by Peter Rhodan
Chapter 1
1165FR: North of the Wall
Morghanna, the only surviving daughter of Cluen, King of the Selgovae, watched the faces of her father’s main retainers in the torch light as he droned on about his latest idea to restore the fortunes and the position of the Selgovae people. Her father was a thick, barrel chested man with a ruddy complexion and dark hair like so many of the Selgovae. He was not overly tall, but his solid build gave the impression he was bigger than he actually was. Whilst in private King Cluen had long appreciated his daughter’s insights as to the attitudes of his subordinates and she had regularly attended such meetings before her abortive marriage to Alayn, King of the Damnoni, her attendance had only been on sufferance with the proviso that she sat in an unobtrusive spot and kept her mouth shut in the actual meeting. Her opinions would be privately sought in consultation by her father and brother afterwards! Keeping herself largely unnoticed in the back of the big meeting room had not generally been a real problem. Keeping track of the conversation while the other women chattered around her often was!
Morghanna was tall for a woman of the Selgovae, with black glossy hair which she got from her mother’s side and she had a shapely figure even if some of the other woman thought she was too thin. Her fine but stately features made her seem older than her real number of years, while her mind was sharp which added to her appearance of maturity, something her father appreciated although her former husband had not seemed so impressed. A lot of men found it uncomfortable to be married to a woman who proved to be smarter than them!
The Damnoni were currently the strongest of the northern Brythonic tribes, dominating the other smaller tribes but were themselves under pressure from the Pechti to their north, the ‘painted people’ of the Romans. The Pechti were still disorganised and not a major threat since their last ‘high king’ had died after being beaten by the Romans almost twenty years before but they were still a worry to those to the south of them, raiding out of their high mountains into the lower lands the ‘civilised’ tribes inhabited. These days the Votandi to the east were the really strong tribe of the three immediately north of the Wall, in large part due to the friendly relations they had maintained with the Romans ever since the Romans withdrew south of their great stone wall several generations ago. It was a strange reversal of earlier times when the Romans maintained a couple of strong forts within Votandi land to keep an eye on them.
The Selgovae on the other hand, were but a shadow of their former selves. Once a competitor with the mighty Brigantes, they had suffered hard at the hands of the Romans, losing badly when the Romans first invaded. Later it was because their bellicose kings repeatedly offered an easy target to the inevitable Roman punitive expeditions, so much so in fact, that their endless defeats were one of the factors that led to the Votandi eventually deciding for friendly relations the hated Romans. At least that was the policy of the previous few kings as well as the current one. The end result of all that bellicosity by the Selgovae was that the formerly much weaker Novantae to the west and Venicones north of the Damnoni were at least as strong as the Selgovae these days.
To counter this decline in their fortunes, her father had arranged her marriage to Alayn a year ago and had hoped to draw the two tribes closer together as a result. As the Damnoni had close relations with some of the Pechti to the north west he had visions of an alliance and possible merger all the way from the wall to the mountains. How realistic this dream was Morghanna had entertained serious doubts about although she had refrained from voicing them to her father when he had seemed so happy, full of his own cleverness. It had been the first time he had seemed to come to life since the death of her mother whose loss had hit him hard. The Pechti in the north west were themselves under pressure from the Scotti of Hibernia and even the Damnoni were not immune to raids by the wild men from over the western water.
On top of all that when the idea of the proposed marriage had been put to her she had felt a strong sense of impending doom. These strong feelings were something she had experienced now and then since a small girl and they invariably meant something bad or, on the very few occasions when she was overwhelmed by a warm feeling, by something good, coming to pass in the often very near future. She had experienced such a strong feeling of impending doom on only one occasion before the marriage plan had been put to her. Several years earlier, she had felt the same feeling of impending doom come over her less than a week before her mother had taken a chill and within five days had been reduced to a pale corpse by an illness no one could stop.
Despite warning her father that she had a bad feeling about marrying Alayn, her father had overridden her fears and the two families had joined in a great ceremony foreshadowing a great alliance between the two tribes. Three months later Alayn had fallen off his horse crossing a stream and hit his head on a rock hidden below the surface, knocking him unconscious besides bashing a hole in the side of his skull. Whether he drowned or died from the head wound was a moot point, but die he did before anyone could get to him. His men had been spread out searching for a boar and by the time the closest of his retainers had noticed his fall and failure to rise, it was too late by the time they reached him. After staying with the Damnoni over the winter in case she had fallen pregnant, Morghanna had in the end returned to her father’s household. Life among the Damnoni after the death of Alayn had been uncomfortable at best and some of the women had become openly hostile to one they saw as an interloper once her position had become unclear.
