The Centurion's Empire by Sean McMullen

Vespus wondered.
    "Do you wish to rub a little onto—"
    "No! No, but, well, perhaps it ensures that boy children will be born from a coupling." Lars was impressed. For all his trepidation, Vespus had some skill with lateral thought.
    "Now that could well be a use for it. Wealthy families would pay a fortune to be sure of an heir. If one person controlled the supply of such an oil he would command silver by the barrowload."
    The inner area was strangely quiet, and the very lack of guards made them uneasy. Once he had rested, Vespus took-off the extra gear that he had been carrying and crawled away across the tiles to explore.
    Lars sat alone, longing for Rome, for the familiarity of crowded streets and densely packed buildings, for the roadway of roofs above the streets and alleys that he could run as easily as a cat. Here there was a villa within a fort, but beyond it was nothing but mountains and snow. Once the alarm was raised the pursuers might hunt them down like wild boars; there was no maze of alleyways, roofs, and trapdoors in which they could lose themselves. He looked about again. A villa within a fort, a palace of sorts. The Upper Palace was isolated by a moat and a high wall, and within that wall were only the Temporians. By day some slaves were brought in to do the cleaning and carrying, slaves carefully selected for dull wits. The guards were never admitted. Lars could make no sense of it, except to deduce that something of immense value was being concealed.
    In a hall not far from where Lars crouched, every Temporian in the Upper Palace sat in conference discussing the death of Celcinius. His blood was still on the speakers' dais, and nobody had been willing to either clean away the stain or even set foot on the dais since their founder had died there.
    "He died of a failed heart, and the fall which followed cracked his head open," Doria explained wearily, but her audience was not really interested. The death of Celcinius was inconvenient, it forced issues into the open.
    "But why did his heart fail?" asked Levites.
    "He was ninety-four years old! The shock of revival is dangerous enough for a person half of his age." If Lars could have seen the hall he would have been even more perplexed. The Temporians sat on purple cushions in concentric ranks of semicircular stone benches. Both men
    and women wore silk trousers and tunics under a purple-edged toga praetexta . . . except that they were not true togas. They were made of silk, had voluminous sleeves, and were tied at the waist by a pinned silk belt. On their feet were sandals, but of a buckled design, and nothing like those that the Roman mortals wore. It was as if some distant Chinese court was having a costume party with a Roman theme. The moderator stood beside the blood-smeared dais as the rest of the company debated.
    "He was our founder," wailed Tullius theatrically. He was one of the more recent recruits, and was barely a century old.
    "He was the man who transformed Rome from just another walled city into what it is today. Without him we're lost."
    "Lost?" sneered Levites. "We have been without him for five years out of every six since we were founded."
    "But in dangerous times we always had him to call upon."
    "You rave. Was he revived during Caligula's rule? Or that of Nero? The greatest possible insult to Celcinius would be to say that his work was so poor that we could not survive without him. He was one of the three who shared the secret of the Venenum Immortale, but Lucian and his student are still alive and there is a full store of Venenum left, enough to last through many centuries. Celcinius should be given a hero's funeral, then we must go back to maintaining and expanding his empire."
    Lucian stood to speak. "Were I to die now the secret of the Venenum Immortale would not be lost. Quintemes has had enough training to brew up usable Venenum, yet I am worried that there are only two of us. We need to have more of our number trained in its