by Vox Day
“Dictator, dictator!” The cry went up from various points around the Forum. “Corvus dictator!”
Severa felt Sextus wince, but his uncle was quick to nip the chant in the bud.
“You need no dictator, men of Amorr! Your laws are sound. Your walls are strong. Your will is certain. And your leaders are one! We stand at the crossroads. We must choose. Our erstwhile allies have made demands of us, men of Amorr, demands of you and of our sacred city. With insolence they demand their liberty. With threats they demand you grant them the very citizenship you possess. Shall we submit to their demands, men of Amorr? Shall we give them a voice in our governance? What say you?”
“No!” The very tiles beneath her feet seemed to shake with the thunder of the twenty-six tribes.
“Shall we answer them with words or shall we answer them with war? Tell me three times!”
“War! War! War!”
“Then so shall I advise the Senate tomorrow. Do not fear, men of Amorr. Some of us will bleed, and some of us will die, but as our forefathers defeated the Maruvii and the Salventii, so we shall defeat them once more!”
The crowd roared their approval of the three consuls standing together in their armor, displaying their united resolve and readiness to lead the city into war. Most of the members of the Senate who would be voting on the response to the allies were present in the crowd, shouting in enthusiastic chorus with the vulgar citizenry, so it was already clear that a Senatorial vote in favor of a belligerent reply was all but a certainty.
Sextus was not shouting, Severa saw. He was staring at his uncle in something akin to awe. She understood. All her life, she had found it almost impossible to balance her firsthand knowledge of her loving, if formidable, papa with the powerful, arrogant, and sometimes feared figure of the princeps senatus of whom she heard others speak. Sextus had certainly heard others talk about Corvus, the victorious general and battle-hardened leader of men, but this was probably the first time he had ever witnessed his uncle in this light.
Had Corvus ever been like Sextus? They had both been lost in the shadow of the same man—would the effort involved in stepping out of it and becoming his own man affect Sextus in the same way? Was the cost too great? She found it hard to picture her handsome, nonchalant fiance executing anyone or standing before the Forum in battered armor, exhorting men to bloodshed and war. What would such a transformation do to their marriage? What grief would it bring her?
She shivered, even as the gathered voices of the angry men of Amorr crescendoed around her. To her, they sounded like wolves howling a fateful warning.
AULAN
The Via Epra was a much more grim and depressing sight than it had been when Aulan and his men had ridden it toward the city only a month earlier. This time, they could seldom progress from one milestone to the next without encountering the huddled mass of a corpse, the well-stripped remnants of a cart, or a rudimentary memorial indicating a burial alongside the road.
The snow from the recent storm had already retreated to the distant heights, but fortunately the winter weather remained cold enough to prevent their journey from descending into a stinking miasma of rot and decay. If the remains of their passing were a reliable guide, the exodus of the provincials from Amorr had been a brutal one.
Aulan heard Magnus sigh as they passed yet another pair of unburied bodies, one of them tragically small. Against his expectations, he’d come to respect his father’s old enemy and even understand why the man had been elected consul a remarkable four times, twice for the Eagles and twice for the Legions. The Valerian possessed a commanding presence that had won over Aulan’s men almost from the moment he’d met them outside the outer walls, and the decisive manner with which he’d announced his intentions had made obedience seem the natural choice. Even when those intentions had turned out to be entirely different than Aulan was expecting.
“Legio VII is in the winter castra near Aviglianus. We’ll see how matters stand with them, then continue north and round up Legios XV. It’s a pity we can’t be sure of XVII. No one knows where my blasted nephew has taken it.”
“If Vallyria is in arms, do you think two legions will be enough to suppress it?” Aulan asked him as they left the bodies behind. At first, it had bothered Aulan to ride past the corpses of the poor unfortunates and leave them unburied, but he’d eventually gotten used to it.
“Suppress it?” Magnus laughed. He was a big-bellied man, and his laugh was as hearty as his appetite. “Don’t be mistaken, Aulus Severus: Vallyria is already in revolt. And I don’t intend to suppress it—I intend to lead it!”
Aulan wondered if he’d heard the ex-consul correctly. “Lead a revolt against the Senate and People?”
“Against who else? Everything changed when your father was murdered, Aulan. An amount of violence and so forth surrounding the elections is nothing new, of course, and senators have been passing laws to trip up their rivals and bringing petty prosecutions to force their enemies out of the game for centuries. But killing an ex-consul? Assassinating the princeps senatus in the public at his own daughter’s betrothal? This is not politics—it is monstrous.”
“Then why do we not strike back in the same manner? How can we turn on the Senate and People?”
Magnus shook his head. “The Senate and People? What are they but the remnants of a mythical past? Your father was a great man. He was the first to see that change was upon us, and he did his best to bring it about peacefully. I wish to the Inviolate that I had seen what he saw sooner myself. I should have helped him, not led the fight against him! It is one of my great regrets that I did not come to see things his way until it was too late. Who knows? Perhaps together we might have averted this war. But he always knew that his efforts might fail, and so he also made alternative arrangements.”
“Such as what?”
