Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

Aurelian shook his head. He did not see the point.

"You have ruled the Empire in my name for nine months now," Galen said, an acerbic edge coming into his voice. "Surely you have noted the volume of coin that passes through the Treasury just to sustain day-to-day operations? Yes? Good. I tell you this: The loot our army has brought home is enough to pay for a hundred and sixteen days of Imperial operations, a staggering sum. And that is the Imperial share! The share due the men in the Legions accounts for another hundred days' worth. Now, think of the price of bread or wine today in the marketplace. If I allow all that gold to flood into the Forum Boarium and the brothels and the shops on the Porticus Aemilla in one huge wave, prices will rise like the chariot of Apollo. That, my brother, will make the cost of daily operations for the fisc rise as well. A hundred and sixteen days will become eighty, or sixty."

"Oh," Aurelian said, at last comprehending something of what his brother was saying.

"So," Galen continued downing the last of the wine, "we do not spend all this bounty at once. Instead, we stockpile it in the Treasury and we spend it a bit at a time. The third share that each legionnaire will receive in his pay will take two years to pay out. A sufficient span of time, I think, to dilute the effect on the price of bread. I have other plans for the Imperial share, but it will not be used frivolously or extravagantly."

"Of course not." Aurelian sighed. "Never extravagant… you'll not raise a triumphal arch for this, but repair a mile of road or a bridge instead."

"My very thought." Galen snickered, putting the wine goblet aside. "Though I had my heart set on dredging the big harbor at Portus, and perhaps-if your heart can stand the excitement-restoring the old military highway through the Alpes from Mediolanum to the Lacus Brigantinus."

Aurelian made a sour face at this, and looked away in a feigned pout.

Galen clapped Aurelian on the shoulder in great good humor and turned again to look out upon the city, bright with celebration.

– |Dawn was near when Galen made his way, at last, to his rooms in the Severan wing of the palace. He was bone tired and feeling the effects of too many goblets of wine and too many garlic prawns in pepper aspic. Guardsmen in red cloaks and burnished steel breastplates opened the doors to his chambers and saluted as he passed in. The rooms were dark, barely lit by a single oil lamp that burned on the mantelpiece of a fire grate. One window was open a little, letting in a cool breath of night air. The breeze stirred the gauzy curtains that hung around his bed. It was a huge old thing, with heavy carved wooden pillars at each corner holding up thick beams of aromatic Mauretanian cedar. Once it had stood in his father's bedroom in their family home in Narbo. The door to these chambers, first built by Emperor Alexander Severus, had been specially widened to get it in.

Galen, feeling much like an overworked shopkeeper at the end of a particularly grueling day during the holiday season, kicked off his boots and pulled his tunic over his head. His entire body ached, and the beginnings of a blinding headache were lurking behind his eyes. He slumped, his head in his hands, and considered calling for one of his servants to rub him down before he went to bed.

"Husband?" A faint whisper from the vastness of the bedclothes caught his attention.

"Helena?" Galen turned, surprised. He had not received a letter from the Empress in weeks, the last coming from her villa at Catania. No one had said anything about her being in the city. Yet here she was, turned on her side, staring at him with sleepy dark brown eyes. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you… I fell asleep, though."

Galen slid under the heavy covers, feeling the glorious sensation of a freshly made bed with clean sheets at the end of a taxing day. Unexpectedly, Helena moved to press herself against him, curling around his arm and side. Her sleek dark hair tickled his nose. Nonplussed, for their last parting had been particularly bitter, he slid his arm around her and held her close. She sighed, holding him tight, and the intimacy of their embrace tickled at his heart. He had a sudden, dreadful, premonition. "Helena, are you well?" The Empress had never been a healthy woman, suffering from the cough in her youth, and prone to colds and summer flu. Galen's mind, still wound up from the long, busy day, spun in a thousand directions, finding nothing but disaster in any path it followed. "Are you sick again?"

"No, husband." There was an odd tone in her voice. With another woman, one less given to the furious single-minded pursuit of her interests, he might have thought she was laughing at him. But Helena had never mocked him. "Did you miss me while you were in the East?"

Galen made a rueful face, though she could not see it in the darkness. "Yes, I did. I regretted the words exchanged at our last parting."

She snuggled closer, running a hand across his chest. Galen caught it and brought it to his lips.

"Did you get my letters?" She was still almost asleep.

"Yes… but I thought you might take me to task again, so I did not read them. I wanted to see you myself, to apologize."

"Do you mean," she said, rousing herself from near sleep, "that you take back calling me the 'failed broodmare of a dynasty'?"

Galen flinched, feeling the echo of terrible anger in her voice. "I do," he said, kissing the crown of her head.

"Good," she said, putting her head back down on his chest. "Because it's not true anymore. I am a successful broodmare."

A bright light seemed to fill the room, blinding Galen for a moment as his normally quick mind processed the incongruous comment. It did not seem to match up with any previous conversation.

"What?" Somehow it was all that he could manage.

"I became pregnant the last time that we lay together," Helena said, raising her head again and enunciating carefully. "I bore you a son, a healthy son, three weeks ago."

"You did?"

"I did. He is here now, in the palace, in the care of domina Anna from your house at Cumae."

"I have a son?" Galen was puzzled; why did he keep repeating himself?

"Huh. As brilliant as ever. Go back to sleep."

Galen lay in the darkness, wondering if there could be a more perfect day in all the history of the world. Eventually, without noticing it, he fell asleep.

The Hill Above Palmyra

"There!" Zoe gasped in exhaustion as she hauled herself up over the last pitch of rock. Negotiating the glassy lip of the waterfall had been a tricky piece of business. Two great sandstone boulders towered over her, jutting from the side of the dry canyon like the pillars of a temple. Under them was a little shade, and she collapsed into it, ignoring the pain of long scratches on her arms and legs, and the parched feeling in her mouth. Sitting, she untangled the cord of her broad-brimmed straw hat from her neck. The canyon fell away below her, lit by the unceasing sun and shimmering with heat. Acres of tumbled stone and cracked tumulus lay below her perch, bare and dry. The canyon bottom itself wound down out of the barren hills that crouched above the city, a narrow thing carved by intermittent rains. Thornbush and gnarled little trees clogged the stream bottom, making passage up it almost impossible. But she had come, following the faint trail of many men over sand and rock.

It had led her up here, to these sentinels on the mountainside. A hundred feet below she had found a lost buckle, still relatively new, and it had pointed her into this draw that plunged down the side of the mountain. On the gray-green trees that clung to the rocks she had found the marks of cord and the knives of men. Something heavy had been dragged upward, carried in a sling of ropes. It had come here.