The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "Then he attacked his fellow churls for not leaving more Danes for him to kill," Vitellan explained.

  "You—you trained him to do that? Can you train my men too?"

  "Berserkers are easy enough to train, but they have limited uses. I have seen a pike-wall of women stop a group of Danish berserkers by fighting intelligently and staying together. I had trained them too, of course." "The women killed them?"

  "They held them back until the archers came and shot the Danes down, but that is not the lesson. The women fought as a team and held together, and a dozen berserkers had to explain some very embarrassing deaths to Wotan, or whoever their underworld's god is supposed to be."

  "Their gods are said to take badly to that sort of death," said Alfred, laughing out aloud. Later that day Vitellan had another attack of cramps in his stomach, and this time he vomited blood. Gentor begged him to move back near his village, so that he could be frozen quickly if his condition worsened. Alfred compromised: they would stay in a small fortified town nine miles from the village, and would discuss Roman methods of warfare until Vitellan either recovered or was carried off to the ice chamber.

  Vitellan had never made a secret of his origins to Alfred or Paeder, although he avoided the subject with everyone else outside his own village. His father had been an officer in the Roman army, and the youth had followed the same career. He had fought in several areas of northern Europe, and was finally posted to the north of Britain where the Caledonians were making sporadic raids. His uncle owned a large estate in the south, and it was while he was on leave and visiting him that he had met Flavia.

  She was the daughter of a minor official, and was captivated by the strong, handsome young soldier who already had a reputation for bravery and was rising fast through the ranks. When he returned to the northern forts they had exchanged passionate letters for two years. Vitellan's uncle had also been impressed by bis brave yet studious nephew, and when the childless fanner had died in a boating accident, the young soldier was found to be named as his sole heir. He returned south to the estate, only to find that Flavia had married a local farmer a year before. Her letters had all been lies. The farmer, Drusus, had the advantage of being a neigh-

  bor of Flavia, and had played up to her vanity while disturbing her with stories of how hard life was for the wife of an officer. If she and Vitellan went to an African garrison the heat would make her skin dry and wrinkled. If they were sent north, the cold would make her face red and frostbitten. Drusus knew that Flavia's worst nightmare was the prospect of losing her beauty. Although the farmer soon won her over, she continued to write her romantic letters to Vitellan because the young soldier was exciting and dashing by comparison. She reassured herself that some hairy Caledonian would probably kill him and resolve her dilemma. Instead he returned alive, and rich . . . and there could be no accounting for her behavior toward him.

  Vitellan bought a release from the army and retired to his estate. At first he could do little more than brood about his lost love. He alternately thought about murdering her or seducing her back from the fat, prosperous yokel who was her husband. It all came to nothing. They were on their guard against him, and their slaves and servants were too loyal to be bribed into letting him near the villa. He searched for distraction in study and in the running of his own estate, but the bitterness remained, eating away inside him.

  A Greek physician named Milos began to treat him for melancholy, and they became friends after some months. The Greek said that he had once worked on an estate high in the Alps, to the north of Verona. The owner had been experimenting with ways of preserving livestock through winter. They were fed an oil made from an extract of insects that could live in the snow. This allowed them to be frozen alive over winter—without the need of costly fodder. Milos had stolen a jar of the oil when he moved on, or so he had said.

  His own experiments were disappointing. The oil was a type of poison, and if the animal survived the treatment and subsequent freezing, its flesh was too toxic to eat after it had been revived. The Greek had continued to tinker with the technique, however, and he showed Vitellan a rabbit that had been revived after five years in a deep cellar on blocks of ice. The rabbit had also survived the effects of the poison because it had been administered in small doses over several weeks.

