Steve White - The Disinherited 02 - Legacy

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Legacy by Steve White

PROLOGUE - 469 A.D.

"It is, of course, premature to congratulate you, my dear Sidonius. We

must observe the proprieties and wait until your election has become

official." Bishop Faustus of Riez chuckled patronizingly. "Nevertheless, we

all know that the final decision is a mere formality. I have absolutely no

doubt that I will soon—perhaps before the year is out—be able to greet you

as a colleague in Christ, our new Bishop of Clermont!"

Sidonius Apollinaris inclined his head graciously and wrapped his cloak

more tightly around his shoulders against the unseasonably raw wind

blowing in from the Bay of Biscay on this overcast spring afternoon.

Amazing that it's so chilly, given the amount of hot air Faustus pumps

out! He immediately regretted the thought—the old man had been a

staunch supporter in his own maneuverings for the Bishopric of Clermont.

Not that Sidonius' lack of clerical background had been any handicap—he

wouldn't be the first bishop to start that way. And being the son-in-law of

Avitus, who had briefly been Emperor of the West, certainly didn't hurt.

Still, Faustus deserved his gratitude. And as one of the most distinguished

churchmen in Gaul he certainly merited courtesy, especially in light of his

parentage— the parentage that no one ever mentioned in his hearing.

"Thank you, Excellency," Sidonius said in his courtier's voice. "I have

looked forward to this opportunity to personally convey my belated best

wishes upon your birthday." Maybe that was part of the problem; Faustus

had never been one to use ten words where twenty would do, but now that

he had attained the exceptional age of sixty he was getting positively

garrulous. A man of his years had no business out here shivering with the

rest of the welcoming committee. But of course it was incumbent upon

him to be here. And he was hardly in a position to be fulfilling his duties

in Riez just now.

Sidonius, on the other hand, had more or less invited himself. No one

had really tried to discourage him. As a distinguished landowner of the

Auvergne, litterateur of some note, city prefect of Rome until recently, and

the likely Bishop of Clermont, he carried too much weight for anyone to

openly object to his presence. And, despite the hazards and hardships of

traveling, he was not about to miss this chance to meet the man who, he

suspected, was the most remarkable of the many with whom he had

corresponded. The man who had set in motion the scene before them here

in the Loire estuary.

The fleet of ships had sailed as far inland as the Loire was navigable,

anchoring here near Nantes. That the island of Britain had produced such

a swarm of seagoing craft had generated unspoken amazement. But they

all knew that the High King Riothamus had revived the old Saxon Shore

Fleet, as he was trying to revive so much else. Before long, a procession of

boats had started bringing ashore the carefully bred warhorses that had

carried Riothamus' famous cavalry galloping over Saxon and Pict,

fetlock-deep in barbarian blood.

Now now, let's not wax poetic, Sidonius chided himself.

I've written so many congratulatory poems—to poor old Avitus, and

then to Majorian a few months later, and now to Anthemius—that it's in

danger of becoming a joke. Besides, unlike them, Riothamus isn't

Emperor of the West. Yet.

Or is he something more?

Now, wherever did such a strange thought come from?

He grew aware of Faustus' drone. "Yes, my dear Sidonius, I am

certainly not getting any younger. My health, by God's mercy, continues to

be good, though my eyesight has deserted me to such an extent that

writing has become quite impossible, And I fear my joints will not soon let

me forget this damp chill today. I know full well that I cannot expect to

weather many more winters."

"Come, Excellency! You'll bury us all."

"No, I do not complain—especially if I depart leaving you as Bishop of

Clermont. For I know that you will be a voice for the true Catholic faith in

the councils of the Church in Gaul! Otherwise, I fear my soul would depart

burdened by the sin of despair. Everywhere, all around us, the Arian

heresy rises like a tide, threatening to drown us all in damnation with its

horrid, perverse doctrine that the Father and the Son are of like

substance, rather than the same substance, as every true Christian must

affirm…" Color mounted in Faustus' cheeks, and Sidonius knew there was

no stopping him now.