When her father had outlined his plan to attack the Romans in the spring she had experienced another of those black clouds indicating that the plan was going to end badly. Once again her father refused to listen to her fears, just as previously! Frustrated and still not resigned to her mere female status, she made more than a token try at changing his mind, without moving him an inch. Her brother Cunedd, two years her senior, was worried by her feeling but refused to stand up to his father, merely shaking his head in resignation when she urged him to argue with their sire. Cunedd had been a gangly youth, all elbows and knees, but he was now filling out into the same ruddy complexioned barrel-chested man their father was, albeit a bit taller than his sire. Morghanna was of a similar height, but with a finer body and features besides the dark glossy black hair of her mother. The whole situation was very depressing and left her feeling like she was watching a chariot wreck in slow motion.
In truth, Cunedd had made it plain he thought it was a great opportunity for the tribe to gain land and standing although he didn’t dismiss her worries the way her father had. And at first glance the plan appeared to have merit. The main Roman army had left some years before and this time had not returned. The Dux in command of the wall had been recruiting to try and rebuild the wall garrisons but lacked the wealth to make any serious inroads into the deficit of manpower. Currently there were less than two thousand Romans manning the entire length of the Wall with most based in Lugowalion. There was a self-proclaimed Comes down at Eboracum who had likewise been trying to rebuild the Roman army there but so far without a great deal of success they had heard. The constant raids by the Scotti on the western side of the island plus those of the Saxoni, Frisi and other Germani on the eastern side were constantly sapping the economic life out of the Roman provinces.
The once mighty Roman forces were reduced to a shadow of their former strength and the word was that things were no better in Gallia where the Visigoths, Vandali and others were marching anywhere they wished. The Dux on the wall had maybe a thousand men at Lugowalion. There were two other forces spread along the Wall that totalled less than five hundred with several smaller garrisons both on the Wall and scattered south of the immediate line of the Wall. Even with the less than two thousand soldiers the Comes command
ed further south at Eboracum, the total manpower facing them was less than the number of warriors their tribe could field even in the reduced state they were in these days.
Further south they had been told that the fortress at Deva lay empty with barely enough men there to count as a garrison according to traders and in the far south it was apparently much the same. The Comes Saxoni had moved to Gallia and was not on good terms with the man in Eboracum. The Vicarius in Londinium was allied to the Christian Bishop there and also at odds with the Comes in Eboracum. The Emperor had apparently told the people of Britannia to look to their own defence, if the stories were true, so a counter-attack from the continent like that of a generation ago appeared unlikely. If there had ever been a time to attack the Romans, this was undoubtedly it, which is why her father was not interested in hearing a note of caution.
And then the Dux had been killed by his cavalry commander Maximus, causing more instability on the northern frontier. Maximus was known as a hothead but was respected as an aggressive cavalry commander. For a while her father had toyed with the idea of campaigning south, even calling up some of the warriors, but in the end had deferred it till some future date. Strangely Morghanna had felt no apprehension about such an action at that time. Whether that was because it was never actually going to happen or because nothing bad would have come of it if her father had gone through with that plan at that time, she was not sure.
Then had come word that some new leader had arisen down the coast who had raised some sort of a force, defeated and killed Maximus and taken over the role of Dux. According to the traders he had then split the force at Lugowalion in two. The dangerous cavalry seemed to have taken most of the casualties in the fight that saw the end of Maximus and were apparently now much reduced in numbers. They, with the less to be feared infantry, were now apparently evenly divided between there and a place called Derventio or Dervent, down the coast. Presumably this was to offer a defence against raids from the Scotti or so her father believed, which did seem plausible. The Scotti even troubled the Novotae to their west at times. In any event it meant the garrison at Lugowalion was now less than five hundred infantry and not much over a hundred cavalry. Even with the strong defences the Roman fort there possessed it should be possible for her father’s five thousand odd tribesmen to overrun the garrison easily. And that size force would have no hope of holding the larger, former cavalry fort, to the north of the town.
Or so everyone who had heard the plan seemed to think. But instead of an easy victory the idea filled Morghanna with a sense of foreboding. But with both her father and her brother seemingly convinced of the merits of the plan, along with most of the tribal sub-leaders, there was little she could do. No one wanted to hear her fears so there was little point in her harping on about her doubts. Even more so now that word had come south that Cryllyn, the second son of Myrllyn, was on the march with several hundred warriors whom he intended to lead on the campaign south. Myrllyn was now king of the Damnoni after the death of Alayn and was clearly lending his support to the attack on the Romans. King Cluen was also relying on family ties with Coel, of the Carveti royal family, who was a unit commander in the garrison forces. He had some time ago indicated a willingness to help overthrow Maximus and Cluen saw no reason he would be less willing to help against this new Dux, Arturo something or other. The man was a foreigner by all accounts, from some land far away over the ocean, if the story was true. It was unlikely he would garner much loyalty from either the Romans or the Brythons.
And yet every time she thought of her father and brother heading south at the head of the tribe’s warriors in the spring all she felt was blackness. It was if some terrible storm lay just over the horizon that none could see as yet, but which would soon come rumbling over the mountains spreading thunder and lightning over them all. And no one would listen to her!
