by Larry Niven
VI
They were led by two humans, one introduced as Marcus Augustus, in white robes bordered with purple strips. Others followed, carrying long knives, and other things, hidden under clothes, that were plainly weapons. “What is that?” Ginger asked Marcus Augustus, pointing at the statue.
“Why, your Feline god of course. We promised to give him worship in our Pantheon in return for certain favors.”
“Fair enough,” Ginger mused. “There are kdaptists who have become Christians. And did he actually grant those favors?”
“Obviously. We are here and alive.”
“How did you know the Fanged God looked like that?”
“Some of our slaves make statues of him for kzinti nobles.”
“I see…I think,” said Ginger, “that perhaps I am beginning to understand a little more.”
Marcus Augustus nodded and moved ahead.
“I see at least three classes of humans here,” said Ginger to Perpetua.
“Classes?”
“Yes. A concept we got to know fairly well on Wunderland. We haven’t exactly been top dogs—top cats?—the whole time, you know. You get to recognize these things. The humans in white and purple are the bosses, of course. The ones with the checkered trousers and the funny hair seem an intermediate class. And there are slaves.”
“Slaves?”
They were led out the far side of the building, which proved startlingly small. Now they were moving though a mass of closely spaced trees, the needle foliage obscuring the sky. It was a tight fit for Ginger in spots.
“Yes. Look at their clothes. More importantly, look at their gait. I may know more about some aspects of human society than you, and I would say this is not one of your democracies. And if they’re fighting a war against modern kzinti with the odd patchwork of technology we’ve seen so far, I’m not surprised. You don’t fight a species war with majority resolutions.
“But slave societies are always looking for more slaves,” he continued. “They may see us in that category. Not me, perhaps. If they know anything about kzinti they’d know we don’t make slaves. But you…who knows? And by human standards of beauty you are attractive. A good prize. Keep your weapon handy.”
“By human standards of beauty? I suppose that’s a compliment?”
“Personally I like long whiskers, and fur with a pleasing alternation of orange and yellow stripes, among other things. Four nicely shaped teats help, too, and muscular haunches, not to mention the right smell. But be alert.”
Marcus Augustus halted them, glanced at the sky, took a step to the side, and disappeared.
Ginger’s ears opened like Chinese parasols. The man had walked inside a tree.
No; a colony of trees, grown together.
It was a really tight fit getting in. Warrgh-Churrg very likely didn’t know about this; an uninvited kzin entering here would not be seen again, except possibly as a rug.
“We kept records,” Marcus Augustus said, “and the Jotoki gave us better books than scrolls and wooden boards for writing on. Our ancestors were the Ninth Legion, the Hispania. You don’t seem surprised.”
“I guessed it might be that,” said Perpetua. “The legion that marched north into Scotland—ah, Caledonia—from Hadrian’s Wall and was never seen again.”
“You know that!” Marcus Augustus jumped forward, clasping Perpetua’s arms with both hands. “But…with time-dilation effects…from Earth’s point of view…I’m not sure, but it must have been thousands of years ago!”
“About two thousand five hundred years, almost.”
“Then—Does Rome still stand? Our battles were not in vain? We led the felines away?”
“She is still a great city, but much has changed.”
“Was Rome conquered?”
“Not by the kzinti. Only by other humans. And the Human Empire in space that defeated the kzinti is the heir of the empire of Rome. You see I know your language.”
“I suppose Earth has got old.”
“Old enough to build spaceships of her own. We come from a colony at Earth’s nearest star.”
“That is good to hear. And the felines?”
“We fought long wars. We won. Now some, like my companion here, are foederati. Didn’t your people recruit Germans? But you spoke of time dilation. You know how time is related to the speed of light?”
“Of course. The Jotoki taught our ancestors…How could you have traveled so far?”
“We travel faster than light.”
“It cannot be done!”
“It is how we beat the kzinti. They were a great empire when the leading edge of their wave of conquest reached Earth and its colony worlds and attacked them. We almost perished. Then the hyperdrive came to us.”
“I cannot think you are lying. If you were but a kzinti puppet you would not know so much about us.”
“So what happened?”
“Do you wish to hear the story firsthand?”
“Firsthand?”
“I told you. We—and the Jotoki—have good records.”
He led them to another room in the underground complex, inviting Perpetua to recline on a human-sized couch. Other couches were pushed together for Ginger. Somehow well-used libraries have something of the same atmosphere in every culture. He touched a panel and a screen came to life.
“Behold Maximus Gaius Pontus of senatorial rank, strategos of the Hispania.”
A man with an aquiline nose, a peculiar mark burnt between his eyebrows, sat in a carved wooden chair, speaking into a camera.
VII
This record is for posterity. Wherever that may be. At least I need not fuss with scribe and scroll, or fear that mouse or termite shall devour this disk. I will begin when I traveled north with a bulla of authority to take over the Ninth Legion at Hadrian’s Wall.
