The Centurion's Empire Read online

  Sean McMullen The

  centurion's empire

  ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. Ft was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. THE CENTURION'S EMPIRE

  Copyright © 1998 by Sean McMullen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. Edited by Jack Dartn

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. ISBN: 0-812-56475-8

  Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 98-10257

  First edition: July 1998

  First mass market edition: May 1999

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  For my daughter, Catherine

  prologue

  The Tyrrhenian Sea: 22 September 71, Anno Domini

  Vitellan's journey to the twenty-first century began on the Tyrrhenian Sea, during an equinox gale in the autumn of the year 71, Anno Domini. In that year, in that century, his name was still Vitellan Bavalius. The Venator was not a big ship, and because of that the sturdy transport vessel handled storms well. One of the severe gales that lashed the Campania coast around this time of year had boiled into life, and the Venator ran steadily with a northeast wind, its mainsail and foresail trimmed to storm-rig as it rode the rolling procession of huge waves. Captain Metellus cautiously worked his way forward along the railing. At the bow, the great iron and timber anchor was loose in its lashings and rocking back and forth with every movement of the ship. The Venator had survived more than its share of storms because Metellus took nothing for granted, not the rigging, nor the packing of cargo, nor anything else. He always bought new sails and ropes long before renewal was due, and he personally inspected the hull with the carpenters—not merely to check that the leaks and seepages were under control, but to make sure that there were no leaks or seepages at all. From a distance the anchor looked loose but safe, yet that was not good enough for the Venator.

  Metellus stopped amidships, beside the mainmast. One of the new deckhands was holding on to the railing and was looking out to sea.

  "Don't worry, it only gets worse," Metellus shouted to the youth above the wind.

  "I'm not sick," Vitellan shouted back. "I'm here to see the storm."

  Metellus laughed. "You're mad. Every one of the men on deck would give a week's pay to be below and dry."

  "This is my first storm. How can I talk about it to my grandparents if I've been cowering below? I'd miss the huge waves, the sailors struggling with the steering oar, and the danger."

  "Hah, there's not much danger on the open sea for a well-rigged, tight ship, Bavalius," shouted Metellus proudly.

  "Danger comes from stopping suddenly on rocks or a shoal. Turning beam-on to the wind and waves could sink us too, but I won't let that happen. Your family chose well when they—"

  Vitellan saw it first. He pointed ahead and shouted a warning to the captain. Another ship, a very large vessel, was directly ahead of the Venator, lying on its side with its masts and rigging smashed and tangled. Captain Metellus turned and stumbled aft across the rolling deck, shouting to the steersmen above the wind. The five seamen working the steering oar frantically tried to turn the Venator to starboard, but even such a small ship does not turn easily. The Venator

  struck the wreck nearly square-on.

  The shock snapped the mainmast, bringing down a tangle of rigging to snare those on deck. The hull split as thousands of mortise and tenon joints ripped apart, then the Venator slowly swerved about until the wind had it pinned beam-on to the waves against the wreck of the other ship. The two vessels crashed together amid the mountains of water, rupturing their hulls further.

  The Venator's bow was underwater scarcely a minute after the impact. Vitellan was still clinging to the rail, paralyzed with shock, as the legionaries that the ship had been taking to Egypt began struggling out of the main hatch amidships and crawling aft. The Venator's newest deckhand seemed to wake from a dream and he realized that death was very close. The ship was doomed, and in a matter of minutes the only living men would be those with wreckage to cling to. Best to have first choice of the wreckage, he decided.

  Vitellan could hear muffled screams beneath his feet as he slid down the deck to the water amid fallen ropes, sails, and spars. Part of the pinewood foremast spar was floating nearby, and he waded in and swam to it. Groping under the water he blindly hacked and cut the hard, strong ropes trailing from the spar. This thing had to be his vessel when the ship was gone, and long ropes that trailed away into the water still might be attached to the ship. They would drag him down when it sank, he kept reminding himself as he frantically hacked at the ropes. How long before—Vitellan looked about to find himself alone amid the waves and debris. The ship had already sunk but the spar was still floating. In sheer relief the youth nearly let go of the spar, then he hooked a leg over it and rested as well as he could. He would not drown for a few moments at least, but even hanging on was exhausting work in the storm. Minutes passed, and he began to tire quickly. Knowing that rescue would be days away if it came at all, he bound himself to the spar while he still had the strength to do it properly. After that it was all he could do to snatch breath while his head was above water. The worst of the squall passed after some hours, but Vitellan was insensible by the time the wind shifted again and began to drive him back toward the coast.

  The Campania Coast, Italy: 27 September 71, Anno Domini

  A jagged piece of wreckage tumbled ponderously amid the waves breaking on the beach, too heavy to be washed in any farther. Antonius stared at it from the seat of his cart, noting that it was part of the decking of quite a large ship. Further along the beach his children searched the flotsam and wreckage that had been washed up by the choppy autumn waves. The sky was heavy with gray clouds, and the wind flung sand and spray at his face in stinging gusts. It was the season for shipwrecks, and thus it was his family's time of prosperity. Antonius shuddered, recalling that it was almost ten years to the day since he had been washed ashore clinging to the wreckage of his own vessel.

