The Legions of Fire

by David Drake

  Lenatus rose from the cabinet he had opened, holding two faience mugs and a pear-shaped glass jug. He unstoppered the wine and poured some into the mug that he offered to Alphena.

  “She’s all right,” Pulto said as he stepped away. He was speaking to Lenatus. “Look, Your Ladyship, I’m sorry I caught you so hard, but I figured you had to learn.”

  “I don’t feel all right,” Alphena muttered. She drank, spluttering as some of the wine went down the wrong throat.

  “You want some water with that?” Lenatus said. “I didn’t think …”

  Then he said, “Your Ladyship, it’s my fault. You’re not a recruit, and we shouldn’t have treated you like one.”

  “If anybody’s going to the cross for this one, it’s me!” Pulto growled. “I did it and I’ll take the punishment.”

  “Stop it, both of you!” Alphena said. “Nobody did wrong except me. I thought I was good and I wasn’t. If anybody asks, I slipped when I was practicing on the post—”

  She gestured.

  “—and hit my head on this bench.”

  She took a deep breath, then finished the wine. “And the wine’s fine, I don’t need to water it,” she said. “I just drank the wrong way.”

  “Thank you, Your Ladyship,” Lenatus said. He looked the other way.

  “Yeah, from me too,” Pulto said.

  “Lady, you really are good,” he went on. He squatted instead of sitting beside her on the bench. “You’re as quick as I’ve seen in a while, and you’ve got a lot of strength for a girl.”

  “Bloody Death, she’s strong enough for anybody!” Lenatus said, rubbing his hip gingerly.

  “What you don’t have yet is thirty years’ practice killing people,” Pulto said. “One of these days you’re going to meet somebody who does and who isn’t using a wood sword. From what I’m told, you’re likely to be closing the left side of my boy Corylus when that happens. So I don’t want it to happen.”

  Lenatus poured her more wine. Alphena looked at him and said, “Lenatus, have you been going easy with me?”

  She spoke calmly, but the implications were threatening even if the tone wasn’t. Pulto stepped verbally between his friend and the noblewoman, saying, “Naw, he wasn’t coddling you. I watched, remember? But you’re used to him, and you’re not used to me.”

  He grinned and stretched out his right arm. “I got more reach than Marcus, here, and besides—”

  Lenatus was grinning also, expecting what was coming.

  “—I figured you wouldn’t be playing your top game against a fat old man. And I was right.”

  Alphena burst out laughing. “Yes, you were right,” she said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  She sobered and looked squarely at Pulto. “But I’ll make others, which I hope you’ll help train me out of, Master Pulto. If Publius Corylus permits it, that is.”

  “Well, you see how your mother feels about that and I’ll talk to Master Corylus,” Pulto said, sounding ill at ease. He was still thinking about what his training exercise—his little joke, really—might have led to.

  Alphena felt a pang. It would have been unjust for her to punish the two veterans for doing what she had dared them to do, but the person she had been six months ago might have done so in a blind rage.

  Hedia wasn’t interested in making Alphena “nice,” but she did want her to be effective. The older woman had repeatedly demonstrated that out-of-control people weren’t effective, and her contempt for failure was more cutting than anger could have been.

  “Say, what are you doing here today?” Lenatus said, offering Pulto the other mug. “Lord Varus is off to some shrine in the north with Her Ladyship, isn’t he?”

  Pulto tossed off the wine and handed back the mug. “Wouldn’t mind another,” he said. “I didn’t half get a dry throat there.”

  “Sorry,” Alphena said into her mug.

  “I’m just here with Master Corylus,” Pulto said without seeming to notice the apology. “He come to see the senator.”

  “He’s looking for a posting to a governor’s staff?” Lenatus said. “Say, will you be going off with him?”

  “No, it’s the senator wants to see him,” Pulto said. “Don’t ask me why, because the boy didn’t have any notion himself. It must’ve been good from the way the senator led him into the office, which was a load off my mind and no mistake.”

  The gymnasium door opened again. Pulto turned his head and said, “Come on in, young master. And if you don’t mind sharing a mug with me, Lenatus here has some bloody good wine to drink!”

  WHEN VARUS STARTED toward the Indian delegation, Minimus began to swagger along with him. “Stop,” Varus said, halting. “Minimus, go back to Lady Hedia and remain with her until she orders you to move.”

  The big slave blinked as though he didn’t understand the simple Greek. Varus realized that was possible, but it was more likely that Minimus didn’t understand the concept of a chief wanting to meet strangers without a threatening entourage at his back. Furthermore, Varus hadn’t shouted at him the way a chief was expected to do when he corrected a warrior.

  “Go back to Lady Hedia,” Varus repeated, still without raising his voice. It was very hard to keep one’s philosophical calm when people listened to a speaker’s tone and volume instead of the words he was speaking.

  Minimus blinked again. “Yes, Lord Varus,” he said reluctantly as he turned away.

  To make sure that his would-be protector hadn’t changed his mind, Varus watched for a moment then resumed walking toward the Indians. The gardeners were backfilling around the vine they had planted. To Varus’ surprise, the old man stepped away from the delegation and came toward him.

  “Good day, revered sir,” the old man said in good Greek. “I am Bhiku, in the service of the Rajah Raguram and his master, King Govinda. May I ask what brings a magician of your eminence to this place?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Varus said, startled into saying the first words that came to his mind. “I am Gaius Alphenus Varus. Who told you I was a magician?”

