The Dark Lord

the rebellious Greek city-states had found the mercenaries, but he doubted they were being paid in any mortal coin. Luckily, not many of the religious zealots seemed to be with this wing of the Persian army.

After breaking through at Pelusium, the Persians had split their army into two columns. One advanced along the northerly axis of the Boutikos canal, a waterway running across the Nile delta from east to west. This force, as far as Aurelian had seen, seemed to be composed mostly of the Persians and the infantry contingents of their allies. A second force—the main body of the Greek rebels and the Persian horse—had swung south, taking the Roman military road sweeping along the southern edge of the delta. The hard-surfaced road was the long way 'round, but passable for cavalry. Both canal and highway led, inevitably, to the gates of Alexandria.

'Runner!' Aurelian called, swinging down from the wagon. A legionary turned toward him, bare head swathed in bandages. One eye watched the prince, the other obscured by a ruined flap of skin. The prince looked him over, feeling the constant sick churning in his stomach spike. He recognized the man—one of the young patricians who had joined his expedition to learn how to be an officer.

'Caius, get over to the left and tell whoever's in charge to disperse his men.' Bitter anger was plain in the prince's voice. This campaign forced a harsh new reality even on the tradition-bound legionaries. Standing in steady lines, shoulder to shoulder, was sure death if one of the Persian sorcerers was nearby. 'When the reserves come up, they must advance in loose order! No bunching up!'

The legionary jogged off, disappearing into a stand of willows. Aurelian waved his bodyguards and aides over. 'Where's the next place we can dig in?'

'Fifteen miles west, lord Caesar,' grunted Scortius, his head of engineers, waving toward the water. 'This canal we've been falling back along crosses the Bolbinitis channel beyond the town of Bouto.' Aurelian saw a flash of despair in the older man's expression.

'How far to Alexandria from there?' the prince asked softly.

'Less than fifty miles.' Scortius looked lost, his craggy old face slack with exhaustion. Only decades of strictly-held Legion discipline kept the veteran from weeping. The prince clenched his own jaw, measuring distances in his mind. Scortius took a breath and continued. 'From the crossing over the Bolbinitis, the canal runs straight southwest into the Kanobikos channel at Hierakonpolis and meets up with the military highway from the south. That's the next place to make a stand.' Scortius swallowed. 'Unless Fourth Scythia has been flanked down south... then the pus-eating Persians could be behind us already.'

Aurelian put his hand on the upright of the wagon to keep from swaying. His stomach turned over again, a hot coal of pain burning down in his gut. Nothing impressed Aurelian about the Persian preparations for this campaign more than their provision of shallow-draft boats. Poled by skilled river men—from Mesopotamia, doubtless—the King of King's river flotilla let the invaders use any canal or arm of the Nile as a swift means of advance. Aurelian and his officers struggled to keep from thinking of water as a defensive barrier. Against this enemy, a river was a broad road. 'Can we block the canal?'

Scortius shook his head, gray hair hanging lank beside his face. 'We can fill the canal with mud or bricks or block it with sunken boats—but they've the men to clear most any obstruction we can put in. And if we're forced back to the main channel of the Nile? The river's a quarter-mile wide! We don't have the men, material or time to make a dam.'

'Very well,' Aurelian replied, forcing confidence into his voice. Can't spook the men with my own fear. 'We fall back to the Bolbinitis as we've done the past week, cohorts alternating. All wounded into boats and back to Alexandria at best speed. Scortius, get your engineers back to Hierakonpolis as fast as you can. If the gods smile even a little bit, the Fourth Scythia has kept the Arabs at bay and they won't be blocking our retreat.'

The engineer nodded wearily, knuckling sweat from his eyes.

'At Hierakonpolis...' the prince continued, trying to marshal fatigue-addled memories, 'the military highway comes up from the south, goes over the Boutikos canal, then makes a turn west and vaults the Nile channel. Both crossings are arched bridges. Use the stone—I remember enormous granite pilings and a heavy roadbed—to block the canal. We'll make a stand at Hiera on the eastern bank. If we have to retreat again, we'll use the Nile bridge, then destroy the main span.' Aurelian summoned up a feeble grin. 'That should make a fair barrier for their damned boats.'

