Burning Shadows: A Novel of the Count Saint-Germain (Saint-Germain series Book 23) Read online

  Burning Shadows

  By Chelsea Quinn Yarbro from Tom Doherty Associates

  Ariosto

  Better in the Dark

  Blood Games

  Blood Roses

  Borne in Blood

  A Candle for D’Artagnan

  Come Twilight

  Communion Blood

  Crusader’s Torch

  A Dangerous Climate

  Dark of the Sun

  Darker Jewels

  A Feast in Exile

  A Flame in Byzantium

  Hotel Transylvania

  Mansions of Darkness

  Out of the House of Life

  The Palace

  Path of the Eclipse

  Roman Dusk

  States of Grace

  Writ in Blood

  BURNING

  SHADOWS

  A NOVEL OF THE COUNT SAINT-GERMAIN

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  BURNING SHADOWS: A NOVEL OF THE COUNT SAINT-GERMAIN

  Copyright © 2009 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn, 1942–

  Burning shadows : a novel of the Count Saint-Germain / Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-1982-1

  1. Saint-Germain, comte de, d. 1784—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3575.A7B87 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2009034661

  First Edition: December 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  Christine Sullivan

  with additional nods and catnip to

  Crumpet,

  Butterscotch,

  and

  Ekaterina the Great,

  who helped whether I needed it or not

  The Huns set all the huts and barns outside the walls afire shortly before sunset, then rode around the town walls, firing arrows, many of them deep-barbed, some of them aflame, into the town.

  In spite of our attempts to strike them down from the top of our walls, we had little success against them, for the firelight and smoke turned the mounted warriors into burning shadows, and we could not see them clearly for long enough to take good aim at them.

  Gregorius Mirandus, Secondary Praetor of Mursella,

  Report on an attack near Aquincum, May 441

  Author’s Note

  Until the rise of Attila (pronounced, despite all you have heard to the contrary, AH-teel-lah), the Huns had been just another one of the many groups of barbarians moving toward Europe through what are now the Crimea, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Carpathian and the Balkan Mountains. They were known as raiders and looters, no better and no worse than many others but for their persistence. Although the stirrup had not yet been invented, the Huns had superior saddlery that gave them a significant advantage against the divided Roman Empire in combat. The Huns who did not ride traveled by tall carts, and those who did, did so on sturdy Steppe ponies, bringing their flocks of goats and sheep and their herds of ponies with them, looking for undisputed pastureland. To support their westward expansion, they hired out as mercenaries to the newly flourishing Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, particularly in its remoter outposts where many ambitious Constantinopolitans preferred not to serve; in general they were well regarded by their Byzantine employers, and often achieved high rank as well as a generous portion of any spoils they gained while in Byzantine service. Compared to what the Vandals were doing in Spain, North Africa, and Italy, the Huns before Attila had been hardly more than an annoyance, worth the inconvenience of occasional raids so long as they continued to fill the distant Byzantine ranks as mercenaries.

  Recent discoveries have revealed that the Huns were more ethnically mixed than originally thought; some had blue or gray eyes, and many of them had brown or reddish hair, not unlike the mysterious mummies found in western China. Apparently they began as nomadic herders in the Asian Steppes; certainly their early style of fighting was based on their herding, rounding up their opponents with cavalry and picking them off with arrows.

  Attila changed all that, taking on the conquest-intentions of the Romans, with the purpose of establishing an empire that would reach from the North Sea to the Middle East. Following in the footsteps of his uncle, who had sought to gain political and economic control of the Carpathian region as well as permanent military conquests there, Attila intended to gain dominance of as much of Europe as he could. In the nearly twenty years from the time he murdered his brother Bleda (around 433–34) and assumed total leadership of his people until his death (453), Attila was the absolute authority for the Huns; under him they became a formidable army, preying on the remnants of the Roman Empire. Rome itself was still recovering from the sacking given to the city by Alaric the Goth in 410, and had lost a great many of the Legions as a result of Alaric’s conquest.

  The high mobility of the mounted Huns gave them an advantage against the better-trained but less flexible and largely infantry Roman Legions, which were already stretched thin fighting the Vandals, the Longobards, and the Goths, as well as being less willing to undertake protracted campaigns due to reduced wages and limited arms and matériel. At the height of his power (447–452), Attila had taken military control from central Gaul to Persia, from Serbia to Poland. Once he died, it took less than two years for the Hunnic Empire to fall apart.