  His son Tradus called to him in a shrill voice, but Antonius did not look away from the shattered section of decking. A few days ago it had been part of one of the finest ships in all of the Roman Empire, he thought as another ragged wave burst over the wreckage. Tradus called out

  again, and this time Antonius did turn. His son was waving and pointing to a shape in the sand. A flick of the reins set his horse plodding along the beach.

  "Part of a spar with metal fittings, and a lot of rope tangled around it," Tradus said as he drew near. "A good find, Papa?"

  "Not as good as a bag of gold, but better than firewood. Here, take the axe and chop the metal free, then untangle the rope and coil it neatly. Ah, now Domedia is waving too. I'll leave the cart with you and see what she has." The girl was standing over the naked body o£a man in his early twenties. It was chalk white and bloated, already in the early stages of decomposition. Using his staff Antonius pointed to a well-healed scar high on one shoulder.

  "That's a spear thrust, and it's at least a year old," he explained. "See the marks here and here on his chin, and the calluses on his left arm? He once wore a helmet and used a shield." />
  "So he was a legionary?"

  "I'd bet my right hand on it," he said, holding up the hook on the stump of his right wrist. "He was probably from one of those troopships from Neapolis that sank in the storm last week."

  "He smells," Domedia complained, then moved upwind.

  "He's been in the water five days, and been dead for about the same time. A pity that he's naked, there's nothing for us." As they started back toward Tradus, Domedia's sharp eyes picked out something in a mound of seaweed and she skipped away to investigate.

  Antonius scratched at his beard with his iron hook. It was just past the autumn equinox, a dangerous time to be on the Tyrrhenian Sea. The captains of the troopships had taken a chance and had lost their gamble with fate, Antonius thought as he looked out to sea. Then again, perhaps they had been under orders: some new rebellion against Roman rule, troops needed urgently somewhere.

  Antonius brandished his hook at the sea as if in defiance, then let his arm drop to his side. He had gambled too, putting his savings into the price of a fishing boat and sail-

  ing late in the season when others did not dare. A storm finally, perhaps inevitably, claimed his boat and the crew of five. He had struggled ashore with his hand so badly mangled that it had to be cut off. Fate had been cruel to his family that year. They were reduced to wretched poverty, and two months later his wife had died in childbirth. Ever since then he had lived off the folly of others who had also given the Tyrrhenian Sea too little respect.

  "Garum, there's garum in this!" called Domedia.

  Antonius strode over to where she was pulling seaweed away from a large amphora tied to a wooden framework by its handles. He cut it free and hefted it.

  "From the ship's kitchen, not the cargo," he said as he licked the fish sauce from the cork seal. "It's nearly full."

  "Lucky it was tied to that beam or it would have sunk."

  "The cook probably secured everything in his kitchen when he saw the storm coming. The beam it's tied to was once part of a wall. This will fetch a good price, a very good price."

  Tradus began shouting and waving in the distance. Antonius stood up and beckoned to him. "Forget the spar, Tradus, bring the cart over to us," he called back.

  "There's a man here, alive!" Tradus replied.

  They ran across to him at once. A youth was lying unconscious under a mass of seaweed and rope. He wore a ragged tunic and had apparently bound his arms to the spar before he became too weak to hold on. A small purse was at his waist, tied to his belt by its drawstrings. Antonius dropped to his knees and drew his knife. His two children stared at him intently as he knelt in the sand. Waves thundered raggedly onto the beach behind them, and a spatter of rain stung their faces.

  "He may be from a rich family," Domedia said at last. Antonius sighed, then nodded slowly and began to cut the youth free. His skin had been chafed and torn by the rope, and was cold to the touch. Domedia brought sacks from the cart to cover him.

  "Five days in the water, five days without food or drink," muttered Antonius as he uncorked a waterskin. "It's amazing. He's young, but he must be tough."

  "About seventeen," ventured Domedia. "No more."

  Antonius forced a little water past the youth's swollen tongue. "And fair of face, eh daughter?"

  "You gave him only a trickle! Give him more."

  "Too much water after so many days of thirst would kill him. Just a little more now. Domedia, take your brother over to the amphora and load it onto the cart. After that, check the rest of the beach. I'll stay here with the boy until you get back."

  "But we must take him straight home. He'll die otherwise."

  "If he dies he dies. If we don't search the beach for what the sea offers us, we'll die too." He held up his hook-hand. "I've been a sailor, I know how to tend the like of this one."

  The youth did not die while they finished searching the beach, and he survived the cart ride back to Antonius' cottage. That evening he revived for a short time as they tended him beside the central hearth, and he began to babble a disjointed account of what had happened. He had been aboard the troopship Venator, which had foundered after a collision during a squall.

  "Cold, so cold," he concluded. "Cold caressed me, cold sustained me . . . cold was my lover."

  "The cold should have killed you," said Antonius. "You say your grandparents have a small farm near Hercula-neum?"

  "At Boscoreale, near Herculaneum. Find them . . . say Vitellan Bavalius survived."

  "Vitellan? A curious name for a Roman?"

  "My mother . .. Egyptian . . . named me after . . . someone."