  Milos had wanted to try the ultimate experiment with the oil by freezing a treated human, but his ethics as a physician prevented him from merely buying a slave and force-feeding the oil to him. Understandably, free Roman citizens expressed no interest in volunteering for such an experiment, and Milos was too fond of life to drink the oil and have someone else freeze him. Vitellan listened to his speculations with interest and sympathy, however. He had been shipwrecked when he was seventeen, and had spent five days in the water before being washed ashore. He had an odd fancy that the cold had suspended his life while he was adrift, preserving him rather than killing him. Milos and what he called his Oil of Frosts seemed to be another version of the same thing as far as Vitellan was concerned. A scheme began to form in his mind: he wanted Flavia dead to smother his own passion for her, yet he did not want to kill her. Why not suspend his body alive, in ice, until she was dead?

  Milos was delighted at the prospect. He conducted an experiment with Vitellan, treating him with the oil, then freezing him for five days. Vitellan had insisted that it be for five days, the same period as he had spent adrift on the sea. Milos revived him successfully, and shortly after that Vitellan had bought what remained of the Oil of Frosts and all the Greek's notes. He now set about ridding himself of Flavia by killing her relative to him. He had the Frigidarium built several days' journey to the north, and hired local villagers to maintain it Finally he pretended to move to Gaul and marry. When word was brought of Flavia's death, he would be revived to come back as his own son. His faithless lover would have lived out her full life and be gone, and there would be nothing left to fuel his obsession with her. Milos was hired as the first Icekeeper, and Vitellan was launched into the one-way river of time.

  Something had gone wrong, however. When he was next revived many centuries had passed. Perhaps his steward's successor had betrayed him, and had continued to pay Milos and the villagers to keep the ice chamber functioning long after Flavia died. After a time the payments would have stopped, but the annual gathering of ice had become an important ceremony by then. It had taken a raid by the Danes to break that tradition. Alfred, Paeder, and Gentor knew the full story, the villagers suspected that he was Artorius returned to life, while the rest of Wessex was told that he was a great Christian general from Byzantium.

  Vitellan's latest victory was the cause of much local celebration. For the first time a party of raiders had been wiped out entirely, with not a single survivor. A frame and thatch hall was decorated with holly and mistletoe, and the weapons, armor, and heads of the Danes were hung on the walls while feasters from all the nearby towns honored the brave and brilliant commander.

  Alfred spoke in praise of Vitellan, and of the need to support the king against the Danes, then Paeder blessed the food and drink and the feast began. As usual the Roman confined himself to broth and melted snow while the bishop looked on in distaste over his whole roast goose. Gentor stood behind them, tasting his master's food and guarding his back.

  "Water and mush," snorted Paeder as he sliced a leg from his goose. "How can you stand it when such a spread is within your reach?"

  "My senses of taste and smell have been burned away by the freezing oil. What I cannot taste I cannot miss. Besides, solid food would make my stomach bleed."

  Paeder tore the flesh from a drumstick in two bites, then flung the bone to a nearby dog.

  "You could be a king in your own right," said Paeder casually to Vitellan. "Why do you help us so much and ask nothing in return?"

  "I get order in return, Bishop, and I secure a scholar and builder on the throne of Wessex."

  "And when the Danes are gone, what then?"

  "Perhaps I sh
all sleep frozen for a while. That would make me easier to guard, eh Gentor?" he said over his shoulder in accented Saxon.

  "Aye master," said the Icekeeper impassively.

  "So is that why you want peace, Vitellan?" asked Paeder. "So that your village can gather ice undisturbed? So that you can live forever without really being alive? What about your friends here?"

  Vitellan stared at Paeder for a moment, then sipped water from his drinking horn.

  "I make friends easily enough."

  "You have friends here, now! You can teach us so much, we want to keep you, to honor you." "I want civilization." "But we have that."

  "You gnaw meat straight off the bone, and not one in a thousand can write or read."

  "Well, I—we wash our hands after meals, not wipe them on our clothing like the pagan Danes."

  "True, true, and you are good friends. Sometimes I am tempted." Gentor came forward to refill his water jug, but was jostled as the bishop flung another bone to the dogs. The jug rolled from the table and smashed on the floor. A churl came running with another jug and Gentor filled it from his jar, glaring at the bishop as he poured.