It was, I thought, a remote (Ha! Remote!) and desolate place, though I traveled north toward Caledonia in some comfort. I had campaigned in far worse conditions. There were towns at first, with stone buildings. Then villages, then straggling huts, and finally just the carven milestones and tombstones beside the road. A draft of replacements, specialists, and some civilians accompanied me and my escort.
Old Crassus was a hard taskmaster to the convoy. He had to be. The civilians and women traveling with us in creaking wains were a hindrance and a peril. We did not let the emptiness of the land deceive us into thinking that we were unobserved. We knew the land was alive though it seemed desolate, and we avoided or hastened through limestone country for we knew it meant caves.
With the legionaries not only singing their usual interminable marching songs about the venereal charms of Lalarge, but with women actually present, there were potential discipline problems. Crassus routed women out of their lines when we made camp at night, stuck to our predawn starts, and generally made himself exceptionally hated even for a ducenarius. He was as tough an old stick of gnarled vinewood as his own cudgel, and I had little to do but look impressive. I also began dictating an account for the old man to Publius, my secretary.
We saw nothing really strange, apart from moving lights in the northern sky: some like drifting stars, some larger and nearer, one huge like a second moon. Sometimes they formed patterns. No one, including the veterans and merchants who knew this country, had seen anything like them before, but at that time they did not trouble us. We were more concerned with robbers and broken men nipping at our heels, or even attacking in force if there were enough of them or if the Scots had landed to encourage them against us. But we reached the wall at Borcovicus with little trouble, apart from a few arrows fired into the camp one night.
Winter is the defining fact about the wall. The climate is even worse than the rest of Britain, with its cold drizzling rain so many days. On the wall you have wind-driven sleet month after month, and dream of walking in the sun under a purple sky in the olive-groves and vineyards of Tuscany, or quaffing the wine of Melita amid the bee-pastures of its flowers (though I have seen more than p
urple skies since then). Troops from Germany regard it as a soft billet after the winters they have there, but for Spaniards like the Ninth it was very much a hardship posting. They had done their best to modify it with baths and barbers and brothels, but they wore padded woolens under their armor and shivered.
Still, the bathhouses were a credit to several generations of military engineering, and the Principia was well lined with woven rugs. Further, the day after our arrival was actually fine, with blue skies and wide views. Those rolling hills of red and brown heather had a kind of beauty under the sun.
The prefect, Bassus Septimus, was the type I expected: weather-beaten and wind-bitten, eyes permanently narrowed from squinting across heather and into sleet, an old sandal-leather man. He had a keen eye for his own comfort but he was a competent veteran who knew the land. I had seen plenty of the type in Gaul. The officers and senior centurions I met were much the same. Some think our officers are fops and amateurs, but these of the frontiers were not, and those who think that way might find it difficult to explain how we have ruled an empire of four thousand cities and forty-four provinces with swords, spears, and animal power.
The men were legionaries, and when you have said that you have said all. They were the drilled, disciplined troops of an empire that was an island of civilization in a world that was a welter of barbarism. They were versatile soldiers and engineers, who could fight barbarians or other Romans by land or sea, build walls and siege engines which I then thought gigantic, drain marshes, drive roads and bridges through wilderness, calculate to a fraction what pay they were owed, fight fires in multistory tenements, plow the land to feed themselves in any climate or distribute food in a famine. Versatile.
I thought that then. How much more do I think it now!
Some said we ruled the world, but we senior officers knew better: We had silks from China and merchants’ tales from further yet. The Greeks had measured the sphere that is the world and we knew the size of it. That helped me understand much later, but for the moment, if forty-four provinces sounded large, and it was, the Barbaricum, we knew, was larger.
I tried from the start, as they were presented to me, to remember as many names as I might but knew it would take some time to tell the centurions apart: they looked as if they had been hammered from the same metal in the same mold by the same smith; as indeed they had been. Our army was full of such. I knew that later they would become individuals to me. Sooner rather than later, if we saw action.
Bassus took me to the wall. He was worried, which was part of his job, but he was also more bewildered than I had often seen such a one.
“Patrols have disappeared before,” he said. “They go too far and the Picts suddenly decide they would like the armor and weapons of the metal men. Or they run into a few boatloads of those cursed Gaels from Hibernia. But sooner or later we always hear from our spies what happened.
“Anyway, the local Picts are on their way to being civilized—we’ve sent enough punitive expeditions to teach them that attacking the metal men was not a good idea, and I can drink with the local chiefs without all of us keeping our hands on our swords or even needing a poison-taster. It’s become not much more than a bit of sport for us to fire arrows at each other when they come to steal blades from the ditch.
“Now, nothing. No patrols returned, no spies, and no Picts. We have a frontier scout force beyond the wall and no word from that either, though of course it’s sometimes gone for weeks at a time. That wolf pack hardly drills like Praetorians—I commanded an ordo of them a long time ago—but they know the country and they fear nothing in it. If it was an attack by the Caledoni they’d report it as such. That’s what they’re there for. This is something different.
