Legacy (2 page)

"We are all delighted that you could be here, Sidonius," he continued, "even though it represents a considerable detour in your journey home from Rome."

"So it does, your Majesty," Sidonius acknowledged. "But I could not resist the chance to meet the High King of the Britons, with whom I have corresponded. . . ."

"As you have with so many!" Arvandus, outgoing Praetorian Prefect of Gaul cut in, skirting the edge of rudeness. "Sidonius, you are almost as eminent a letter-writer as you are a poet. We all look forward to the panegyric you will undoubtedly compose for our British ally."

Sidonius sighed. Yes, perhaps he
had
overdone it with his verses. Some felt that he might have waited just a little longer after his father-in-law had been murdered before dedicating a poem to his successor Majorian.
All right, maybe it
was
a bit unseemly. But I am
not
just a shallow flatterer, whatever some may claim! Let's be honest. I probably would not have supported Avitus if he had not been Papianilla's father. On the other hand, Majorian had real potential. He could have become the new Restorer, the new Aurelian or Diocletian or Constantine. Majorian could have set the Empire back on course. It has always been restored after the storms of the past, with a strong new hand on the steering-sweep. It must happen again!

Syagrius addressed Arvandus with a frown. "Doubtless, Sidonius is waiting for the coming triumphs which will inform his muse, Prefect. As all Romans"—he pointedly included himself—"await our joint victories over the barbarians. . . ."

"Which we shall win for the Greek Emperor!" Arvandus grinned recklessly amid the frigid shock that followed. The grin almost banished the now habitual bitterness from his face, and made him as handsome as he had been thought to be when he had become Prefect five years earlier. His charm had enabled him at first to make a success of an increasingly meaningless post. But his second term was shadowed by a rash accumulation of debts, and the exactions which he had been accused of by certain prominent Gauls. He was now in a kind of limbo: officially out of office, called to Rome to answer charges, but still publicly treated as Prefect in the absence of a successor. So his presence embarrassed everyone, and he clearly relished the opportunity to embarrass them even more by giving vent to his well-known feelings about Anthemius, the "Greek Emperor" of the West.

"I also wrote Anthemius a panegyric, Prefect," Sidonius said mildly. "It may be cause for regret that our own failure to set our house in order has forced the Eastern Emperor to appoint an Augustus for the West. But we may at least be thankful that Emperor Leo chose a man of character and ability."
The Restorer? Possibly. At least he had the initiative to try a departure from policy when King Euric's aggressions became so blatant as to exceed even our capacity for self-deception. Instead of playing yet another horde of barbarians off against the Visigoths, he turned to our British former provincials, who are only keeping civilization precariously alive in the face of their own barbarians.

The British alliance
had
been handled well. Anthemius' masterstroke had been his proposal that an attack on the Saxons of the lower Loire be the first order of business. Riothamus had had to agree. Those sea raiders had been preying on his subjects in Armorica for many years. Now that he and Ambrosius had drubbed the British Saxons into a semblance of good behavior, they constituted his chief military problem. He could not pass up an opportunity to solve that problem at its root. Afterwards, the allies would advance inland, keeping north of the Rhone until reaching Berry, where they would turn south and threaten Euric, while shielding the Auvergne.

Yes
, Sidonius thought,
Anthemius
is
clever. But can he muster the support he needs in the West? Or are there too many like Arvandus?

The damnable thing was, he couldn't help liking Arvandus, who was an old friend—as were a couple of his accusers.
Maybe it's true that I'm too easy to get along with. Too accommodating, as Papianilla says. And says. And says.
Sidonius sighed. He was glad he was no longer City Prefect, for he would have been forced to become involved in Arvandus' prosecution. This delegation was the outgoing Praetorian Prefect's last semiofficial act before departing for Rome.
I shall advise him to deny everything.

"Sidonius is right," said Syagrius, on whom Arvandus' charm had always been lost. "This alliance is long overdue. My father and I have always found the High King to be reliable in keeping his commitments."

