"Ptolemy"- Alexandros frowned and smiled at the same time- "that rascal! He would: he would dare such a thing. Boyhood friends should never be trusted. They never show proper respect!"
Seeing that the boy was ignoring him, Gaius dragged the marble cylinder over to him and began unscrewing the top of the urn. It was old and had once been sealed with a band of bronze, but that had corroded away in the intervening centuries. Gaius' hands were quick about their work; even with the door carefully locked behind them, there was no telling if the sentries might notice something and enter the tomb to investigate. The lid was still sticking, though. Gaius rummaged in the leather bag and found a cold chisel and a mallet. The mallet's head was lead with a woolen fleece tied around it to muffle noise. He wedged the cylinder between his boots and carefully lined up the chisel.
"Who won?" Alexandros' voice was businesslike again, and the melancholy tone had vanished. "When dogs fight, a new leader rises. Was it Ptolemy? Antiochus? Pray not that panderer Seleucus!"
Gaius looked up, the mallet in one hand and the other on the top of the cylinder. "None of them, lad. In the end it was brash young Rome that won. By the time of this puppy"- he tapped the top of the cylinder with the mallet- "the Republic had overthrown all of the Diadochai- your successors- and conquered the world. Well, save for Parthia:"
Alexandros frowned and looked around the tomb as if for the first time. "This was the best you could build, after all that? It's barely bigger than a minor temple in Thebes!"
Gaius raised an eyebrow and bent again to the urn. He carefully positioned the chisel and tapped softly at it with the mallet. After a moment, and despite a seemingly enormous noise, the topbudged and then the old Roman could unscrew it.
"Pfaugh! What a must!" Gaius held the urn away from him and nodded at Alexander to hold the silk bag open. Ashes spilled out in a thin gray stream, barely filling half of the bag.
"Must have been a small fellow," Alexandros said, curiously looking into the sack.
Gaius ignored him and tied up the top of the bag with the purple string. "Take this," he said to Alexandros. "I need to replace the urn so they don't notice."
Gaius wrestled the heavy marble cylinder back into its niche, then pulled yet another bag from his belt. This one was heavy. He pulled the top open and poured the contents into the urn, his face turned away. "Ay! You're complaining about the mustiness of this? What in Hades is that?" Alexandros backed away from the niche, holding his nose closed and breathing through his mouth.
Gaius stepped back and brushed his hands off on his cloak. He was smiling broadly. "Just paying my proper respects," muttered the old Roman. "Make sure everything is picked up."
Alexandros nodded, and they checked the area around the niche carefully, obscuring any footprints in the dust and recovering their tools. There was no reason to leave any clues to their theft. Within minutes they were gone, the tiny bobbing candle vanishing upthe stairs that led to the entrance tunnel.
Outside Antioch, Roman Syria Magna
The rattle of wooden practice swords on the heavy plywood surface of a training scutum filled the air over the camp. Among the tents of the Thaumaturgic cohort was an added whine of small rotating fans that stirred the hot, dry air. In one of the larger tents, opened on one side by a raised awning, two men were sitting, discussing a third who sat opposite. The two men were sitting on triangular campstools, their boots planted firmly on the ground. The young man they were discussing stood at the center of the tent, his hands behind his back, his eyes and body showing great weariness.
"Lad's not good for much now," the first of the two sitting men said, a veteran with a barrel-like chest and sandy, short-cropped hair. " Without the rest of his five, he'll have to be assigned to a new manus."
The other, his superior officer, was a redheaded fellow with a stolid, doughy, face. He wore the dress tunic of a tribune, with a gold flash at the shoulders, and an expensive leather belt. There was a streak of grease on his left hand and a smudge by his left ear. Watery blue eyes hid behind twin circles of glass, held in a fragileseeming metal frame.
"He can't be assigned to an existing manus, one lacking a digit? There were losses at Kerenos that have not been replaced."
The tribune looked Dwyrin upand down, measuring him for the market. The Hibernian ignored him, staring dolefully over the heads of his superior officers. Since Odenathus and Zoe had left, he had been at loose ends. There was no one to practice with- all of the other thaumaturges in the cohort were at least a dozen years his senior and far beyond his skills. He had tried to keep up the daily drill, but too much of it depended on having the rest of your five in hand. The Legions taught cooperative tactics in battle thaumaturgy. In the end, all that he had been able to do was practice fire-casting, which came easily to him, anyway, and the most basic wards and signs.
Blanco frowned, considering the tribune's words. He had already thought of moving the boy into one of the empty slots in the other fives. Unfortunately, every five-leader he had approached had angrily rejected the idea. It took too long for a battle-mage group, whether of three men or five, to learn to battlecast together. No one wanted to start over with a boy of little training. Slowly, and with regret, the centurion shook his head no.
"Tribune Quintus, he will have to go to a new-formed manus with other fresh recruits."
The tribune sighed, though it was obvious that he was not concerned about the issue. He had rosters to fill out and men to shuffle about. If this boy could fill one of his tally-slots, then so much the better!
"Very well, keep an eye out for him and keep him out of trouble, Centurion. He'll be reassigned once he gets to Constantinople."
Dwyrin felt his heart sink even further. Now he truly had no place here. It would be pleasant, he thought, to smash in that cowlike face and its bland indifference to my pain. But he could not. Surely not with Blanco glowering at him, and beyond that? A soldier striking a superior officer got more than the lash, that was a surety. The thought of marching all the way back to the capital, alone and friendless, was a crushing weight.
"Dismissed," the tribune said, turning away to consider his paperwork.
Dwyrin sat alone, in darkness, under a clear night sky. The wagon had been «appropriated» by one of the other units, leaving him with only a blanket and ground cloth for shelter. He could, he supposed, get a bunk in one of the legionary tents that lined the streets of the great camp. There seemed little point in that, not with an endless succession of clear, cloudless, days and nights marking their time in the valley of the Orontes. The moon had not yet risen, letting the vast wash of stars shine in full glory above. The night wind hissed off the desert, too, as he lay on his back, the blanket rolled under his head.
He could hear men on the watch as they passed along the camp-street, complaining about the nip in the wind. That brought half a smile to his lips, even through the deep funk that had gripped him. He was a poor student of the defensive arts that so intrigued the thaumaturges, but he could control fire and heat and warmth. Even enough to summon the latent heat from the rocks that littered the field and wrapit around himself as an invisible blanket. Once, in the high mountains of Albania, he had cursed the other mages for this skill, but it had come easily to him, once he put his thought to it.
Bats wheeled and chittered overhead, hunting in the night. Their voices were indistinct, but they tugged him toward a kind of peace. Bats sounded much the same in his distant home, when they blurred over the fields of wheat and rye. For a moment he wondered why that life seemed so distant. But, in the end, it did not matter. He was sworn to the Legion and owed them twenty years of his young life. I will be in the Legion until I die. It was a mournful thought, but it felt true as he thought it.