'Yes, my lord.' Scortius nodded. 'We'll do what we can.'

—|—

A column of legionaries tramped past, heads bent in exhaustion, the setting sun throwing a hot glare in their faces. The air was so muggy their passage didn't even raise a pall of dust from the road. Instead, their hobnailed sandals squelched wetly in a slurry of watery mud. Aurelian squatted in the shade of a farmhouse gate, a courier's pouch opened on the ground in front of him. His guardsmen were sound asleep under the eaves of an abandoned stable, their boots lying out on a bricked patio, drying in the last remnant of the day.

The prince brushed flies away from face, reading the dispatches with a steadily sinking heart. The governor of Lower Egypt was in a panic, urgently requesting troops from Aurelian to police the port and streets of Alexandria. So many citizens had fled, crowding any ship sailing west or north, that refugees flooding in from the countryside had begun looting the abandoned shops and houses. Squatting and larceny was the order of the day. Civil order, in the opinion of the governor, was close to collapse. Crushing the papyrus sheet into a crumpled ball, Aurelian pitched the letter aside. There will be order aplenty, when we're forced back to the city, he thought savagely. I'll deal with this fool of a governor then, if he's still there. And any looters.

The other dispatches revealed more by their lack than their words—no fresh Legions to bolster his shrinking, battered army. The Imperial fleet was nowhere to be found. Civilian shipping left the Portus Magnus in a constant stream but did not return. He rubbed his face, looking at the straw pallets with longing. There was only one dispatch left—a crumpled, stained packet bound with red twine. He picked it up with thumb and forefinger, feeling a chill steal over him.

A letter from my brother, he realized. What now? Aurelian leaned back against the wall and cut the binding away with a sharp slash of his hand knife. Despite the poor condition of the missive, the wax seal was intact and the prince doubted anyone had dared read the contents. Unfolding the parchment, he frowned—this wasn't his brother's neat, economical printing. Instead, the letter was penned in a graceful, flowing hand, though there were abrupt amendments and several struck-out words.

'Why did Helena write this?' he grumbled, scanning the closely set lines. As he read, his frown deepened. The letter, rambling and obviously dictated in haste, contained no orders, no privy news, in fact nothing of a military nature. Aurelian flicked a green-blue bottle fly away from his nose, puzzled. This read like the correspondence of two patrician landowners with absolutely nothing to say to one another. Even the opening was odd—beginning with their boyhood nickname rather than a formal salutation. Horse, he read, starting over. The weather is very fine, with rains and sun and clear... A strikeout interrupted the sentence.

A wagon rumbled past—portions of the farm road were footed with brick, making them passable even during the wet season. The prince looked up, raising a hand in salute to the latest detachment of soldiers passing by. These men were covered with mud, spades canted over their shoulders. They stumbled past, barely raising their heads to greet the prince. At the end of the column, two weary figures trailed behind a huge-wheeled wagon, dozens of empty dirt hods hanging from leather straps on a pole between them. One of the men squinted at Aurelian as he passed.

The prince saluted the two engineers, but his mind was so dulled he couldn't muster the breath to speak their names aloud. Neither Frontius nor Sextus answered, though they did nod in response. Aurelian looked back to the paper. Something—a memory? A clear thought?—was trying to force its way into his consciousness. Thoughts of sleep and a hot bath battled for his attention, but there was no chance of rest, or leisure, not while the Persians harried his army so closely.

Tomorrow, there would be another—not a battle, but a running skirmish—as the Persian vanguard tried to overwhelm his rear guard. The easterners were tenacious and their generals were taking far too much delight in the slow, methodical destruction of the Roman army. Like boys torturing a fly, or a spider caught in a loft, or a lame dog that couldn't run away.

The elusive memory surfaced, buoyed up by a brief vision of a very young Galen painstakingly writing out a school lesson, sitting at the big, wide table in their mother's kitchen. Aurelian picked up the letter again, feeling the