The Legions of Fire Read Online Free Page B

was like learning to drink ale instead of wine when he’d been stationed in Upper Germany: it wasn’t the way it ought to be, but that didn’t matter.
    Then Varus had offered his new friend use of the facilities.
    Alphena had watched Corylus the first time he exercised. Corylus had protested, but Varus wouldn’t stand up to his sister. In part she was being contrary—she did quite a number of things because she knew that other people would rather she didn’t—but she was also proving that nobody in the household could prevent her from doing what she wanted.
    As for Lenatus, he’d taken his master’s lesson to heart: he pretended he didn’t hear either party to the argument.
    Corylus had at last gone ahead with his basic drills, despite the audience. He couldn’t order around the family of the man from whom he was accepting a favor. Alphena had colored when he said, “When in Carce, one follows the customs of Carce,” and bowed low to her, however. He’d made the light comment sound more insulting than a tirade from a bearded Stoic philosopher.
    â€œGentlemen of Carce!” squeaked Varus.
Oh, Venus and Mars, he sounds so young!
“I welcome you on my own behalf and on behalf of Senator Gaius Saxa, my noble father and patron!”
    The audience shuffled its feet dutifully, indicating its appreciation of the greeting. Alphena turned and glanced back, wondering if Saxa had come in after she did. She couldn’t see the whole room—she was shorter than most of the richly dressed freedmen—but she knew that the Senator’s presence would have caused a stir.
    Saxa was probably off with Nemastes again; he seemed to spend all his time with the Hyperborean. He had never pretended to care about literature, of course, so he probably wouldn’t have been present at his son’s reading regardless.
    Saxa was a good father in most fashions. He never ranted at his children about their behavior, and he supplied the money for their whims without objection or concern. He even seemed to care about their well-being, though he viewed them from a foggy distance.
    Alphena didn’t love Saxa; that would be like saying she loved the ornamental pond in the garden. But she liked him a good deal, and she certainly didn’t want her existence to change so that he was no longer part of her life. One way or another, Nemastes the Hyperborean meant change.
    â€œThe filthy River Baroda slowly plows the sandy wastes of Libya,” Varus said, beginning to chant his poem. His voice had settled out of its initial squeak, but it had no more life than the plash of rain into the cistern in the entranceway.
    Alphena had heard established poets and professional singers whom her father had invited to dinner parties. Some of them were better than others, but she couldn’t compare even the worst of them to what she was hearing now. Her brother’s delivery was as dull as watching concrete set.
    Nemastes had appeared two weeks earlier as a petitioner at Saxa’s morning levee. The Hyperborean was only a short step up from the outright beggars who crowded every rich man’s doorstep until the servants ran them away, but because he claimed to be a wizard he’d been admitted to the office after Saxa and his more important clients had exchanged greetings.
    Nobody seemed to know what had happened then, but Saxa and the Hyperborean had spent most of their waking hours together ever since. Indeed, Saxa had announced that Nemastes would be moving into the town house—
    But that plan had collided with Hedia. Nemastes might well be a wizard, but Saxa’s third wife had proved a match for whatever magic he was using on the Senator. There’d been a blazing argument—Hedia was petite, but her lungs and projection could match a professional actor’s—at the end of which the two men had left the house. Saxa had returned alone later that evening.
    â€œA