The Gate of Fire (80 page)

The praetor pulled a rope that hung from the wall. A moment later there was a distant ringing sound. Bardanes smiled again. "Samuel is the chief of my servants—he will help you barrack your men in the old Legion camp and stable your animals. While you are here, you may draw stores and feed from the Imperial granary. How many men did you bring?"

Nicholas noted that the praetor finally seemed interested in something. He smiled, the edges of his eyes crinkling up.

"A full century, Lord Bardanes. Veterans every one."

There was a patter of feet outside the office and then a tall man entered, ducking under the lintel. Bardanes glowered at the man as he entered. He seemed to have dismissed the matter of Nicholas' troops.

"Samuel, you are as slow a servant as I've ever suffered in my house! This is Centurion Nicholas of Roskilde. He and his men will be occupying the old Legion quarters for a week or two before they head across the river into the territories of the Gerasans. See that they have what they need."

Bardanes nodded to Nicholas and turned back to considering the papers on his desk. Nicholas rose and saluted, then followed the majordomo out into the hallway. Bardanes was already engrossed in his ledgers. Samuel was a tall thin man with a close-cut head of very curly brown hair. He wore a simple robe of cream-colored cotton, belted, with the edge of a blue shirt peeking out at his collar. In youth he had suffered some disease that left his face marked with small half-moon scars. He did not meet Nicholas' eyes, wearing an air of indifference. He preceded the centurion, descending the stairs to the main floor with a loping gait.

"We have wagons and mules," said Nicholas as they reached the cool dim space of the main hall. "Does the old camp have sufficient room for a dozen large wagons? We can camp outside the city, if necessary."

Samuel turned, his dark eyes finally focussing on Nicholas. The Scandian felt a shock, meeting that gaze. This man was hiding deep and abiding anger. In her sheath,
Brunhilde
trembled a little, but so faintly that Nicholas barely perceived it. Here was a slave that did not wear the yoke of Rome gently.

"Master, the Imperial Army has leave to camp where it will. However, when the Tenth Legion was based here, it was at full strength, so I think that the camp on Zion mount will suit you."

The man's voice was soft and submissive, which made Nicholas feel a cold chill creep on his arms. Now that he saw the hatred in the man, the dissonance between his words and hidden thoughts bespoke danger.

"I saw..." Nicholas cleared his throat. "I saw no aqueducts upon our arrival. The city is watered by springs? They are all within the walls?"

Samuel paused at the door to the plaza. He turned, his head silhouetted against the brightness of the day outside.

"Master, there are some small springs outside the walls, but they are difficult to reach. The pool of Solomon, for example, or the spring of Sion are high on the cliffs that line the eastern side of the city. The camp of the Tenth is watered by cisterns. They should be full."

Nicholas nodded, his hand on the doorjamb. "I understand. I'm sure we'll find it a suitable camp. I will need a chit for the granary."

The man bowed and then handed Nicholas a tablet bearing the seal of the praetor and the city. Nicholas took it, suppressing an arched eyebrow. There was no name or other directive on the tablet. Any man that held it could, theoretically, request anything they wanted from the Imperial granaries, stables, or armory.
A blank pass
, he thought. Samuel, without speaking, turned away and disappeared into the gloom of the house. Nicholas took one last look around and left, though he still felt on edge as he walked out into the burning heat. A sullen and angry servant coupled with an oblivious master; that was a poor combination.

Dwyrin was waiting in the shade in front of the stables. As Nicholas passed under the wooden porch that lined the front of it, he saw that it was part of some larger building that had been partially torn down. The paint on the walls had flaked away in places, revealing bits and pieces of murals and paintings that had adorned the original walls. The columns, too, were not of Roman manufacture, or even Greek. Nicholas ran his hand over one of them. They were fat-bellied and tapered toward the summit. Round bands formed their bases and capitals. The garish red paint crumbled under his touch, revealing a dark finish and a fine-grained wood underneath.

"Cedar, I think," said the Hibernian, pushing away from the wall he had been holding up. "There are the same kind of columns inside, and tessellated flooring under the straw and dirt. These stables were an audience hall once, I think, and there were upper floors, not just one."