  "You never met so much as a single Apostle?" the bishop asked hopefully, returning to a private obsession of his. "Did you never meet any who are mentioned in the Gospels?"

  "Most were dead by the time I was born," Vitellan explained patiently. "I did once serve briefly in Egypt, but after that I served and lived in the western part of the Empire."

  "I know, I know, I've asked this all before," he sighed.

  "What is it you want to know, Bishop Paeder? The chronicles of Christus' followers seem fairly complete."

  "It would be good to have, oh, just some little detail about Him. The color of His eyes—"

  "They were brown."

  "What?"

  "You never told me what you really wanted to know, Bishop. My father met Christus while garrisoned in Jerusalem." The bishop's eyes bulged. Although his jaw worked up and down, no words came, so Vitellan continued.

  "Father was keeping the peace during a sermon. He was

  in command of ten soldiers then, but later he got a commission to—"

  "Never mind that!" said the bishop in a strangled whisper. "What did Christus say to him?"

  "Why, nothing. Father spoke no Aramaic. He said that Christus seemed a kind and reasonable man, though."

  "Your father saw the Son of God and noticed nothing more than, than ... the fact that he was kind and reasonable?" the bishop bellowed in amazement as he rose to his feet. Most of the hall fell silent and turned to watch, though they could not follow his Latin.'

  "Well, that's all he said, but he did become a Christian himself in later years. It was a dangerous act in those times. He had me christened during the reign of Emperor Nero, you know."

  Paeder sat down heavily. "Christus had brown eyes, and seemed kind and reasonable . . ." He sighed and shook his head, then began to laugh quietly. There were tears on his cheeks when he finally raised his head again. "In a way, that's what I wanted to know," he whispered, staring out across the hall. "I need a kind and reasonable God. We all do."

  "Much better than that undisciplined Roman pantheon," agreed Vitellan. "That's why I—" Paeder snapped out of his reverie. "No wait, I must be clearheaded and remember all this. Please, may I?" Paeder seized Vitellan's water jug and drank deeply. "No more than a glance at Christus and your father was converted! Ah yes, I must chronicle this, every word, every detail that you can recall. The devil, there's something sharp in this water!"

  "What? It should be melted snow!" said Vitellan, at once alarmed.

  "I'm burning, it's burning me up!" gasped Paeder, clutching his throat as he fell forward across the table. People rushed from all sides to help the bishop, and Alfred's own physician bent him across a bench and forced a finger down his throat to make him throw up some of the poison. Guards ran to seize the serving churls. It was some time before Alfred realized that the poison had been meant for Vitellan. As Paeder was carried out Alfred found the Roman by the hearth, his arms folded behind his back and his head bowed in thought.

  "That was meant for you," Alfred began.

  "I know. Someone must have placed the poison in the jug before Gentor poured the water from his jar. He drank from his jar to prove it to me just now. He is still alive."

  "The Danes must have—"

  "Not the Danes." Vitellan reached into his sleeve and took out a square of folded parchment. It was stained and grimy, as if it had been trodden under foot.

  " 'Twas I who found it, after the bishop was carried off," said Gentor, looking straight into Alfred's eyes and folding his arms. "It were right under the Master's bench."

  "There are two words on this scrap of parchment," Alfred observed.

  Vitellan sighed as he returned the note to his sleeve. "After seven centuries, they are still after me. This is their way of claiming the honor of killing me."

  He was shivering in spite of the blazing fire. Vitellan had always looked anemic, but now there was a change in his bearing as well. He seemed crushed, beaten.

  "Is, ah, there another Frigidarium, Vitellan? Is some enemy pursuing you across the years?"

  "I am being pursued," said Vitellan, "but.. ." He paused, unable to find the words that he needed. Perhaps he cannot find words that I can understand, Alfred wondered. They were both being hunted.