“Also, the spymasters and political officers who work among the Northern tribesmen know their business. They don’t last long otherwise.
“Look!”—he gestured across the vast sweep of heather—“not a wisp of smoke anywhere. There are Pictish villages beyond those hills. Normally on a day like this you can see the smoke of their fires. But they’ve cleared off. No word. I don’t know why, unless the tribes are gathering in the highlands for some sort of mass descent.”
“Would they be capable of such organization?”
“Did Varus ever wonder such a thing?”
I had spoken of Varus with the old man and I wondered now that his name still seemed to keep cropping up after more than a century. Perhaps it haunted every frontier commander. I wondered how often it was mentioned on the Rhine, or in those distant red deserts of sand where our legions wait for the Parthians or Persians.
“Anyway, they’re gone without a word,” he continued. “After the patrols we’d lost I wasn’t taking any chances. I sent a strong force to investigate, with orders to turn back at the first suspicion of trouble and not to march north beyond sight of our beacons. They reported the Pictish villages deserted. Nothing else, except those lights in the sky.”
“I thought you always saw them in these parts,” I said.
“That’s the aurora borealis, the northern glow. The further north you go in Caledonia the more you tend to see it, in winter anyway, but it’s nothing like these. These moving stars are new.”
“Pictish gods?”
“I’ve been a soldier a long time. I’ve never seen gods like that.” He too had the brand of Mithras on his brow and knew the mysteries. “We have all sorts of religions here, even Jews and the fish-worshipping Christians. Gods from Spain and Syria and Melita and places only the gods themselves know. But no one has a god that is a light traveling in the sky. Some of them are frightened, I think, and they’d show it, if they weren’t more frightened of me and their centurions.”
I didn’t like the idea of a legionary frightened by anything but his own superiors. It should be what the philosophers and logicians call a contradiction in terms. “So what do you think?”
“Since it’s futile to speculate about gods, I speculate about men, which may be just as futile. I think what I told you: that the tribes are gathering for a massive attack southwards. If they breach the wall, there’s nothing to stop them before Eboracum. And that’s not much more than a shell, now that we’ve brought the Ninth here. They’d take it. Then they’d either straggle back to Caledonia with their booty or they’d go on. I think they’d go on.”
“Why?”
“You don’t fire siege ballistas at a hare in a field. An attack to punch through the wall isn’t just to plunder the northern marches and return. They’d be aiming for Londinium and the channel—to chuck us right out of Britannia. It would be more than brigandage and piracy, it would be politics. If the Gauls cooperated with them, and the Germans…” He made an eloquent gesture.
“The Britons tried it themselves once,” I reminded him. “It didn’t do them any good. Two legions brought them to bay and wiped them out.”
He had been in Britain longer than I and knew more of its history.
“They were disunited and had bad leaders,” he said. “Another attack may be better led. And they know us now. They’re not going to flee in panic at the sight of a Testudo, and they know better than to close against a legion with short swords in the field.
“Even if we could beat them in a pitched battle, that wouldn’t solve it. If I commanded them, my tactic would be to dodge our field army, and wear down our supply trains with ceaseless harassment. They can live off the land better than we can. Nip off isolated forts and garrisons and ambush the relief forces. Then melt back into the forests and dare us to follow them. Only this time they would be taking cities, not mile castles. Harassment happens all the time in wild country, of course, but think of it on a far bigger scale. Then, when we’re scattered and worn down and Londinium says the money’s running out and we can’t pay our auxiliaries, they launch a main-force attack.”
He waved again to left and right, at the miles of wall marching across the hills and valleys to east and west and out of sight. Here and there the helmets of pacing sentries
shone as they caught the sun, seeming to slide atop the stonework. It was new, almost unweathered, and majestic. A colossal statement of the might of Rome.
“Look at the wall itself. Our garrison is stretched from sea to sea, from Luguvallium in the west to Segedunum in the east. Our problem here is the problem of the Empire in miniature: they can attack when and where they choose. We have to try to be strong at all points at once and we can’t be. Where is our central reserve?
“We have better tactics and discipline, but we have to spread the grease on the bread very thinly. This wall looks impressive but it’s largely a bluff. See that sentry?” He pointed to the glittering bead of a helmet visible above the rampart of the next mile castle. “Twenty men and a decurion are sometimes all we’ve got in a castle, along with their women and camp followers. We rely on our spies and scouts to warn us when an attack is coming so we can concentrate our forces to meet it. But one real punch, delivered without warning, could go through a weakly garrisoned section like wet parchment. Especially if they had help from the other side—we can’t watch all the coast to know what landings may take place beyond our lines. This wall is trying to do something too big for it.”
“And once they were through?”
“We’d attack them from east and west, of course. Cut their communications. We can handle a big attack. But not an all-out attack by all the tribes, and not at too many points simultaneously. I’m not saying they would inevitably throw us out of Britannia if they tried—you know how good our boys are—but they could do a lot of damage, and leave us that much weaker when they’ve bred up enough to try again.”
“So what do you recommend?”