molded into the ceiling coffers.

Hedia rather liked the room, but the decoration puzzled her. Saxa didn't care for the sea; she'd had to press to get him to go with her to Baiae in the Gulf of Puteoli this past spring. Perhaps a previous wife had chosen it for him ….

“I do trust you, dear heart,” she said, putting a hand on her husband's shoulder. He was trembling. “There's no one in the world with a better heart or with greater loyalty to the Emperor.”

That last was for any ears listening at doorways or through the floor with a tumbler to amplify sounds. In truth Saxa probably didn't think about the Emperor twice in a week; he was about as apolitical a man as you would find in the Senate. But the deeper truth beneath that lie was the fact that Saxa
certainly
wasn't involved in a plot.

Not that the truth would matter if somebody laid a complaint. And Juno knew that it wouldn't be hard at all to show the Senator's behavior in a bad light.

“I don't trust your Nemastes at all, though,” Hedia said, letting her anger show in her tone. Saxa had started to relax; now he tensed again. “He's a viper, and he'll bite many people besides you unless you scotch him immediately. But he'll certainly bite you.”

She paused before adding, “And your son. As he did today.”

“Hedia, that's not true!” Saxa said, whirling to face her for the first time. “You don't understand, I tell you. Without Nemastes' efforts, we're all lost. The world is lost!”

He's not lying,
Hedia thought. She wasn't sure her husband could lie; certainly he couldn't lie successfully to her. But he thought he was telling the truth now.

“I understand that Nemastes plays at being a magician,” she said aloud. “How do you think the Emperor will feel if he hears about that, Husband?
And
I understand that the viper you brought into the house with you today caused your son to speak words that terrified everyone who heard him. You
know
that.”

Hedia hadn't waited to question the audience pouring out of the hall, so she didn't have any idea what had happened during Varus's recital. The wealthy freedmen were running as though Parthians galloped behind them with their bows drawn, but she could have stopped one if she'd seen the need to. Oh, yes, she most certainly could.

But their abject fear was all Hedia needed to know. Whatever happened, it hadn't been Varus's unaided doing: the boy didn't have it in him to frighten a mouse from the pantry!

Knowing that Nemastes was in the house, she hadn't had to search far for a villain. She was confident that the blame was deserved in this case, but
she didn't particularly care. A threat to Varus was the best tool she'd been offered for prying her husband away from this dangerous magician, so she would have used it even if she'd thought she was being unfair.

“Nemastes had nothing to do with whatever you're talking about,” Saxa said uncertainly. “He and I were together while the reading was going on.”

“Together doing what?” Hedia snapped. “Tell me, Husband, what was your so-called magician doing? Besides tricking you out of money, I mean, because I know he's robbing you!”

That was a lie. She'd originally believed Nemastes was a charlatan—anybody would have believed that. She became really worried—really frightened—only when she realized that the Hyperborean's magic wasn't just tricks and suggestion.

“No, you're quite wrong, dear one,” Saxa said, sounding relieved. “Master Nemastes hasn't taken a single coin from me. He's a king in his own land, you see.”

Hedia wanted to slap him.
How do you know he's a king, you puling child? Because he told you so?

And yet Saxa wasn't a fool or even unsophisticated in most respects. This was just something that he desperately wanted to believe.

“He pays for his needs with gold that he brought with him,” Saxa continued earnestly. “All I did, dear heart, was introduce him to my own bankers, the brothers Oppius. Because Hyperborean gold isn't coined; it grows in blocks of quartz. But it's pure, the brothers assure me it is. They wouldn't lie to their own cost.”

No, unless they are part of the swindle themselves,
Hedia thought. But she didn't believe that, much as she wished it were true. The Oppii and their ancestors had served the Alphenus family for three generations.

“The money I withdrew isn't for Nemastes,” Saxa said, the first time Hedia had heard about a withdrawal. “I'm renovating the Temple of Tellus at the entrance to the Carinae District. As a public service, you see.”

He tried a smile. “That's why I suggested you and Alphena hold the marriage divination there, you see,” he said. “The chief priest is a freedman named Barritus who owns the laundry on the same block. I knew he'd jump at a chance to do anything for me, since I haven't decided the scale of the renovation yet.”

“Why are you …?” Hedia said, as startled as if Saxa had just announced he was going to retire to his villa in the Campania and spend the rest of his
life as a gentleman farmer. “That is, it's commendable that you're fixing up an ancient temple, Husband. But I hadn't previously noticed signs of your religious inclination.”

“Well, it was Nemastes who made the suggestion,” Saxa said diffidently, watching his wife to see how she took mention of the Hyperborean's name. Hedia didn't react. Even in the silence of her mind, she filed the fact and waited till she had more information.

Saxa cleared his throat and continued. “He believes it's important to the coming struggle that Carce's most ancient temple of Tellus, Mother Earth, be renovated. Because he's a foreigner, he would have to ask permission of the Senate to carry out the repairs in his own name.”

“Ah,” said Hedia. “I see.”

Applying to the Senate—which meant to the Emperor—would call attention to the Hyperborean and to his patron, Gaius Alphenus Saxa. Hedia certainly didn't want that to happen, but the fact that Nemastes was trying to avoid it also was very disquieting.

“We're going to store the objects that have been given to the goddess over the years here,” Saxa said. “In the back garden. There'll be some wagons coming by shortly. Bringing things for safekeeping, you see; there are some quite valuable dedications, though mostly from a number of years ago.”

Hedia felt an aching fear.
If I could name what I was afraid of, it wouldn't be so bad
.
But now
—

Saxa swallowed. His face had briefly been animated as he talked about the antiquities which he so loved. It went waxen again and he turned away.

Seeming to gather strength from an image of Neptune blowing on a conch with a pair of Nereids, fish-tailed and bare-breasted, supporting him, he said, “My dear, you don't know what I have seen.
Seen
. Yes, in a vision, but it was
real
. It was—”

His hands lifted as though he were trying to squeeze an image into life.

“I saw fire,” he whispered. The words sounded like dry leaves rustling. “I saw fire rushing across the whole world. Everything burning, everything dying in fire, and the fire god was laughing as he watched.”

Hedia licked her lips, then embraced him. She hugged herself close, but Saxa didn't respond except to wriggle like a hooked fish.

“Husband,” she pleaded.

“Please, dear,” Saxa muttered to the wall. “Things will come out right. You have to trust me.”

She stepped away and wrapped her arms around herself instead. She was cold with fear—not for the mythical fire, but from the certainty that Nemastes had caught her husband in a net she could not break him free of.

“You will do as you please, Husband,” Hedia said. “I only hope that you come to your senses in time to, to …”

To escape the Emperor's torturers,
but even in this awful moment she couldn't bring herself to say that.