by Rick Wilber
Marcellinus wished he hadn’t asked her name.
Corbulo tutted. “A wasted opportunity to raise morale, Gaius. It’ll be trouble, and we need no more of that.”
“One woman,” said the Praetor.
“Still bad tactics, with the troops as fractious as they are.”
“Discipline’s a problem,” added Gnaeus Fabius, who rarely passed up an opportunity to suck up to Corbulo, or state the obvious.
“An even worse problem, if the natives keep picking us off.” Marcellinus looked around him. “I did not request a discussion on this topic, gentlemen.”
“God knows what we’d all have caught off her,” Aelfric said loudly, glancing around at the other tribunes. “I doubt these people ever bathe. A good commander safeguards his men’s health as well as his own.”
“And the men bless you for it, sir,” Leogild said to Marcellinus, straight-faced.
Marcellinus grimaced. “Don’t we have a convenient festival coming up? Where do we stand on wine?”
“We’ll be out of corn and cheese first,” said the quartermaster. “Wine’s not yet an issue.”
The other officers looked at one another. None of them had any clearer idea of the date than Marcellinus did.
“Let’s call it Easter,” said Aelfric. “That’s a moveable feast anyway.” Aelfric’s Fifth were mostly Northern auxiliaries, and many of the Legion’s worshippers of the Christ-Risen served in that cohort.
“Tomorrow, not today,” warned Corbulo. “Let them walk off this disappointment first.”
“Of course,” said Marcellinus, who’d had no intention of fueling his legionaries with extra liquor tonight. “All right. Get out there and make it known that she was a chieftain’s daughter that I sent out to calm the way ahead, and that I’m not setting any new precedents with this. And then remind them that tomorrow’s Easter.”
“Most of them won’t know what that is,” said Fabius.
“Or care,” said Marcus Tullius, scratching under his helmet.
“Tell ‘em it’s the Christ-Risen feast of double wine rations,” said Aelfric. “They’ll understand that.”
“Dismissed,” said Marcellinus, and Leogild and most of his tribunes–Corbulo, Fabius, Tullius–saluted and set off through the camp in various directions to brief their centurions.
Naturally, Aelfric dallied. “So, Praetor. Even when you were younger. Would you have taken her?” He raised his hands. “Nothing implied. I’m just making conversation.”
Marcellinus looked at him. It was an impertinent question, but that was Aelfric’s way. Britons were very direct. “You don’t have daughters, do you, Aelfric?”
“No.”
“Ask me again when you do.”
***
Much like the Britons, the Norse were a smart people who mostly understood the massive advantages of being important to the Imperium and the terrible costs of being an irritant. But every race contained its bad apples. And so the Imperator Hadrianus had issued an edict allowing no quarter to Norse pirates, those renegade few who refused to come to heel.
Two years earlier, a Roman navy warship had intercepted a Norse longship approaching the north coast of Hibernia. An innocent Norse vessel sailing home from Vinlandia had naught to fear from a Roman inspection; this longship had tried to use its greater maneuverability to escape and, when that failed, had tried to bluff the Roman captain, badly.
After a brief but fierce engagement the Romans boarded the vessel to find it stuffed with gold plate, jewelry and bizarre statues from an as yet unknown culture, along with large quantities of turquoise and lapis lazuli and a few bags of spice. Alas, Roman efficiency had slammed into Viking berserker battle ardor with such completeness that there was nobody left alive on the longship capable of testifying about where they had acquired such a lucrative cargo.
Despite this inconvenience, Hadrianus was badly in need of revenue and not one to pass up such an opportunity. It was at this point that he had raised the priority of the conquest of Nova Hesperia.
There was no reason to suspect that the equatorial regions of the Evening Continent should be any richer than those of famine-stricken Aethiopia. Logically, then, the gold must have originated around the same latitude as Roma.
Hadrianus sent scouting parties into Nova Hesperia. Those who returned brought back tales of a large city of mounds, longhouses, and at least ten thousand people, in the plains far beyond the mountains. Admittedly they hadn’t brought any gold back with them, but then again, the locals hadn’t allowed them within the boundaries of the city.