Faustus was bound to be a fire-eater on the subject of heretics, having

only last year been driven from his bishopric and sent scurrying to

Soissons by the Arian Visigoths. Earnest theologians all, Sidonius

reflected drily. No doubt they debated the nature of the Trinity while

stealing the candelabra. But Faustus' obsession dated back much further

than that—back to his youth on the misty island that had put forth the

fleet now filling the Loire estuary.

Old as Faustus was, it still came as a shock to realize that he had been

born just a couple of years after the day—the last day of 406, to be

exact—when the Suevi and Vandals and their rabble of allies had crossed

the frozen Rhine into a Gaul that had been stripped of troops by Stilicho

to defend Italy, and the world had begun to go horribly wrong.

No hope had existed for the provincials of Gaul save the legions of

Britain, which had landed under the usurped command of a lowborn lout

whose only recommendation was the auspicious name of Constantine. The

barbarians had continued their looting undisturbed while the Empire had

put down his clownish bid for the purple, and Alaric the Visigoth had

raped inviolate Rome herself, shattering the spell of centuries. Afterwards,

the Empire had hired the Visigoths to slaughter their fellow barbarians,

paying them with the lands of southwestern Gaul—which they were now

finding too narrow—and people told each other that all was restored. But

the restoration was a patchwork thing—and it did not include Britain,

which the Emperor Honorius had graciously permitted to arm itself while

awaiting succor from an Empire that had none to give.

So the Britons, left without the troops who had followed Constantine to

the continent and to their deaths, just as their fathers had followed

Magnus Maximus to theirs in 383—no question about it, that island was

almost as notable for usurpers as it was for inedible cooking—had placed

themselves under the protection of powerful landowners. Some were

half-pagan brutes, like Ceredig and Cunedda on the frontiers. But others

had had larger ideas, like Vortigern of the Gewessei. As a youth he had

married the considerably older Sevira, daughter of Magnus Maximus, the

larger than life Spanish adventurer whose name was still one to conjure

with among the Britons. The matrilineal ideas of the native Celtic people

had never altogether died out, and the mana of Maximus had descended

through Sevira, whose mother had been British.

Vortigern's primacy among the British lords had been one fruit of that

marriage; Faustus had been another.

Looking at the self-satisfied old man before him, Sidonius tried—and

failed—to imagine Faustus as a rebellious youth. What had touched the

son of the newly installed High King of Britain? Had it been Vortigern's

second marriage? The story was that Faustus never referred to Vortigern's

second wife as anything other than "the pagan sow." Sidonius had always

felt that Vortigern had been blamed too harshly for his solution to the

Pictish threat, in the early days of his High Kingship. He had merely been

following a time-honored Roman precedent by using barbarian foederatii,

even as the Empire had used the Visigoths. But if the Visigoths were

barbarians, then the Saxons were,howling savages, untouched even by

heretical forms of Christianity. They reeked of the old death cults from

Europe's foggy, sinister North— the same breed of two-legged beasts who

had established themselves here on the lower Loire. And Vortigern,

lacking the Empire's ability to overawe them, had married the daughter of

their chieftain, replacing Sevira who had died giving birth to a second son

at an age beyond that at which most women bore children… or, for that

matter, lived.

Or was the official reason the true one? Vortigern, while seeking a

popular base for his artificial High Kingship, had sponsored the Pelagian

heresy that had won the hearts of many of the islanders. Sidonius lacked

Faustus' fervor on the subject of heresy in general; had he not visited the

Visigothic court at Toulouse during the reign of the late lamented

Theoderic II and found it almost disturbingly refreshing in its simplicity?

But the British-born Pelagius had gone beyond metaphysical

hairsplitting—he had actually denied original sin, and asserted the

freedom of the individual—even individuals of the lower orders— to make

autonomous moral choices! It had all died down, but Sidonius still

shuddered at the thought of such madness. Did the man really have no

conception of the chaos he could have loosed on the world?