“Before the new year, your brother Regulus left to take control of Legio III and Fulgetra, and he has done so as Dux Salventum. I am months, if not years, behind your father, and I’m not even certain I’ll be able to take control of all three Valerian legions.”
“Regulus is with our legions? That’s where he’s been?”
“That’s where he is.”
They rode in silence after that. Magnus had given him much upon which to think, and Aulan was wondering if he should believe the Valerian, or order his men to strike him down and ride with all due haste to the Senate instead.
He glanced at Lucarus. He was pretty sure that none of the men would protest if they were ordered to kill an ex-consul, as most of the knights in the squadron had about as much use for the Amorran Senate and its dignitaries as they did for the dead refugees on the side of the road. Even if they wouldn’t accept such an order, it wouldn’t occur to them to stand in his way.
Magnus noticed the look. “Before you do anything rash, Aulus Severus, I should very much encourage you to consider the matter more deeply. Think, lad! Why would I have asked for you, in particular, and why would your father have encouraged me to take you on as a tribune, if he was opposed to my plans?”
Aulan thought about it. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “Why?”
“These are treacherous times, lad. Civil wars are ugly. Brothers turn against brothers and sons against their fathers. But I suspect a son of House Severus is the very last man with whom the men of my House legions would conspire. I can trust you and your men in a way I won’t be able to trust any of my other officers.”
“That’s a risky wager, old man.” Aulan jerked his thumb back at Lucarus. “We’re a long way from civilization. What is to prevent me from killing you now and bringing the Senate your head? Once he hears what you’ve done, your brother Corvus would probably pay your weight in gold for it.”
“Not a damned thing, Aulus Severus, not a damned thing.” Magnus surprised him by looking off into the distance and smiling. “I can’t even tell you I would object, to be honest. You lost your father, true. But believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more
dreadful than losing a son. The pain…a part of you dies with him. My wife…well, you’re young, so that’s of no concern to you. But nothing will bring Gaius Valerius back, and regardless of what you decide, someone is going to have to command those legions. And the Senatorial consensus seems to be that I have a knack for it.”
For some reason, Magnus’s fey words caused a lump to arise in Aulan’s throat. He concealed it by hawking a few times and spitting. Then he looked over at the man and thumped his chest. “Speaking as one of your tribunes, my lord dux, I hope you are considerably more concerned with your men’s lives than you are with your own.”
Magnus smiled at that, but his eyes glistened with unshed tears. “I hope so too, lad. I hope so too.”
The Old Man, as Aulan and the others had taken to calling him, was tough enough to allow them to keep a fast pace, so they reached Aviglianus only six days after leaving Amorr. That afternoon, bathed and slightly intoxicated thanks to the liberality of Magnus’s purse, they came within site of the castra where Legio VII was spending the winter.
That the legion was in revolt was not in question, as their armor aroused suspicion until Aulan convinced the suspicious bath attendants that they were cavalry from Legio VII on their way back from a scouting mission south. But it was still startling to see that the Amorran flag missing from the gates of the castra. In its place was the white civic flag of Vallyria.
“That settles that,” Magnus commented as they took in the sight of the gates. “It appears the noble Didius Scato has cast his lot in with the rebels. That is a relief.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I should hate to lose his talents simply because he isn’t a Vallyrian. There is a secret to being a successful stragister, Tribune, and that is to have good legates willing to execute your orders properly. Many a solid strategist has lost a battle or even a war due to inept or insubordinate tacticians.”
“And you think he’ll hand the command over to you?”
Magnus looked surprised, as if the thought of any other possibility had never occurred to him. “Of course he will! Why on Earth would he not?”
Aulan could think of a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with the idea that an army of rebel provincials would probably be disinclined to follow the orders of one of the most powerful members of the Senate against which they were rebelling. But then, it was also an army led by men with whom Magnus had fought and bled for years, if not decades. He gritted his teeth and decided to follow the Valerian’s lead. Still, on the off-chance that the ex-consul might have gotten it wrong, he ordered Lucarus to keep the legionary standard stowed as they approached the southern gate.
The two pairs of guards manning scorpios mounted above the gate on either side stared down at them in a remarkably unfriendly manner. Aulan wouldn’t have minded their apparent hostility so much were it not for the fact that one of the large bolt-heads was pointed in the general vicinity of his chest.
The watch officer, an optio who looked old enough to have retired five years ago, was staring too, but with an expression of disbelief.
“Lord Valerius, is that you?”
“I believe ‘Who goes there?’ is the appropriate question, Liberius Murillo. Have the centurions gotten slack in my absence?”
The optio grinned, clearly pleased at having been recognized. “As you like, my lord. Who goes there?”
“You know damn well who it is, Optio! No wonder you still haven’t made centurion, you slack-witted bastard. Now go and tell Scato to get his ugly face out here post-haste!”
“At once, my lord!” The optio saluted, still grinning, and disappeared from the battlements.
A moment later, to Aulan’s relief, the two scorpios swiveled forty-five degrees in opposite directions.
It wasn’t long before the gates began to swing open, revealing a tall, cadaverous legate whose only sign of office was the crimson cape bound at his throat with a golden clasp. He was a man of about sixty. Had he carried a scythe in his hand, he could have easily passed for an incarnation of Death. Behind him tramped four contubernia, fully armored, who spread out behind him on both sides when he stopped in front of Magnus.