  Huns were only one of the many problems confronting the Roman Empire, East and West. In the three centuries since its maximum expansion, the Roman Empire had been losing ground steadily to various barbarian peoples; even parts of the Empire that were still nominally Roman were in actuality fiefdoms of barbarian groups who encouraged the Roman presence because Romans improved trade, maintained financial continuity, and honored standards of exchange, weights, and measures. The Byzantine Emperor continued the Roman practice of appointing non-Roman regional guardians for borderland territories to continue Western Roman policies after the Romans and Byzantines were officially gone from the edges of the Empire. Much of what had been the Province of Dacia in what are now Hungary and Romania had been lost to the Germanic Gepidae, the Ostro (Eastern) Goths, and Visi (Western) Goths, who in turn were being pushed west by Avars, Alans, and Huns coming in from Central Asia.

 
As I have mentioned before, in Blood Games, at the suggestion of my editor, I set up the names of the fictional characters along present-day name order—personal name, family name, clan name (Atta Olivia Clemens), instead of the Roman order: personal name, clan name, family name (Atta Clemens Olivia)—but by the time of this novel there had been considerable shifts in Roman nomenclature traditions, and only the oldest aristocratic families in the Western Roman Empire kept to the old personal-clan-family order.

  By 400 CE, while Rome itself was being hard-pressed by the Goths, the Hungarian plains and most of the Carpathian Mountains had fallen under the control of the Gepidae, one of the Germanic tribes driven down from the north toward the Black Sea, and the might of the Roman Empire in the East, which was increasingly separate from the Roman Empire in the West, despite continuing high-flown rhetoric about unity. During most of the fifth century CE, exact boundaries and territorial borders in the region were far from fixed. The Gepidae seized most of the Roman towns and camps in the former Province of Dacia, but left a few larger installations and strongholds to the remaining Romans as a means of bolstering the region’s defenses and to ensure ongoing trade with major commercial centers from Hispania (Spain) to Gaul (France, Belgium, and western Germany) to Carthago (northern Africa). Most of the Germanic tribes were structured along kinship-and-clan alliances as well as complex obligations arising from issues of honor and vengeance. These Germanic societies lacked the infrastructure of Roman governance, with its emphasis on civil order, standardizations, and laws, which made early Germanic society far more difficult to preserve over time than the Roman was, and which is why over time much of what was Roman was absorbed into the various Germanic societies.

  By 435, much of both parts of the Roman Empire were officially Christian—sufficiently so that conflicts had arisen within the Christian communities about issues of Christian dogma and the nature of heresies. Most liturgy was not yet fixed, and the titles and structures of the Churches, Roman and Greek, were still in flux. Yet paganism of various kinds, and other religions, hung on throughout the two portions of the Empire. Mithraism was popular with soldiers; so popular, in fact, that many of the hero stories of Mithras were taken over by the Christians and told about Jesus, such as being born at the Winter Solstice of a virgin mother, persecuted by corrupt officials, killed for the benefit of all mankind, and resurrected at the Vernal Equinox. Islam was still two centuries in the future, yet in addition to Mithraism, Zoroastrianism flourished in the Middle East, especially in Persia. Coptic Christians in northern Africa were increasingly forced away from Mediterranean ports by the Christianized Vandals, and down into what is now southern Egypt and Ethiopia, where they remain to this day. Mediterranean Christianity, in theory cohesive, was in fact fiercely divided between the Orthodox (Byzantine Rite) and the Catholic (Roman Rite) Churches. And within the Orthodox Church, there was an increasing dispute as to whether the nature of Jesus was more divine or more human, arguments that led to riots, slaughter, and persecution by each sect of the other.

  As the Roman Empire continued to break apart, those territories near the fracture-points tended to be left to fend for themselves against invaders, since the intense political rivalry between East and West inclined the military to avoid actions in areas where Empire divisions were most acute, and where they might be at risk from the very folk they were supposed to protect from harm. The Eastern and Western Roman response to the early campaigns of Attila tended to be relegated to local military garrisons, often composed of barbarian mercenaries, who often as not defected to the Huns; by the time the Western Roman Empire awoke to the danger Attila represented, he was raging through central Europe and northern Italy. The reputation of the Huns was so frightful that many towns and cities in Europe bankrupted themselves to prepare to defend against Hunnic armies that never arrived.

  In the first century BCE, Julius Caesar had reformed the Roman calendar, but by the 430s, it was already running a little slow again, and there was a degree of discrepancy between the Western and Eastern calendars. For the sake of this book, the calendar is solidly based on the modern calendar, the seasons and dates balanced with a leap year that makes a more regularized progression of years. Whenever possible, the dates are given in terms of proximity to solstices and equinoxes, which was a common practice at that time.