At any rate, the young Faustus' two wellsprings of discontent had

flowed together in his twentieth year. Vortigern had married Renwein the

Saxon, and Bishop Germanus of Auxerre had landed in Britain to combat

heresy, furiously anathematizing the High King. Faustus had publicly

broken with his heretic father and joined the church in protest, departing

for the continent with Germanus. Vortigern had never been the same

again. Renwein had failed to produce a male heir, and as the years passed,

the Saxons had changed from watchdogs to wolves, tearing at the throat

of Britain. In his last years, Vortigern had been a shadowy, almost

pathetic figure. He became more and more detached from the epic of

resistance, whose hero, Ambrosius Aurelianus, had refused to seek the

High Kingship even while Vortigern was letting it slip away. Instead

Ambrosius, a Roman of the old school, had entered the service of the new

High King, who had caught the scepter before it could slip into

nothingness, and consigned Vortigern to a twilight so obscure that his

very death had gone unremarked.

Apparently, Faustus was talking even more than usual to calm his

apprehension at meeting the man who had held the British High Kingship

to which Faustus—son of Vortigern and grandson of Maxim us—arguably

had a better right. The old bishop had long ago relinquished all political

ambitions… but would Riothamus know that?

Faustus paused for breath in mid-tirade and Sidonius, hearing

Tertullian's diffident cough behind him, turned gratefully.

"A thousand pardons, Prefect," his secretary said, giving him as a

courtesy the title he had only recently relinquished. "The High King is

coming ashore, and the other distinguished lords request your presence—

and yours, Excellency—on the beach."

"Thank you, Tertullian. Shall we go, Excellency?" They started down the

path from the bluff, Tertullian following at a discreet distance.

"Where did you find him?" Faustus asked in a voice touched with the

sin of envy.

"He came from nowhere and joined my staff in Rome," Sidonius

replied. "His references were a bit obscure, but I'm glad I took him on in

spite of all the mystery. He's made himself absolutely indispensable to me,

as you know."

Faustus did know. He shot a surreptitious look backwards at Sidonius'

secretary. "But where is he originally from? He's not a Gaul, obviously."

"I couldn't help being curious about that myself. He told me that his

family originally came from India, in the time of the late Republic when

there were still Greek-ruled states there. He says they moved west, living

in Mesopotamia until the Sassanids took over, later moving to Italy and

becoming completely Romanized. Of course," he added emphatically, "he's

a Christian of unimpeachable orthodoxy, as all his family have been for

some time."

Privately, Sidonius was still a bit curious. Tertullian didn't look much

like an Indian—at least as he visualized the inhabitants of that far off

subcontinent. He might have a lot of Persian and Syrian blood, but still…

They rounded a bend in the trail, and the delegation stood before them

on the beach. It was a fair-sized group, as it must be to represent all the

factions involved. Caesar, Caesar! How many parts would you say Gaul

is divided into now? At least five, Sidonius thought: the Visigoths of the

southwest; the British colonies of Armorica (or Little Britain as it was

being called), whose allegiance was to Riothamus; the Burgundians of the

southeast, barbarians but fairly reliable Roman allies; and the two whose

representatives stepped forward now.

"Greetings Excellency, Prefect," said Syagrius, King of the Romans, as

he had styled himself since succeeding to the Kingdom of Soissons, which

his father Aegidius had set up twelve years ago while loudly proclaiming

his continued loyalty to the Empire whose general he had been. Sidonius

suppressed a smile, for it was a title no one had held since Tarquin the

Proud, of whom Syagrius had probably never heard. Contrary to the

general rule that successful usurpers' heirs were cultivated idlers, Syagrius

was neither. He was, however, capable of a dignified courtesy.

"We are all delighted that you could be here, Sidonius," he continued,

"even though it represents a considerable detour in your journey home

from Rome."

"So it does, your Majesty," Sidonius acknowledged. "But I could not

resist the chance to meet the High King of the Britons, with whom I have

corresponded…"

"As you have with so many!" Arvandus, outgoing Praetorian Prefect of

Gaul cut in, skirting the edge of rudeness. "Sidonius, you are almost as

eminent a letter-writer as you are a poet. We all look forward to the

panegyric you will undoubtedly compose for our British ally."