“My lord Valerius,” the legate addressed Magnus in a neutral manner. “I am surprised to see you here.”
Magnus grunted as he dismounted, a little heavily, and nodded. “Yes, I suppose you might be. This is my tribune, Aulus Severus Aulan. I see that you have made a few changes around here. Does that include your sworn allegiance to House Valerius?”
Scato raised his eyebrows at hearing the name Severus, but refrained from inquiring. “Tribune,” he politely acknowledged Aulan before returning his attention to Magnus. “You pose an interesting question that inspires one of its own, my lord. Is House Valerius still beholden to the Senatus Populusque Amorrus, or does it stand with the people of Vallyria?”
Magnus nodded slowly and reached under his cloak, exposing a leather pouch suspended from his shoulder. From it, he withdrew a scroll and offered it to Scato. “This should answer your question for you, Legate.”
The tall man looked suspiciously from Magnus to the scroll, then took it and unrolled it. He seemed to grasp the contents in a glance, as he rolled it up again and handed it back to Magnus almost immediately.
“All of them?” he asked a little incredulously.
“All of them,” Magnus confirmed. “Barring the Faliscan cities. We should be able to announce a second league, in alliance with the Marruvian league, before the end of the month. The Quinqueterrans are still being difficult, but I expect they will fall in line as soon as Galabrus and Tarquinia publicly declare they are with us.”
“My lord, I am astonished!” Scato shook his head. “Delighted, but mostly astonished. I will confess, I had some trepidations about the wisdom of facing you in the field. Is Corvus with us too?”
“No. I expect he’ll be leading whatever forces remain to the Senate.” Magnus smiled thinly. “We need not fear my little brother, however. He has his talents, but he has never been a match for me, in the field or anywhere else. In any event, he’ll be occupied with raising new legions from the detritus of the city to replace those that have come over to us. The Senate will be in no position to take the offensive until the late spring at the absolute earliest. If we leave it up to Corvus, it will be a summer of battles.”
“Very well, my lord.” Scato reached up and unclasped his legate’s cloak. “With your permission, Magnus, I will return Legio VII to your direct command and request that you release me from my vow of loyalty to your House.”
For the first time, Magnus looked surprised, even a little dismayed. “You do not intend to join Corvus, Titus Didius?”
“No, my lord. Caelignus has risen and my place is there, with the city of my birth. The Caelignesi will need an experienced general, as I expect House Gaerus will side with the Senate. And my lord, I suggest I can serve you better—serve the Utruccan cause better—if you can operate in the confidence that your allies are competently led.”
Scato was probably right, Aulan thought, not that Magnus was likely to need his advice. A big handicap faced by the newly allied cities was the fact that even in the legions where they made up most of the soldiery, the staff officers were largely Amorran. Unless the House that ruled over them also turned against the Senate, the legions they raised would not have experienced legates to general them. Aulan was no historian, but even he knew that in most battles, it wasn’t usually the side with the larger numbers that won, but the side with the better generals.
“As you wish, Titus Didius.” But Magnus rejected the cloak. “Keep it, and your helmet too. Tell the elders of Caelignus that if they won’t accept you as their stragister militum and trust you with their legions, I’ll gladly have you back and give you one of mine. And in my capacity as the head of House Valerius and Dux Vallyria, I release you from your vow.”
The two men shook hands warmly, and if the Old Man was disappointed at losing one of his senior o
fficers, Aulan thought he hid it manfully.
The Caelignian seemed relieved, so much so that he was almost babbling as he invited Magnus and his men to enter the castra while simultaneously providing the ex-consul with a status report.
“I think you’ll find the men are in fine fettle, my lord, as I instructed the centurions to keep to the usual training schedule, with particular attention to the unit manuevers. With such uncertainty, we can’t be sure they won’t have to go into battle sooner this spring than usual.
“The supply situation is excellent, and I’ve been in regular contact with Gerontius, as he’s been wintering Legio XV in Montmila. However, I did receive a curious letter from him just two days ago, which may be good news. It seems Legio XVII has withdrawn from Cynothicum. They passed through Larinum, and I believe they are coming south to join us. That will put all three House legions at your disposal for the spring.”
“Yes, you would think so,” Magnus said, a little sourly. “Unfortunately, Marcus Saturnius is dead, and I’ve heard my nephew, the little priestling, is in command. He’s a bright lad, so perhaps he caught wind of the general rebellion and had the good sense to retreat here before he got himself surrounded. On the other hand, if he’s as stubborn and self-righteous as his father, we may have to give him a proper spanking before we can take the legion from him.”
“Won’t he just turn it over to you as the head of the House?” Aulan couldn’t help asking.
Magnus snorted. “With Corvus in the field every year, that boy practically grew up in my domus. I’ll be damned if he didn’t read every bloody philosopher and sophist who ever came up with a way to prove a black cat was truly white. Don’t be surprised if he talks me into handing over my legions to him and returning to the Senate to confess my sins and beg its pardon.”
