Read Online Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online

with small, square pages bound together in covers of wood, metal, or leather to form a whole. He wondered how Apsimar could read by candlelight and have any sight left at his age, though the priest had given no sign of failing vision.
    The room’s walls were as crowded with religious images as its shelves were with books. The dominant theme was one of struggle: here a warrior in armor that gleamed with gold leaf felled his foe, whose mail was black as midnight; there, the same gold-clad figure drove its spear through the heart of a snarling black panther; elsewhere, the disc of the sun blazed through a roiling, sooty bank of fog.
    Apsimar sat in a hard, straight chair behind his overloaded desk, waving Scaurus to a more comfortable one in front of it. The priest leaned forward. He said, “Tell me, then, somewhat of your beliefs.”
    Unsure where to begin, the Roman named some of the gods his people followed and their attributes: Jupiter the king of heaven, his consort Juno, his brother Neptune who ruled the seas, Vulcan the smith, the war god Mars, Ceres the goddess of fertility and agriculture …
    At each name and description Apsimar’s thin face grew longer. Finally he slammed both hands down on the desk. Startled, Marcus stopped talking.
    Apsimar shook his head in dismay. “Another puerile pantheon,” he exclaimed, “no better than the incredible set of miscegenating godlets the Halogai reverence! I had thought better of you, Roman; you and yours seemed like civilized men, not barbarians whose sole joy in life is slaughter.”
    Marcus did not understand all of that, but plainly Apsimar thought little of his religious persuasions. He thought for amoment. To his way of looking at things, Stoicism was a philosophy, not a religion, but maybe its tenets would please Apsimar more than those of the Olympian cult. He explained its moral elements: an insistence on virtue, fortitude, and self-control, and a rejection of the storms of passion to which all men were liable.
    He went on to describe how the Stoics believed that Mind, which among the known elements could best be equated with Fire, both created and comprised the universe in its varying aspects.
    Apsimar nodded. “Both in its values and in its ideas, this is a better creed, and a closer approach to the truth. I will tell you the truth now.”
    The tribune braced himself for a quick course on the glory of the divine sun, kicking himself for not mentioning Apollo. But the “truth,” as Apsimar saw it, was not tied up in heliolatry.
    The Videssians, Marcus learned, viewed the universe and everything in it as a conflict between two deities: Phos, whose nature was inherently good, and the evil Skotos. Light and darkness were their respective manifestations. “Thus the globe of the sun which tops our temples,” Apsimar said, “for the sun is the most powerful source of light. Yet it is but a symbol, for Phos transcends its radiance as much as it outshines the candle between us.”
    Phos and Skotos warred not only in the sensible world, but within the soul of every man. Each individual had to choose which he would serve, and on this choice rested his fate in the next world. Those who followed the good would gain an afterlife of bliss, while the wicked would fall into Skotos’ clutches, to be tormented forever in his unending ice.
    Yet even the eternal happiness of the souls of the deserving might be threatened, should Skotos vanquish Phos in this world. Opinions over the possibility of this differed. Within the Empire of Videssos, it was orthodox to believe Phos would emerge victorious in the ultimate confrontation. Other sects, however, were less certain.
    “I know you will be traveling to the city,” Apsimar said. “You will be meeting many men of the east there; fall not into their misbelief.” He went on to explain that, some eight hundred years before, nomadic barbarians known as the Khamorthflooded into what had been the eastern provinces of the Empire.