Sidonius sighed. Yes, perhaps he had overdone it with his verses. Some

felt that he might have waited just a little longer after his father-in-law

had been murdered before dedicating a poem to his successor Majorian.

All right, maybe it was a bit unseemly. But I am not just a shallow

flatterer, whatever some may claim! Let's be honest. I probably would

not have supported Avitus if he had not been Papianilla's father. On the

other hand, Majorian had real potential. He could have become the new

Restorer, the new Aurelian or Diocletian or Constantine. Majorian could

have set the Empire back on course. It has always been restored after the

storms of the past, with a strong new hand on the steering-sweep. It

must happen again!

Syagrius addressed Arvandus with a frown. "Doubtless, Sidonius is

waiting for the coming triumphs which will inform his muse, Prefect. As

all Romans" —he pointedly included himself— "await our joint victories

over the barbarians… ."

"Which we shall win for the Greek Emperor!" Arvandus grinned

recklessly amid the frigid shock that followed. The grin almost banished

the now habitual bitterness from his face, and made him as handsome as

he had been thought to be when he had become Prefect five years earlier.

His charm had enabled him at first to make a success of an increasingly

meaningless post. But his second term was shadowed by a rash

accumulation of debts, and the exactions which he had been accused of by

certain prominent Gauls. He was now in a kind of limbo: officially out of

office, called to Rome to answer charges, but still publicly treated as

Prefect in the absence of a successor. So his presence embarrassed

everyone, and he clearly relished the opportunity to embarrass them even

more by giving vent to his well-known feelings about Anthemius, the

"Greek Emperor" of the West.

"I also wrote Anthemius a panegyric, Prefect," Sidonius said mildly. "It

may be cause for regret that our own failure to set our house in order has

forced the Eastern Emperor to appoint an Augustus for the West. But we

may at least be thankful that Emperor Leo chose a man of character and

ability." The Restorer? Possibly. At hast he had the initiative to try a

departure from policy when King Euric's aggressions became so blatant

as to exceed even our capacity for self-deception. Instead of playing yet

another horde of barbarians off against the Visigoths, he turned to our

British former provincials, who are only

keeping civilization precariously alive in the face of their own

barbarians.

The British alliance had been handled well. Anthemius' masterstroke

had been his proposal that an attack on the Saxons of the lower Loire be

the first order of business. Riothamus had had to agree. Those sea raiders

had been preying on his subjects in Armorica for many years. Now that he

and Ambrosius had drubbed the British Saxons into a semblance of good

behavior, they constituted his chief military problem. He could not pass

up an opportunity to solve that problem at its root. Afterwards, the allies

would advance inland, keeping north of the Rhone until reaching Berry,

where they would turn south and threaten Euric, while shielding the

Auvergne.

Yes, Sidonius thought, Anthemius is clever. But can he muster the

support he needs in the West? Or are there too many like Arvandus?

The damnable thing was, he couldn't help liking Arvandus, who was an

old friend—as were a couple of his accusers. Maybe it's true that I'm too

easy to get along with. Too accommodating, as Papianilla says. And

says. And says. Sidonius sighed. He was glad he was no longer City

Prefect, for he would have been forced to become involved in Arvandus'

prosecution. This delegation was the outgoing Praetorian Prefects last

semiofficial act before departing for Rome. I shall advise him to deny

everything.

"Sidonius is right," said Syagrius, on whom Arvandus' charm had

always been lost. 'This alliance is long overdue. My father and I have

always found the High King to be reliable in keeping his commitments."

"High King! This British self-styled royalty of usurpers and barbarians

has so little trace of legitimacy that he must claim it through Magnus

Maximus, another usurper, although admittedly one with a certain

style…" Belatedly, Arvandus noticed the look in Syagrius' eyes and realized

what he had been saying. He trailed to a halt with as good grace as he

could manage. Even in a mood of embittered recklessness, one did not

speak of usurpers in the presence of the King of the Romans.

Syagrius glared for a long moment of what was not really silence—the

seabirds and the disembarking army saw to that—but seemed to be.