  For those non-Roman guardians appointed in former Roman provinces, there was more responsibility than authority in their offices, but without such men, the Roman Empire erosion would have been more catastrophic, and barbarian conquests more total. By setting up a system that allowed the advancement of responsible foreigners, the Eastern and Western Romans were able to avoid the burdens of dealing with disputed regions, and provided a wonderful scapegoat for any corrosion of already reduced Roman authority in areas that were no longer actual provinces. In addition, the Christianization of the various barbarian groups would have been markedly less than it was had the Roman Empire not become officially Christian under Constantine. The eventual development of Europe as a specific entity would probably have taken much longer to occur without the cohesion of Christianity. It can also be argued that when the Church became a political/military power in the West, it opened the door to widespread corruption and influence-peddling, even while it extended its authority into all aspects of European life, which proved both disastrous and beneficial through the Dark Ages and the Medieval Era. Personal rights and property rights that were the hallmark of Imperial Rome (especially as regards the rights of women and slaves, and the upward mobility of freed-men and freemen) gave way to Christian dogma and a policy of repression and fixedness that defined and supported the religious status quo. One of the Roman Church’s earliest political/military acts was the bribe Pope Leo I paid to Attila to take his typhus-stricken army and leave Rome; that act set the Roman Church firmly on the path that led to the politicization of the institution; it is a path that many sects of Christianity follow to this day.

  Thanks are due to a number of people who supplied needed information for this book: to Thomas Byrne for his material on the split of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires; to Emily Cummins for the loan of two texts on the barbarian invasions, and for filling in some regional gaps for me; to Paul Gonsalves, S.J., for sharing his vast knowledge of early Christianity, including liturgies and Church hierarchical structures; to George Hope for access to a raft of fascinating, if spotty, records of the deurbanization of the Roman Empire, the decline of the Roman courts, and the development of protofeudalism in border regions of the Empire; to Eric Hunter for providing much insight into the rise of Byzantium; to Perry and Genevieve Ognissanti for wonderful references on language drift and regional dialects of the fifth century, which combined elements of Byzantine Greek, vulgate Latin, and Germanic dialects, as well as coming up with Rotlandus Bernardius’ occasional garbling of Imperial Latin; to Diane V. Razelton for the loan of her thesis on the development and collapse of Attila’s armies; to Beatrice Tully for providing her translations of Greek documents of the period; and to Hal Wainwright for delineating conflicting versions of fluctuating borders from eastern Europe into the Balkans. Errors in the text are my own and should not be attributed to these most helpful people.

  On the publishing side of the ledger, thanks are due to my agent, Irene Kraas, for her staunch support of this series; to Tor and my longtime editor, Melissa Singer; to the incomparable Wiley Saichek, who handles so much of my online promotion; to Paula Guran, the designer and webmaster for ChelseaQuinnYarbro.net; to Lindig Harris ([email protected]) for her newsletter Yclept Yarbro; to the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the ICFA for their continuing enthusiasm; to Elizabeth Miller of the Canadian chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and Dracula expert; to Sharon, Stephanie, Libba, Brian, Steve, and Maureen for their sharp eyes for errors of all sorts; to Delilah Crosby, Jim Estrander, and Corrie Nahum, the recreational readers for this book; to Alice, Megan, Peggy, Charlie, Gaye, Lori, and Marc for useful feedback; to Peter and David in England; to
RC for being RC; to my redoubtable and doughty attorney, Robin A. Dubner, who watches over Saint-Germain’s legal welfare; to the book-dealers who have done so much to sustain the series for three decades; and to Saint-Germain’s faithful readers, without whom the tales would not continue. On to #24.

  CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO

  Berkeley, California

  9 January, 2008

  PART I

  ATTA OLIVIA CLEMENS

  Text of a letter from Demetrios Maius, merchant of the Porolissensis region of the old Province of Dacia, to Gnaccus Tortulla, Praetor Custodis of Viminacium in the Province of Moesia, written in Latin vulgate with fixed ink on parchment and carried by Estephanos Stobi, private courier for Dom Feranescus Rakoczy Sanctu-Germainios, regional guardian of Apulum Inferior, in the company of Maius’ fleeing family members; delivered in ten days.

  Ave, Praetor Custodis Gnaccus Tortulla: may God and the old gods hold you in their favor. On your recommendation, we have appealed to the Goths who now rule in the southeastern quarter of the old Dacian region, seeking protection for those of us who are Romans still living here, from the increasing ferocity of the Huns; the small raiding parties of three decades past are still growing in numbers, and increasingly they are forming more extensive fighting companies. More than continuing their search for grazing lands, they are determined to hold the land they have over-run as their conquest rather than passing on to broader pastures as they have done before, unless this is a ploy to drive the last of the Roman settlements away from these mountains so that they will only have to fight the Gepidae and Goths. We have lost the good-will of the region, for it’s said that the Huns follow the old roads to settlements and towns, as merchant-travelers do, and these are all Roman.