Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

Sitting at a folding camp desk, a thin, dark-haired man looked up at the intrusion. The courier knelt on one knee, making the half proskynesis that was the rule here in the East.

"Hail, Emperor and God, Galen."

"Greetings, lad." Martius Galen Atreus, Emperor of the Western Empire, put aside his quill pen and rubbed ink from his hands. His was a narrow face, with a cap of lank black hair crowning his head. His eyes were bright and filled with a fierce intellect. "What news do you bring?"

The messenger stood and pulled a scroll case from the carry bag at his waist. He was very young, perhaps not sixteen, with close-cut hair and a determined expression. "A letter, Caesar, from the Empress."

Galen's hand, reaching for the copper tube, paused for just an instant, but then he took it and placed it on the desk. The Emperor summoned a smile and motioned for one of his servants. "Well done, lad. You need a bath and a shave and something to drink. Timos, see that this fellow is looked after."

The elderly Greek nodded, smiling at the courier, and escorted him away. The Emperor stared at the message tube on his desk with trepidation. Poking at it with a tentative finger, he rolled it over and saw that it bore the sign and seal of his wife, Helena, Empress of the West. He sighed. He had last seen her in Catania, at their villa on the island of Sicily. There had been words exchanged between them-heated words he had since regretted. She had sent him letters; he kept them in a chest with his personal items, unopened.

In Rome, and even before, when he had been stationed at Colonia Agrippina in lower Germania with the Legio First Minerva, Helena had gained herself a towering reputation as a poet, writer, and sly-handed wit. Her sharp tongue had laid low many a city. Her volume of correspondence was legendary. In the course of one week at Agrippina, while it rained constantly and steadily, he had watched her write seventy-three letters. He valued her mind above all else. The thought that he had found a mate of equal or greater intelligence still filled him with hidden wonder.

But when it might be turned against him in vitriolic anger? He dreaded her wit, even he, the master of half the known world. Galen took the message tube in his hand and weighed it, feeling the papyrus sheets slide back and forth inside. What, he thought, if it is good news?

A memory of Helena, her dark eyes sizzling with anger, her voice raised in a particularly cutting rebuke, her thin hands wrapped around the neck of a Minoan jade vase older than the city of Rome, came to mind. He put the message tube down. He had started that argument with a particularly ill-advised remark about her health. She had finished it. Perhaps later, when I've had a bit to drink.

– |"Well?" The young woman's voice was laced with anger.

The young redheaded man shook his head and shrugged. He smiled broadly. He was long used to her anger and abrupt nature. "Nothing to do about it, leader of five. Things in the city are in such a snarl that it will be days before we see the cool porticoes of the agora or even the inside of an inn."

"For this I send you off to scout?" The young woman snapped, smoothing back short raven black hair. Luminous dark eyes and high cheekbones marked her face, which was radiating disgust. Like the redheaded youth, she wore a travel-stained crimson cloak with blue edging and a heavy shirt of leather embossed with bronze studs. The brooch that held her cloak to the shoulder was silver, though, where his was copper. "For this we sit in the heat for hours, waiting for you to finally report in?"

The young redheaded man shrugged again and took a long drink from a leather wine flask that the other man in the back of the wagon had handed him. It was sour acetum, but that was to be expected on the third day. It cut a little of the dust in his throat.

"You may bring down the wrath of heaven upon me, O Zoe, Leader-of-five, but I cannot change the will of the Emperor! Say, is there anything left to eat?"

"No, Dwyrin," the dark-haired youth growled, leaning back against the wall of the wagon. "We ate everything out of boredom while waiting for you to return."

"Odenathus, you are a pig of a Palmyrene!" Dwyrin punched the other youth in the arm. "Not so much as a fig left, I suppose!"

Odenathus shook his head, his face a study of pitiful sorrow. "No so much as a fig," he said, "or a date, or a roast hen, or a wheel of cheese, or bread or dried meat or wine, or, well, anything…"

Zoe made a snorting sound and swung out of the back of the wagon, brown legs showing for a moment under her leather kilt. Out of the wagon she settled her belt and checked to see that her issue short sword, the gladius, was snug at her side and that the other gear was in place. Dwyrin and Odenathus crawled to the back of the wagon and sat, their legs swinging over the tailgate.

"Leader-of-five? You, ah, you going somewhere?"

Zoe spared Dwyrin a short, pointed glare and lifted her hat, a battered straw thing with a long woven tail that lay down over her neck, off a hook twisted into the side of the wagon. "I," she said, "am going into the city to find us lodging and food. You two are staying here, with the wagon and our gear. And I do mean stay with the wagon. Do not leave the wagon by the side of the road-not even for a moment-to be stolen by drunken Sarmatian mercenaries… like last time."

"Wait a grain." Dwyrin was frowning. "Won't the army be pitching camp here? Why do we have to find our own rooms?"

Odenathus laughed, a short barking sound like a dog with a bone caught in its throat. "At Antioch? The luxurious, sybaritic, legendary Antioch? At the end of such a victorious campaign? Oh, my fine Hibernian friend, the Emperor would not retain his red boots with such an act! This is the first fruit of victory for these legionnaires-this city by the languid waters of the Orontes, this city of green bowers and fine wine and beautiful women under the cedar-covered slopes of Mount Silpius."

Dwyrin frowned again, this time at Odenathus. "You wax eloquent, O Buzzard. You've been thinking about it too much, I think. Then it will be a free-for-all in the city-that would drive the centurions insane trying to keep everyone in line! How can the Roman army move without a camp at the end of each day?"

Zoe shook her head and rolled her eyes in despair, hands on her slim hips. "Oh, there is a camp all right, a permanent one, the Campus Martius west of the city on the far bank of the river. And there everyone will-in all regulation-pitch their tents and count heads. But for another week or two, the army will spend all this loot and coin that we've dragged back from Ctesiphon in the brothels and tavernas and gambling dens of the city… which, as you can see, has put my dear cousin into a frenzy at the thought that he might not be able to sate his animal lusts." She tossed her head in the direction of the crowded road and the waiting soldiers. "It will take a day or more to sort them all out and get everyone a pass to go into the city. By then all of the good inns and hostels will be filled with officers and the common soldiers will be sleeping in the seats of the circus or back in the campus, on cold ground. I want a bath and I know what to do to get one. But the two of you have to stay with the wagon while I take care of it."

Odenathus' bushy black eyebrows narrowed, and he regarded his cousin with a suspicious air. "But you won't be forgetting us while we're dragging this monster wagon around the narrow streets of the city to get to the campus and enduring the foul voices of the centurions, will you? You wouldn't mind sneaking off and finding lodgings at the villa of the Palmyrene consul all by yourself? That would offer some fine lounging about in baths and steam rooms, with servants to brush your hair and trim your nails. Even, dare I say it, a handsome young slave or two to oil your back…"