Nicholas scraped away some of the paint on the columns with his belt-knife. The wood underneath was as smooth as silk and had, in some past time, been polished to a high gloss.

"Whoever ruled before Rome, then..." Nicholas put the knife away. "No matter. What gossip did you squeeze out of the grooms?"

Dwyrin shrugged and looked about in a nonchalant matter. "Nothing worth talking about."

"Not here, you mean," said Nicholas with a wry grin. "Let's be on our way, then. I shudder to think what kind of trouble those pioneers and Vladimir are up to."

It only took a moment to find the engineers. They had circled the city, starting at the northern gate and going west. The hill of the city was steep on the south, the west, and the east. A barren slope dropped away from the Jaffa gate to the west. Despite this, the engineers had found that the Jaffa gate was wide enough to admit their wagons and it was a simple right turn in the public area fronting the
praetorium
to reach the Legion encampment.

Nicholas stood in the shade of the gate, watching the wagons roll in, their muffled wheels still loud on the limestone cobbles of the street. The Roman city sprawled away to the north on the flat, shimmering in the heat. Everywhere the land was barren and pale, overgrazed by sheep and goats and sapped by the constant dry wind from the east. Here and there bare hills of white limestone punched through the dry brown soil, assuming the characteristics of old bone under the round white disk of the sun.

"Not much for a farmer..." Dwyrin looked around in mild puzzlement. "Doesn't it seem odd that most of this land should be so grim looking, but people are still here, clinging to it?"

Nicholas rubbed his jaw, feeling the need for a shave. "Many places are like this—the people have always been here, even if it is desolate. They stay because they have always stayed. There must be fertile valleys nearby, though, or it
would
be abandoned. How went things with the groomsmen and servants?"

"Not well," Dwyrin made a face. "I learned quite a bit, though more about the
tavernae
and
cauponae
of the city than the lay of the land, so to speak. There is trouble... your orders were right about that, but not the kind that you might think."

"Tell me," said Nicholas, turning a little sideways to watch the boy. The last of the engineers' wagons had passed the gate, kicking up a pall of white dust that coated their legs. They began walking back toward the encampment.

"This praetor," the Hibernian began, "he was sent here not too long ago by the Emperor with orders to begin a census—as you heard before—so that there could be a tax. There was a bit of trouble right away, which was bad because all of the Legions in the area had been recalled to Constantinople for the war against Persia. This Bardanes—apparently an Epirote, if you believe the groomsmen—took some initiative to deal with it. He had only brought two or three hundred men with him, but not legionnaires."

"Household troops?" Nicholas interjected. The near collapse of Imperial authority in the east had driven many of the great landowners to raise their own private
militias
. Many of the traditional authorities—chiefs, princes, and potentates—had armed retainers already. The Emperor frowned upon such things, of course, but with the capital besieged, who could blame a local governor for seeing to the maintenance of order?

"No," Dwyrin mused. "Mercenaries I think, like those guards at the temple gate. In any case he apparently hired the largest local clan, the Persee, to see that order was restored in the countryside and taxes collected. Aelia Capitolina, of course, he garrisoned with his own men."

Nicholas raised an eyebrow at that, though it was a common practice on the borders of the Empire to employ local troops. Still, the Roman landowners in the province would be beside themselves at the thought of some barbarians banging on their gates, demanding the tax.

"The Persee," Dwyrin continued, "faced down the other clans and things settled out. Now, the taxes have not been collected yet, because Bardanes is waiting for the Persee to finish the census. That will be done in a month or two when the official rate comes down from Constantinople."

"You said he hired the Persee," Nicholas said. "With what? Did he bring his own coin or did he use the Emperor's voucher?"

"Better!" grinned Dwyrin as they entered the double-wide gate of the camp within the walls of the city. "He promised them a cut of the taxes that they are to collect."

Nicholas growled in disgust. "Then they get to gouge their neighbors with the Imperial writ, not pay themselves, keep their own percentage, and make this backwoods tax-farmer Bardanes rich." He drummed his fingers on the saddle horn. "This," he pronounced to the nearby buildings and Dwryin, "is the kind of thing that winds up requiring three full Legions, a bushel of tribunes, and an ocean of blood to clean up. Anything else?"