Very well; Hadrianus could spare a legion to throw at a high-risk, high-return venture. Now all he needed was the right Praetor to lead it.
***
By dawn the next day the legionaries had folded tents and were on the trail again, heading west in as straight a line as they could manage. Which, being Romans, was pretty damned straight.
For a while, Marcellinus’s tactic seemed to be working. The harassing actions that the natives had been running against the Legion’s advanced corps of engineers and its flanks and stragglers stopped. Freeing one woman had apparently earned the Fighting 33rd a clear path all the way to the mountains. Even the grumpy Domitius Corbulo had to agree it was well done. The miles fell away under the military sandals of the Legion; day by day they left the sea further behind, and the interior of the giant land opened up around them. They covered two hundred miles without a single death, and the daily march became so routine that the centurions began to grumble that the men were getting soft.
True to his word, Marcellinus left the villages unscathed. Usually their inhabitants deserted them and hid out in the wilds till the army had passed; sometimes they sat sullenly outside their scrappy, insect-ridden hovels with their heads bowed. Good enough. They might be untouched by civilization, but at least they comprehended a threat when they heard it.
Truth be told, Marcellinus felt sorry for them. He hadn’t asked to be sent here, and these folks hadn’t asked to have a Roman legion trampling their pastoral quiet. The Hesperians had so little to begin with. Roma’s ancient ancestors might have been painted men very much like these, long before all the marble buildings and the metalsmithing and the lawmaking. Less than farmers, their tiny patches of sickly corn were so pitiful that even Leogild didn’t think them worth requisitioning; as far as Marcellinus could tell, the inland peoples really survived by trapping coneys and picking berries. Marcellinus could be ruthless when necessary, but there was no glory in waging war against beggars. The true enemy lay ahead, in the Great City that the Norse scouts had reported and Sisika had now confirmed.
Soon enough, the terrain creased around them and rose up into a series of rolling ridges and craggy mountains that Fuscus, in his broken tongue, called Appalachia. The peaks were neither as classically sculpted as the Alps of Europa, nor as grand and tall as the ranges of the Himalaya, but they had a hazy comeliness to them that reminded Marcellinus of parts of northern Italia. Despite the rigors of getting the Legion through such a trackless wilderness, Marcellinus thought it a land of some charm. Then again, he got to ride a horse up the interminable hills.
They had only a couple of dozen horses, and only the Praetor and his tribunes, scouts, and dispatch riders got to ride them. They were much too valuable to put to work hauling the supply wagons, and besides, they had slaves for that; to their surprise the Hesperian shores had proved to be devoid of beasts of burden, aside from the Powhatani themselves.
Marcellinus felt the odd twinge of guilt about resting easy in the saddle, but he genuinely needed to conserve his strength. At night in castra his men might drink their watered wine and gossip over games of knucklebones with no further cares, but Marcellinus spent those hours meeting with his quartermaster about supplies, his tribunes and armorers about their battle-readiness, his centurions on matters of discipline, and doing a hundred and one other things. There was never a lazy evening for a Praetor. Technically Marcellinus might have left some of th
ese details to others, but with his authority over the Legion as precarious as it now seemed, it behooved him to stay involved with all aspects of legionary logistics. If Marcellinus could be everywhere at once, no one could talk about him behind his back.
The men noted his diligence and didn’t seem to begrudge him the ride. Their job was the hike; his was to keep enough blood flowing to his brain and heart that he could look after his men and keep them as comfortable as possible, not waste the sweat they were donating to the enterprise, and be trusted not to squander their lives when the crunch came.
Around noon Marcellinus found himself riding near Marcus Tullius, who hailed from Etruria. “What d’you think, Tully? Long views, and enough land for anyone, once we get rid of some of these damned trees.”
Tullius made a sour face. “Over that whore of an ocean? It’s too far from Roma. Nobody is going to want to come and farm this crap.”
“Some men might prize a bit of separation from the capital. Independent sorts, regulation-weary?”