"High King! This British self-styled royalty of usurpers and barbarians has so little trace of legitimacy that he must claim it through Magnus Maximus, another usurper, although admittedly one with a certain style. . . ." Belatedly, Arvandus noticed the look in Syagrius' eyes and realized what he had been saying. He trailed to a halt with as good grace as he could manage. Even in a mood of embittered recklessness, one did not speak of usurpers in the presence of the King of the Romans.

Syagrius glared for a long moment of what was not really silence—the seabirds and the disembarking army saw to that—but seemed to be. Finally, he spoke in a voice chillier than the late afternoon wind. "The fact remains, Prefect"—he stressed the title, emphasizing that Arvandus was still receiving it only by courtesy—"that this alliance has been entered into by the Augustus of the West, and we must all strive to effectuate his policy. And," he continued, indicating the beach to the west with a sweeping gesture, "we will never be in a better military position."

No one argued with him. The throng on the beach was growing steadily as the boats continued to ply back and forth across the shallows. The crowd was sorting itself out with the unforced orderliness of an army of veterans. The bulk of it was composed of the trained and disciplined infantry so rarely seen anymore—unarmored archers and javelin men, and the heavy shock troops that were Ambrosius' creation, with their ring-mail
lorica hamata
, large round shield, and visorless helmet with moveable cheek-pieces. But what made this army special was the heavy cavalry that was coming ashore now—Riothamus' unique contribution—and his birthright. And he was arriving with them.

An honor guard of dismounted cavalry was forming up, fully turned out in scarlet cloaks. The men carried shields smaller than the infantrymen's, and these were painted with garish kinship symbols. They wore standard helmets, but did not bear the long lances that were their chief weapon. Their scale hauberks and the long
spatha
hanging at each man's side, like the dark hawklike look in some of their faces, reflected the origins of the core around which Riothamus had built a cavalry that might, at anything close to even odds, have given the
cataphractii
of the Eastern Empire pause.

Arvandus seemed to read his thoughts. "Ironic, isn't it, Sidonius? A descendant of barbarian auxiliaries that we Romans posted to Britain almost three centuries ago now comes as our savior from
admitted
barbarians!"

Syagrius overheard him. He visibly controlled his fury, and spoke in a tight voice. "As you point out, Prefect, it has been centuries since the auxiliary cavalry arrived in Britain—centuries in which they have served Rome loyally. And by now, their descendants, including the High King, are less Sarmatian than they are British and Roman in blood."

"And," Faustus put in, "most importantly, his Christian orthodoxy is unquestioned."

"And," Sidonius added diplomatically, "he is now approaching."

The High King's boat was inconspicuous, like all the fleet, with sails of the same light blue-grey as the sailors' tunics.
What an extraordinary idea
, Sidonius thought.
A color scheme designed to make it harder for your enemy to see you! Who ever heard of the like?
But there was no mistaking the man it carried, for the blood-red dragon that accompanied him everywhere soared and swooped above him as the wind filled the sleeve-like cloth device that was yet another vestige of the steppes. That banner had filled the Saxons with superstitious terror when they had first encountered it. Now it filled them with entirely rational terror.

As the boat drew ashore, two sailors jumped into the surf with lines to draw it up on the beach. The delegation advanced to meet the man who stepped onto the wet sand. And as he did, the clouds parted for the first time in hours, and the westering sun blazed behind him, making him momentarily invisible and dazzling Sidonius' eyes. When he could see again, Riothamus stood before him.

An omen? So our pagan ancestors, who worshipped Mithras the Unconquered Sun, would have thought. But not enlightened Christian men, of course.

So why does the skin at the nape of my neck prickle?

It was strangely hard to concentrate on anyone else in the High King's presence. Not because of any outward display of magnificence; he was unarmored, bareheaded, and dressed in the same red and white tunic, with horseman's leggings, as his
cataphractii
. But Sidonius never felt the slightest uncertainty as to who this man was. Neither, apparently, had Syagrius, who had stepped forward and was exchanging stately courtesies with him. No, it was some indefinable quality of the man himself, so compelling that the beach, the fleet, the town of Nantes to the east, the soldiers, and the dignitaries all seemed mere background in a painting of which he was the subject—a drab background.