Chapter 2
1165FR: Serious change starting
Federation Fleet Captain Arturo Sanders, or Sandus as his surname was pronounced hereabouts, rode out of the southern gate of the walled town of Lugowalion heading south for Dervent or Derventio after weeks of struggling with military and civilian affairs. He had come a long way since crash landing on this planet roughly two years before. At the time he had not realised he had time travelled as well being sent many light years across space by an accident as his shuttle went through a jump point. It was the year eleven sixty-four locally. That is eleven hundred and sixty-four years since the founding of Roma! It had taken him nearly all that time to realise he was on Earth of the past and not some isolated planet that had backslid after the fall of the Chou Empire some thousand years before his original time.
A touch of acceleration just as his shuttle had entered the warp jump point had disrupted the warp jump and propelled his ship around five thousand light years across space and a similar number of years into the past. Or so he had finally deduced. Of course, with the changes he was making hereabouts it then raised the problem that if he changed that past resulting in a future that was different, how did he come back into the past if he no longer existed in the future? It was a conundrum he had been unable to find any answer to. The two main theories he currently held were that either the local barbarians would sweep south and destroy everything he was developing, thus keeping the timeline’s greater course intact. Or that it was remotely possible he had not only travelled in space and time but possibly into an alternate dimension. A different universe. Perhaps. There was no real way of testing the second, fairly unlikely hypothesis though with the technology at his disposal. He wished he’d read more on the multiverse theory some physicists had propounded over the centuries.
The locals hereabouts had been difficult to deal with, understandably. There had been years of oppression from the Roman military commanders desperate to keep their troops fed and operational in the face of little real support from the Imperial government. The northern barbarians had swept south on several occasions, yet each time in the past the Empire had rallied and sent an army to regain the lost territory. At this time there was apparently now longer an Imperial army to send.
His victory over the Dux Britannium and the death of said Dux had left him the most powerful man in the north of what he now knew to be an island. Along with all the liabilities and obligations the job entailed. In practice he controlled only a very small area with a very limited army.
He had been forced to accept the title of Dux after the soldiers spontaneously acclaimed him as such following the victory over the former Dux. Since then he had changed the title from Dux Britannium to Dux Exercitus Primus or General of the First Army. He felt that territorial titles promoted isolationism and he intended to make the new Republic he was organising over the bones of the Empire a bit more homogenous. He was following a similar strategy in other areas of activity as well, but it all took time, of which he only had so much.
He had been required to send for Jacob, his Jewish banker, to explain the new mathematics to the locals including Jacob’s own father and one Abraham, a relative of sorts. On Jacob’s recommendation, Arturo intended to put Abraham in charge of the new Lugowalion branch of the Bank Arturo had started in Dervent. He had also managed to have copies of the new measuring lengths and weights sent up to Lugowalion to ensure that measurements were standard across the lands he now controlled. There were complaints about him imposing them so arbitrarily, but he overruled them and having the army, such as it was, at his back meant his desires were the ones that counted! In time the locals would all come to see the benefits of uniform weights and measures, so he was not concerned by those that objected initially. He had also tried to open communications with the commander of the force at Vindolanda, the next nearest remaining large Roman force, but without much success as the commander there showed no real interest in putting himself under the new Dux’s authority.
His attempts at diplomacy with the tribes to the north of the Wall had met with even less success so far. The Novotae to the north west were not unfri
endly but as that tribe was preoccupied with defending their lands from the Scotti, who regularly raided across the narrow sea from Hibernia, they were not really that focused to the south. The Selgovae had been, well, elusive was the only way to describe their response to his overtures. The Votadini had simply replied that they had not opposed Rome in a generation and their lands had housed Roman forts long after the rest of the army had retired south behind the Wall. They implied that was because they were friendly towards Rome but Arturo rather thought that could have also been because the Romans manning the Wall didn't trust the Votandi and wanted to keep a close watch on them!
The memories of the final battle of his cruiser continued to haunt him, as did the deaths that followed. As Captain it was responsibly to ensure the proper working of his ship and the fact he would not be available to be Court Martialled for the loss of his ship in no mitigated his responsibility for both the destruction of the Hood and the casualties that ensued. Even if he managed to build a new ship or somehow repaired the shuttle he had arrived in, there was no guarantee that he would ever be able to return to his own time and place. The problem had been caused by the enemy fire imparting a small amount of acceleration just as they jumped the warp point and it was a known fact, observed for millennia, that ships with any amount of acceleration or deceleration never arrived at their destination. No one had have ever worked out why, but Arturo now had a possible explanation. If the tiny amount of acceleration caused by the enemy fire had thrown him so far in both space and time it was little wonder there had never been a ship return which had jumped with real acceleration being applied at the same time. They may well have been transported to a star on the other side of the galaxy or even a different galaxy entirely!
Anyway, what he had at first believed to be a former Chou Imperial colony world which had lost its technology since the fall of the repressive and static Chou Empire had in reality proved to be the original, old Earth, five thousand years before his time. His knowledge of history enabled him to have some idea of when he was and also gave him some advantages, but his knowledge of engineering was limited, very limited, at such a primitive level of technology. Knowing that something was possible was not the same as making it possible as he had discovered already!