  "Her hate is pursuing me, although she is long dead." He shook his head suddenly, as if to clear it. "You must spread the word that I have sailed for Rome on a pilgrimage. They cannot know about how I live so long as yet, they will think that I live as other men but just never grow old. A few centuries more, that's all I need. When I'm revived I shall move to Gaul, grow a beard, change my name completely, become a priest. They are looking for a warrior, after all." His eyes were dull, and his words were slurred and careless. Alfred seized his shoulders and shook him.

  "The assassins were Danes, Vitellan, or churls in their pay."

  "No. If the tradition of maintaining the Frigidarium could be maintained for centuries, then their hate could as well."

  "But who are they, then?"

  He seemed to relax, slumping against a heavy beam near the hearth. It was as if the fear had gone out of him once he had accepted the threat from his distant past.

  "Lucia's descendants, and mine. Those of our child."

  Gentor fetched a stool and guided him to it. Vitellan cowered beside the fire, as if anticipating the years to come in the Frigidarium.

  "Fear not, Master," crooned Gentor. "None but the Prince and his bishop know about the ice chamber outside the village."

  "Lucia's people may find me there, too." "Then we'll fight them off, Master. Ye can lie safe there until the end of time." In the days that followed Gentor slipped away to the village to prepare for the return of their Master. He sent back a small jar of golden-colored oil from the store in the Frigidarium, and Vitellan began to drink small measures of it. In small doses it was not lethal, while the beneficial part seemed to accumulate in his body. It burned and convulsed his stomach, and the loss of blood from internal bleeding soon had him too weak to stand.

  It was during these long winter evenings, as he lay in his fireside bed, that he told Alfred the part of his past that only Gentor had known about untilnow. He had actually broken his journey through time twice before that final vast leap. His steward had been instructed to revive him after twenty-five years, not after Flavia's death. Flavia was by then middle-aged, with seven children. Vitellan returned as his own son and resumed the running of his estate. He also courted Lucia, Flavia's eldest daughter.

  "Oh, she was reluctant enough to enter my bed," he told Alfred while a distant chant for Bishop Paeder's recovery mixed with the crackling of the fire. "Her mother had told her that anticipation keeps a man ardent, but when I reminded her that Flavia had made my supposed father anticipate, then given him nothing . . . well, it must have been inherited guilt, for she let me have my way with n
o more ado.

  "Flavia had not aged gracefully, I must emphasize. The paint was thick on her wrinkles, and she dyed her hair every day. Her husband Drusus had prospered and she loved to stage great revels for the local landowners and generally play the temptress, but her figure had sagged with twenty-five years and seven children. At any rate, I was invited to one of these feasts, now that her daughter was sleeping with me. After all those years I finally came face to face with Flavia again. She even drew me aside from the other guests to ask if I meant to marry her daughter."

  "I see," said Alfred in a hollow, flat voice. "So you killed her while posing as your own son." Vitellan began to laugh, but was stopped by a coughing fit. Alfred gave him water to drink after tasting it himself.

  "Civilized men have more refined perversions, my young barbarian prince," he said. Alfred bristled for a moment. "We may live in the shadow of Rome's memory, but we do have civilization. Would you prefer a Dane as a patron?"

  Vitellan shrugged. "No, I merely stress how different we were long ago. Revenge often had the status of a high art, and I practiced it well. All that I did was tell Flavia that I really was Vitellan Bavalius, the lover that she had jilted as a girl. It was hard, but I was able to convince her. Apart from my appearance, I knew far too much about her and the things that had passed between us.

  "Only now did I have my revenge. I told her that I had found a potion that granted eternal youth—which was true in a way. I'd meant to share it with her, but Drusus had seduced her away with his talk of comfortable, secure prosperity so I had kept it for myself. Now she begged me to give it to her, to restore her face and figure. She promised to forsake Drusus and go with me. It was her weakness, she would give the world to be young again. Nothing mattered to her so much as that. I dangled the promise before her then snatched it back, explaining that I could only halt aging, not reverse it, and the prospect of living forever with someone who looked old enough to be my mother did not appeal. Lucia was a different matter, though."

  "You do me an injustice," said Alfred. "I find that more