Riothamus was strongly built but only moderately tall. And yet it did not seem strange to Sidonius that people always described the High King as towering. His thick dark hair and beard were trimmed with a neatness that he could never hope to maintain in the field, and were barely touched with grey in his forty-second year. His features were strongly marked, his eyes an intensely dark brown under thick black brows. He moved with a smoothly controlled leonine strength.

Sidonius grew aware that the introductions had reached him. "
Ave
, Riothamus," he said, using the honorific with the smoothness of the trained rhetorician. "Welcome to Gaul."

"Sidonius! What a pleasure to meet you face-to-face at last." Riothamus' resonant baritone added unaffected enthusiasm to everything he said. His Latin held an odd variation of the Britons' usual accent. "I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed your letters. Almost as much, in fact, as Ambrosius has." He smiled with a boyishness that somehow did not seem incongruous. "He regards you as an inspiration, you know—a torchbearer of classical culture."

"I am overwhelmed, Riothamus," Sidonius replied, and meant it.

Again came the smile that seemed to reveal some tiny fraction of a vitality that, Sidonius suddenly knew, needed a larger setting than Britain.
This
, he thought with simple certainty,
is the Restorer
.

"You know, Sidonius, I still can't get used to that honorific, although I know it's how I'm always referred to in Gaul. But, except on formal occasions, hardly anybody uses it in Britain. It's a little grander than we like things. 'Supremely Royal' indeed! Grant me a favor as a friend, and be the one man over here who calls me by my
name
."

Sidonius was mildly scandalized at the informality, but he could not refuse. "Very well . . . Artorius."

There were, he told himself firmly, limits. At least he wouldn't use the worn-down form of the fine old Latin name favored by uneducated British rustics, which sounded like "Arthur."

The canals of Mars stretched toward the nearby desert horizon beneath the shrunken sun, their waters flowing slowly toward the Phoenix Sea.

And
, reflected Lieutenant Robert Sarnac, Solar Union Space Fleet,
wouldn't that have made a classic pulp science fiction line in the days before there really
were
canals on Mars?

It was hard to avoid thinking in such terms in this year of 2261, on this planet that was celebrating the bicentennial (Earth-style) of the human-engineered asteroid strike that had initiated its Terraforming. Whenever the war news ran dry, every pundit with time to fill trotted out the well-worn irony that the hard necessities of water distribution had dovetailed with an old fantasy, born of optical illusion and wishful thinking among the pioneering astronomers who had peered through their primitive telescopes at then lifeless Mars.

Of course
, Sarnac thought, getting into the spirit of the thing,
there were differences
. The view from the parapet of the roof landing pad lacked something. Granted, the flat desert of reddish dust beyond the canal's fringe of cultivation was right. But no wild green raiders galloped in from it on thoats and zitadars, and the distant pumping station could not possibly be mistaken for a palace of the dying aristocracy of Leigh Brackett's dying world, or for one of Robert Heinlein's slender Towers of Truth. And there were no hurtling moons overhead—even if Deimos and Phobos
did
hurtle, you wouldn't have been able to see them do it from beneath Barsoom's . . . er, Mars' thick new atmosphere. Sarnac leaned on the parapet and mourned for romance, for he had not quite outgrown youth's self-conscious and self-congratulatory flourishes of melancholy.

But while romance might be dead, mystery was not. It just didn't get talked about as much, even by the most desperate members of the chattering classes. It was, he thought, too uncomfortable—the mind shied from it. And too big, as though the
Titanic
, instead of decently sinking, had ended as a
Mary Celeste
with passengers and crew numbered in the thousands. So even as people recalled the ice asteroid called Phoenix that had smashed into this world two centuries ago, obliterating the old Mars as it birthed the new one, they left unspoken the most haunting of all history's enigmas: the fate of the people who had lit the fusion fires that had launched that asteroid on its sunward course. Or, at least, the nine-tenths of them who had
not
awakened aboard the lifecraft with no physical marks—but also with no recollection of what had happened since the inexplicable moment when everyone in their habitat-asteroid, Phoenix Prime, had collapsed unconscious.