Satisfied, he swung the plate back and checked the dates inscribed in it. He allowed himself a little smile: the imprint in the seal was his own: 217 years earlier he had been acting as the Frigidarium Glaciale's Master of the Ice for the first time when Celcinius had returned to the ice. He released the pins and pried the panel out to reveal a block of rammed snow, from which emerged leather straps bound with a wax seal. The entrance had now faded into blackness, but the corridor was empty as far as he could see. Regulus turned and glanced behind him, more through habit than paranoia. The panel bearing Celcinius' name was alone in the wall at the end of the corridor. Regulus patted the tag with Vitellan's name like a teacher encouraging a good student, then walked down to the very end of the Frigidarium Glaciale. Those are perfect qualifications to become a Temporian and live for a thousand years." You're a strong, natural leader, and you have great resistance to the cold. We're watching you now, and you are very promising. You don't know about us yet, lad, but you are destined to join us and sleep in this hole. "You're the lad who survived five days in a cold sea after that troopship sank last September. "Vitellan Bavalius, eh?" he chuckled softly to the name on the panel. He studied the entry for a moment before moving on. "Never again," he promised himself as he scanned the dates in the dancing lamplight, then he turned and shuffled farther down the corridor of the Frigidarium Glaciale like a short, arthritic bear.Īt a vacant cell he took a metal tag from his robes, slid it into a bracket and sealed it into place. He heaved the bronze panel back into place. The old man was secretly a little claustrophobic, and disliked both being in the Frigidarium Glaciale and the prospect of some day returning to his assigned cell there. He had returned to the ice again by the time Christ was born. That time he had stayed awake for two decades, until after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra. There had been more years in the ice after that, until he had been revived in time to cross the Rubicon with Julius Caesar. The Punic Wars and rapid expansion of Roman power and influence had followed, and Regulus had been awake to earn scars in the fighting against Hannibal. That was when they had decided to abandon their Etruscan heritage and support Rome. Regulus had, of course, been awake to attend the Temporians' Grand Council, the single time when all his fellow Temporians had been awake together. He had been in there when Plato had died, and for the whole of Alexander the Great's short but remarkable career. Regulus stared into the little chamber, holding the lamp up and running his gloved hand along the surface of the ice. Behind it was an empty space six feet long and two feet deep. The hinges creaked reluctantly, shedding a frosty crust. Following hisown private ritual he knocked out the pins securing the top of the panel to retaining bolts set into the ice, then levered it down with his staff.
There was something strangely alluring about this cell cut into the ice, where he had spent 360 of the 437 years since his birth. He paused again by a panel marked with his own name and bearing twenty-six pairs of dates. Its other end was tipped with a spike, so that it would not slip on the ice of the floor. After a minute Regulus reluctantly heaved himself into motion again, shuffling down the corridor and leaning heavily on a staff that bore the Temporian crest of a winged eye. On the walls on either side of him were rows of bronze panels, each two feet by seven and inscribed with names and dates. It stretched away into blackness, as straight and level as a Roman road.
The Frigidarium Glaciale was a single corridor cut into the ice. "There'd be something wrong were it not so damn cold," he panted to himself as he leaned against the wall, watching his words become puffs of golden fog in the lamplight. Wheezing loudly after the long trek down through corridors cut through solid ice, he paused for a moment. The sheepskin lining of his hobnailed clogs did no better to keep out the cold, and the fur of his hood and collar was crusted with frost from his own breath. He shivered, even dressed as he was in a coat of quilted Chinese silk and goosedown. Regulus held his olive oil lamp high as he entered the Frigidarium Glaciale. His body was frozen solid in a block of ice at the bottom of a shaft two hundred feet deep. Celcinius lay with his ears and nostrils sealed with beeswax plugs, and his mouth bound shut. Rome was near the height of its power in the second year of Vespasian's reign as emperor, and nobody would have suspected that the Empire's fate hung by the life of a five-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Etruscan. Nusquam, the European Alps: 17 December 71, Anno Domini
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