  Close-up the Indian was even older than he had seemed at a distance. He was barefoot, and his only garment was a thin cotton singlet that had been washed so often that it was almost translucent now. Varus could see Bhiku’s ribs through the fabric.

  The old man glanced down and chuckled. “I look like a victim after the sacrifice, don’t I?” he said, plucking the singlet out from his scrawny chest. “Nothing left of me but the tongue and the guts. But as for you being a magician, Gaius Varus—”

  Bhiku looked Varus in the face. His own brown eyes were bright and alert.

  “—I am in a small way a magician also, a very small way compared to you. But I see you for what you are, as surely as I could see a burning village if I were standing beside it.”

  “I, ah …,” Varus said. Memories stirred in his mind, demons and monsters and perhaps gods whom someone had seen and things that someone had done. The person seeing had been Gaius Alphenus Varus, and the person working the terrible magic had been that Gaius Varus also … but—

  “That wasn’t me!” Varus said, snarling at himself rather than at the little man before him. Bhiku gave no sign of having heard, save by an almost invisible twitch of his right eye.

  “I’m sorry, Master Bhiku,” Varus said. “I think of myself as a scholar, a philosopher if you will. Things have happened in my presence that I could not explain better than as manifestations of magic, but I have no conscious power over such things. I don’t, I certainly do not, hold myself out as a magician.”

  For the most part, the members of the Indian delegation were ignoring Bhiku and Varus. The three richly dressed Indians looked profoundly bored. They stood apart from their own subordinates as well as from the half-dozen members of Sentius’ household under the direction of an understeward.

  The exception was the woman, who watched Varus intently. Her skin was as dark as aged oak and contrasted sharply with her white garment. She had no wrink
les or visible blemishes.

  Varus started to break eye contact with the strange woman, but he caught himself before his muscles obeyed the thought. I am a citizen of Carce, he thought. Why should I allow myself to be cowed by a stranger while standing in the ancient lands of my people?

  “Who is the woman, Master Bhiku?” he asked without turning his head. After a moment she walked toward the pair of gardeners, putting her back to Varus.

  “Our lords’ lord, Govinda,” said Bhiku, “is not a trustful man. He is a great magician as well as the greatest of kings, but his duties prevent him from making the long sea voyage that was required to come here for the first time. Rather than send a magician to carry out the rites he wishes, he sent two of us.”

  Varus felt his face stiffen. “What rites would those be, Master Bhiku?” he said.

  “Govinda wishes the god Bacchus to be summoned to this place,” the old man said agreeably. “You might think that priests rather than magicians would be the proper parties to carry out the rites, but this is not the judgment of my master’s master.”

  Varus grimaced. “I see,” he said. “I don’t set much store by religious rites myself.”

  “In that,” Bhiku said, “you and I are of the same opinion as Govinda.”

  The old man coughed, then continued, “He sent myself and Rupa, whom you asked about, to carry out the rite and to open a passage through the Otherworld by which we and our colleagues will return. Rupa is a member of the household of Ramsa Lal, a rajah subject to Govinda, but Ramsa Lal and Raguram, my master, are on terms just short of war. If indeed war has not broken out in the months since we sailed.”

  The old man smiled. Varus found Bhiku’s personality engaging, though their contact had been too short for him to be able to support his reaction with logic.

  “Govinda thinks that because our masters are rivals,” Bhiku said, “Rupa and I will make sure that the rites are carried out as he wishes.”

  The gardeners were watering the vine from a brass barrel. The container was certainly from India. Varus wondered if the water had been transported also, in furtherance of the “rites” to which Bhiku had referred.

  “You told me what Govinda thinks, Master Bhiku,” Varus said “What is your opinion?”

  Bhiku laughed, a cackle that could have been threatening had it not been for the old man’s cheerful expression. He said, “People rarely ask me what I think. They want to know what I can do for them, only that. But what I think, Gaius Varus, is that I do not need to be threatened to carry out the duties I agreed to do in exchange for my keep.”

  He plucked the thin fabric away from his ribs and grinned like a frog. “Very modest keep,” he said wryly. “And as for Rupa …”

  His eyes followed the woman. She appeared to be examining an outcrop on the slope above the altar.

  “Govinda is a very great magician, beyond any question,” Bhiku said musingly. “But I would not care to guess how powerful Rupa is, or what her real purposes might be. I have heard it said that she is ancient. I am an old man, but it is said that she is older than I am by hundreds of years. To the eye she does not appear old.”

  “She looks,” said Varus, “as though she were made of polished chert. Smooth and so hard that steel could strike sparks from her skin.”

  “Yes,” said Bhiku. They were speaking with lowered voices, though there was no one near them, nor, in all likelihood, anyone who would have cared about what they were saying if they had been shouting. “It may be that her soul is that hard also.”

  Then, in a still softer voice, Bhiku said, “I think that Rupa may be searching for a word that will split this world the way a knife cuts a pat of butter … and that if Rupa should find that word, she will speak it.”

  The gardeners stepped away from the vine shoot. One spoke to the officials. The bearded man in blue made a peremptory gesture toward Bhiku, who bowed in obedience and started toward his fellows.

  He turned as he walked away and said over his shoulder, “It has been a pleasure to meet you, Gaius Varus. I hope that we may meet again.”

  Order Air and Darkness Now!