  "I see. And who is your father?"

  "My father, Marcus Bavalius ... centurion in legions. Legions dangerous, he said. Join a ship, he said. Safe, safe ... he said."

  "Where is your father?"

  "At Alexandria . . . princeps prior. Warm there, too warm . .. heat kills, cold gives life."

  "He's raving," grunted Antonius. "Still, he speaks as if educated, and his father has a middling good rank. His fam- ily may reward us well for his return. Tradus, take the horse and ride to Boscoreale in the morning. Ask at the farms if anyone has a grandson named Vitellan Bavalius. Tell them he was rescued by a poor crippled sailor." Antonius sat by the fire and began to carve tenons from driftwood to sell to the boatbuilders. Outside the wind howled and rain pattered on the roof. Tradus thought of his journey the following day and glanced resentfully at Vitellan before climbing into bed.

  ". . . waves washed over me, chilled away my pain," Vitellan mumbled. "Beware fire, fire is death."

  "My fire is bringing you back to life now," Antonius said as he fed wood shavings to the flames. "You should have died out there. How did you endure five days in the water?"

  "The cold is my friend, kept me alive ... the cold is my lover, in her embrace I'll live forever." Domedia shivered as she sat beside Antonius, splicing the lengths of rope that they had salvaged. "Are the gods immortal because their blood is cold?" she asked.

  Antonius frowned at her. "Vitellan here is no godling. He's just a tough—and very lucky—boy. I know what you're thinking, Domedia. Just remember how your mother died and stay out of his bed."

  "But how did he survive so long in the cold sea?"

  "Why are some men stronger than others? Why are your eyes so keen that you can see flotsam on the beach at twice the distance your brother can? The talent to endure cold is Vitellan's particular blessing from the gods. It has already saved his life once. Perhaps it will do so again."

  Vitellan recovered and was soon reunited with his grandparents. They rewarded Antonius by making the former captain an assistant overseer of the dozen slaves on their little farm. Antonius and his son died when Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Boscoreale eight years later, in an odd vindication of Vitellan's delirious warning. Domedia escaped, having married a boatbuilder by then and gone to live in Naples.

  Two months after his ordeal Vitellan decided to join the army rather than return to the sea. Some months after that he was put aboard a ship to Egypt, much to his horror, but

  this voyage was free of disaster. He was to travel widely in the years that followed, and he served in Mauretania, Gaul, the Germanic frontier, and the north of Britannia. It was in Britannia where he learned that by embracing coldness he could indeed live forever, and in an act of petty revenge he designed and built the world's second human-powered time machine.

  I

  venenum inunortale

  N u s q u a m , t h e E u r o p e a n A l p s : 1 7 D e c e m b e r 7 1 , A n n o D o m i n i Rome was near the height of its power in the second year of Vespasian's reign as emperor, and nobody would have suspected that the Empire's fate hung by the life of a five-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Etruscan. Celcinius lay with his ears and nostrils sealed with beeswax plugs, and his mouth bound shut. His body was frozen solid in a block of ice at the bottom of a shaft two hundred feet deep.

  Regulus held his olive oil lamp high as he entered the Frigi-darium Glacia
le. He shivered, even dressed as he was in a coat of quilted Chinese silk and goosedown. The sheepskin lining of his hobnailed clogs did no better to keep out the cold, and the fur of his hood and collar was crusted with frost from his own breath. Wheezing loudly after the long trek down through corridors cut through solid ice, he paused for a moment.

  "There'd be something wrong were it not so damn cold," he panted to himself as he leaned against the wall, watching his words become puffs of golden fog in the lamplight.

  The Frigidarium Glaciale was a single corridor cut into the ice. It stretched away into blackness, as straight and level as a Roman road. On the walls on either side of him were rows of bronze panels, each two feet by seven and inscribed with names and dates. After a minute Regulus reluctantly heaved himself into motion again, shuffling down the corridor and leaning heavily on a staff that bore the Tempo-rian crest of a winged eye. Its other end was tipped with a spike, so that it would not slip on the ice of the floor.

  He paused again by a panel marked with his own name and bearing twenty-six pairs of dates. There was something strangely alluring about this cell cut into the ice, where he had spent 360 of the 437 years since his birth. Following his own private ritual he knocked out the pins securing the top of the panel to retaining bolts set into the ice, then levered it down with his staff. The hinges creaked reluctantly, shedding a frosty crust. Behind it was an empty space six feet long and two feet deep.

  Regulus stared into the little chamber, holding the lamp up and running his gloved hand along the surface of the ice. He had been in there when Plato had died, and for the whole of Alexander the Great's short but remarkable career. Regulus had, of course, been awake to attend the Temporians' Grand Council, the single time when all his fellow Temporians had been awake together. That was when they had decided to abandon their Etruscan heritage and support Rome. The Punic Wars and rapid expansion of Roman power and influence had followed, and Regulus had been awake to earn scars in the fighting against Hannibal. There had been more years in the ice after that, until he had been revived in time to cross the Rubicon with Julius Caesar. That time he had stayed awake for two decades, until after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra. He had returned to the ice again by the time Christ was born.