“Ex-convicts, maybe. But they won’t be growing olives or grapes on these slopes. Bad soil, worse sun. You’ve seen what passes for corn here? Even the Norse can’t make a go of it, and they can farm Graenlandia.”
“Well, only with sheep and a few cattle,” said Marcellinus. “They don’t grow crops there.”
“Either way. No, if the redskins have gold, we want it. If not, we just kill the bastards off. Hack ourselves a bloody road right across the continent and use it to go and stab the slant-eyes in the back.”
Marcellinus winced. “That might be quite a distance,” he murmured, and didn’t raise the issue of natural beauty again.
Whatever their scenic glory, the Legion found the high ridges heavy going, and their average daily march dropped from twenty-two miles to nearer twelve. On one ignominious day when they had to ford several streams and backtrack twice in search of a route the baggage carts could negotiate, they only advanced by seven. Finding areas broad and flat enough to host a full castra added to the challenge, and Marcellinus sorely missed the guidance of Thorkell Sigurdsson and his other Norse scouts, still conspicuous by their absence.
His men grumbled, and even Leogild’s sunny Visigoth humor began to cloud over. Each day took them further from the coast and stretched their provisions even thinner. Battle was ahead, a city to be sacked, spoils to be had–but how far? It was the conversation on every tongue, the thought in everyone’s mind. Arguments now broke out beside the Legion’s campfires on a nightly basis. Best to go on to death or glory, risk everything on a single throw of the dice? Or eventually beat a prudent retreat to the coast, winter up, and next spring surge back along the path they had already carved?
They could go on, but once winter came the march would be over. The Legion would have to build a fortress and hunker down in it, unable to travel again until the thaw. And then what would they eat?
Marcellinus heard the discontent and shared it, but all he could do was show a resolute face and push on.
Then came the ambush, and everything changed.
***
Imperators come and go. In Marcellinus’s time he’d seen nine and served four, and he would not have donned the Imperial purple himself for a million sesterces. He would sooner have lived as a beggar in a shack than be Imperator of Roma, and everyone knew it, so he had survived many a bloody Imperial transition to become one of the most senior legates in the army. His problem with Hadrianus III was the Imperator’s ambition, not his own.
Gaius Publius Marcellinus was that rare thing, a Roman who was actually born in Urbs Roma. His family had been military for four generations and he was born with a brass spoon in his mouth, rather than silver. Nonetheless his gens was reasonably well-to-do and the young Gaius wanted for little, except common sense.
One night on the way home from his tutor’s he had wandered into the slums of Subura. There he’d been set upon by a gang of young thugs, beaten up, his tunic ripped, his books scattered. In fact he had been lucky; Subura gangs sometimes killed or gelded their victims just for the joy of watching the rich suffer. That evening, the young Marcellinus was saved from worse damage only by his tender years. Several hours after the beating, a waterboy and a prostitute had discovered him and carried his bleeding body out.
His distraught mother’s slaves had had to banish her from the room so they could bandage Marcellinus’s wounds; the poor woman had had to worry through quite enough of her husband’s campaigns against the Magyars without having her son’s body slashed and pummeled on her own doorstep. Once the slaves let her back in she fell upon Marcellinus moaning “We’ll leave the Urbs, we’ll live in Campania, you must never go near the Subura again, they know you there now.” And he had looked at her as if she were crazy, and from the side of his battered mouth had said in a clear, piping voice: “Of course they do. And that’s why I must go back. They mustn’t win. They’ll take orders from me.”
So went the story his father told their friends, anyway. But the slaves corroborated it.
Soon, Marcellinus was leading a life of relative gentility by day and masterminding one of the busiest gangs in the Subura by night. Marcellinus’s gang were not murderers and emasculators, though, but thieves who broke into the villas of rich merchants to liberate their valuables. His parents did not consider this such a fine story to regale their dinner guests with; when his father finally searched his sleeping room and found a collection of silver cups and jewelry that certainly should not have been there, he gave young Gaius a whipping that put the Subura-boys’ beating to shame. A week later, long before the stripes on his back and legs healed, Gaius Marcellinus found himself delivered ahead of schedule to boot camp in the army of Titus Augustus, his first and favorite Imperator.