Finally, he spoke in a voice chillier than the late afternoon wind. "The fact

remains, Prefect" —he stressed the title, emphasizing that Arvandus was

still receiving it only by courtesy— "that this alliance has been entered into

by the Augustus of the West, and we must all strive to effectuate his

policy. And," he continued, indicating the beach to the west with a

sweeping gesture, "we will never be in a better military position."

No one argued with him. The throng on the beach was growing steadily

as the boats continued to ply back and forth across the shallows. The

crowd was sorting itself out with the unforced orderliness of an army of

veterans. The bulk of it was composed of the trained and disciplined

infantry so rarely seen anymore—unarmored archers and javelin men, and

the heavy shock troops that were Ambrosius' creation, with their

ring-mail lorica hamata, large round shield, and visorless helmet with

moveable cheek-pieces. But what made this army special was the heavy

cavalry that was coming ashore now—Riothamus' unique

contribution—and his birthright. And he was arriving with them.

An honor guard of dismounted cavalry was forming up, fully turned out

in scarlet cloaks. The men carried shields smaller than the infantrymen's,

and these were painted with garish kinship symbols. They wore standard

helmets, but did not bear the long lances that were their chief weapon.

Their scale hauberks and the longspatha hanging at each man's side, like

the dark hawklike look in some of their faces, reflected the origins of the

core around which Riothamus had built a cavalry that might, at anything

close to even odds, have given the cataphractii of the Eastern Empire

pause.

Arvandus seemed to read his thoughts. "Ironic, isn't it, Sidonius? A

descendant of barbarian auxiliaries that we Romans posted to Britain

almost three centuries ago now comes as our savior from admitted

barbarians!"

Syagrius overheard him. He visibly controlled his fury, and spoke in a

tight voice. "As you point out, Prefect, it has been centuries since the

auxiliary cavalry arrived in Britain—centuries in which they have served

Rome loyally. And by now, their descendants, including the High King, are

less Sarmatian than they are British and Roman in blood."

"And," Faustus put in, "most importantly, his Christian orthodoxy is

unquestioned."

"And," Sidonius added diplomatically, "he is now approaching."

The High King's boat was inconspicuous, like all the fleet, with sails of

the same light blue-grey as the sailors' tunics. What an extraordinary

idea, Sidonius thought. A color scheme designed to make it harder for

your enemy to see you! Who ever heard of the like? But there was no

mistaking the man it carried, for the blood-red dragon that accompanied

him everywhere soared and swooped above him as the wind filled the

sleeve-like cloth device that was yet another vestige of the steppes. That

banner had Med the Saxons with superstitious terror when they had first

encountered it. Now it filled them with entirely rational terror.

As the boat drew ashore, two sailors jumped into the surf with lines to

draw it up on the beach. The delegation advanced to meet the man who

stepped onto the wet sand. And as he did, the clouds parted for the first

time in hours, and the westering sun blazed behind him, making him

momentarily invisible and dazzling Sidonius' eyes. When he could see

again, Riothamus stood before him.

An omen? So our pagan ancestors, who worshipped Mithras the

Unconquered Sun, would have thought. But not enlightened Christian

men, of course.

So why does the skin at the nape of my neck prickle?

It was strangely hard to concentrate on anyone else in the High King's

presence. Not because of any outward display of magnificence; he was

unarmored, bareheaded, and dressed in the same red and white tunic,

with horseman's leggings, as his cataphractii. But Sidonius never felt the

slightest uncertainty as to who this man was. Neither, apparently, had

Syagrius, who had stepped forward and was exchanging stately courtesies

with him. No, it was some indefinable quality of the man himself, so

compelling that the beach, the fleet, the town of Nantes to the east, the

soldiers, and the dignitaries all seemed mere background in a painting of

which he was the subject—a drab background.

Riothamus was strongly built but only moderately tall. And yet it did

not seem strange to Sidonius that people always described the High King

as towering. His thick dark hair and beard were trimmed with a neatness

that he could never hope to maintain in the field, and were barely touched

with grey in his forty-second year. His features were strongly marked, his

eyes an intensely dark brown under thick black brows. He moved with a

Steve White - The Disinherited 02 - Legacy

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