"No," sighed Dwyrin. "Unless you count a fervent argument over which of the local tavern girls is the prettiest."

"Halt!" Nicholas stopped, seeing that a guard had already been posted inside the first row of buildings in the camp. Two of the surveyors stepped out into the sun, their helmets on and spears up. Nicholas nodded to the lead man in greeting. The soldier looked up and down the road and then saluted. "Welcome to the camp, Centurion! Sextus and Frontius are over yonder, near the main building."

Nicholas saluted in return and then walked past, noting that two more sentries were still in the shade of the nearest barracks, arms in hand. Thankfully the streets of the camp were regular, bisecting the hilltop with a regulation-width road. It seemed that some of the buildings, like the stables, had been converted from some previous edifice, but most of them seemed—in comparison to the rest of the city—to be new. The wagons had stopped, lined up along the main street—the cardo—and the engineers were busily unloading, passing bags and crates from hand to hand. Nicholas came to the lead wagon and stopped, casting a glance down the shorter road, the
decumanus
, that bisected the camp from east to west.

To the east, there was a slope leading down into some kind of a shallow valley that cut across the city. Beyond the crowded rooftops and towers of the main part of the city, rose the massive bulk of the Temple of Jupiter. From this vantage, raised above the rest of the urb, he could see that the impressive wall was the base of a monumental platform that occupied fully a quarter of the whole city. It rose up, over the nearest houses, like a giant. Atop it was a girdling battlemented wall, and just above the rampart, he could make out the roof line of a classically styled temple.

"That must be the Temple of Jupiter."

"Aye," said Sextus, musing. "A fine piece of work it looks from here. That wall and platform are all artificial, I'd wager. Tens of thousands of tons of dirt and stone to build it up around whatever hill was there originally. Then that facing! They must have dragged those slabs from miles away—there's certainly no good stone around here. Those Greeks... they were some builders!"

Nicholas nodded, he had seen the walls of Constantinople, too. This place was on that scale.

With the lead engineer at his side, he stomped into the
principa
, or headquarters building. Vladimir and Dwyrin had already chosen rooms for themselves, and some of the surveyors were moving his goods and the staff billet into the main room.

"This was the best location?" Nicholas unstrapped the helmet from his head and hung it from the hook on his armor at the right shoulder. The engineer looked around and nodded. His men were using felt-wrapped hammers to tap dowels into the legs of the commander's field table.

"I can't say that I'm happy about the town buildings being so close to the interior wall, but we abut the outer rampart on two sides. There are two main gates, the one at the north you came in through, then one at the south, which goes outside. A steep cliff beneath the walls both to south and west. Not too bad, though we need to dig around in the cisterns to see if there is actually a spring within the precinct." Sextus shrugged. "What can you do?"

Nicholas fingered his chin, looking around at the brisk efficiency that would provide him with a cleaned and garrisoned base within the next three hours. By turns he lamented the veteran infantry that he had been promised and then praised the work of these men. No wonder the Western Empire had ridden out the last three centuries of disaster, plague, invasion, and catastrophe and still stood.

"Good work. Once the camp is secure, call a meeting of the section commanders. Tomorrow we need to start finding the lay of the land hereabouts and making ourselves at home. I want sentries on all four walls right now, and throughout the night. This might be a Roman city, but I fear it is not a friendly one. Dwyrin, here lad, I need you to make a working..."

Anatol shuffled his feet on the tile floor. They were bare and covered with a bristly black pelt of fur. Like the other Walach, he had given up wearing a shirt during the day. They spent most of their time sleeping on the patio of the villa or slinking through the flowering bushes along the farm lanes. He didn't need a shirt or tunic for that. Such things just got in the way of the hunt.

"Do you know why I've summoned you here?" Maxian had slept for a long time after the effort of rebuilding the book of Khamûn. Today, after a lengthy spell in the little bathhouse, he felt almost restored. Had the tome been a ruined body, its restoration would have been far easier for the Prince, but he was still exploring the power that let him affect the inanimate world.