And, as before, he’d never looked back.
By contrast, Lucius Domitius Corbulo was a member of an old patrician family and a distant descendant of that Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo who had served as a Consul under Caligula, commanded the armies of Germania Inferior under Claudius, and been appointed Governor of Asia under Nero. One day he would make the leap from army to politics, and perhaps end up a Consul himself. Perhaps it was predictable, then, that Corbulo was the most alert to their place in history. More than any other Roman present he felt the full sweep of Roman power. But Corbulo was also alert to money, and sought riches as well as glory.
When Hadrianus had called upon Marcellinus to lead the 33rd into the new land across the Atlanticus, Marcellinus had chosen Corbulo to be his First Tribune. Corbulo had served under him in his Sindh campaign, and Marcellinus knew him as a man of breeding, spotless record, and endless anecdote. If Marcellinus had to dine with someone for months on end, he wanted him by all means not to be tedious. Later, he came to marvel that tediousness was the worst sin he had dreaded in the man.
So what did it say about Marcellinus that, despite everything, he now spent more time with Aelfric the Briton and Sigurdsson the Norse scout than he did with the Romans among his tribunes? Nowadays he even got on better with the bluff working-class centurions and their men than he did with Corbulo, Fabius, and Tully.
The answer was that Roma had grown effete under its most recent Imperators, and this batch of tribunes bore testimony to that. After Titus Augustus, whose assassination Marcellinus had barely survived, things had spiraled from bad into worse during the reigns of Vespasianus II, Arcadius Victor, and now Hadrianus III. For the values Marcellinus prized he now had to seek out plebeians and foreigners, just as in his errant youth he’d felt more comfortable with the street boys than the youths of the gymnasium.
Once more, Marcellinus was blazing his own social trail, navigating by the seat of his tunic. And, once again, this would come at a high cost.
***
The ambush came as no surprise. The Legion was ready for it. Craving it, in fact.
They marched down a long sweeping valley, narrow and high-sided. Below them the plains opened up; they had conquered the Appalachia, and an enemy might suppose
that high spirits would make them careless. But the Fighting 33rd were career soldiers to a man, and this was such an obvious site for an ambush that there really had to be one.
They had been sighting Iroqua all day: a fleeting glimpse of a warrior behind a tree here, a feather seen over a rock there. Once the trend was clear Marcellinus had passed the order down through his tribunes and centurions that the men were to ignore the natives until actively engaged. That way, the savages might assume they’d gone unnoticed. As the Iroqua tried to lull the Romans into a false sense of security, Marcellinus was sanguine that he had instead tricked them into overconfidence.
As his cohorts tromped downhill, eagerly awaiting the onslaught and whistling like longshoremen, Marcellinus felt that surge of energy he loved, the spark that ran like lightning through well-trained men on the verge of combat. Today, at least, his Legion was behind him to the last man.
Sure enough, where the way was narrow and the crags around them tall, the Iroqua attacked.
Predictable. And yet not.
Suddenly the air was full of darting shapes that whirled above them as if the laws of nature and commonsense had ceased to apply.
Briefly, Marcellinus feared he had lost his mind. He seemed to be assaulted by a swarm of giant moths, and for several dangerous seconds he couldn’t even bring them into focus. Then the shapes resolved, and he realized they were farther away than he’d thought.
The moths were actually men, harnessed to rigid triangular wings.
Each pilot was spread-eagled beneath his wing, lying prone, steering left and right by tugging at a stiff cord that passed under his chest and extended from wingtip to wingtip. Yet control of these crude aerial vehicles required only part of their energy; each also held a bow and could reach across himself to pull arrows from a streamlined quiver strapped to his thigh, to rain down death upon Marcellinus’s troops. Each aviator wore a mask bearing the powerful hooked beak of a falcon.
Had this been a circus display, Marcellinus might have laughed for joy. Men in flight! Yet these wings were not for sport; their intent was deadly serious. Marcellinus was caught flat-footed. Behind the beat of the battle, he mentally lunged to catch up.