Making History

by Rick Wilber

  He was not the only one. Legionaries shouted, turning around and around, flinching from this strange aerial threat but finding nowhere to retreat to. Centurions barked, fighting to regain control. Close to Marcellinus a soldier lifted his shield over his head in defense, knocking the helmet off the man next to him. Soldiers slipped and fell.

  The archers of his First Cohort, the cream of his military crop, capable of recognizing an enemy no matter what direction it came from, laconically pumped arrows into the air. But they were below the thrust of the attack and so were forced to fire back over the mass of the Legion. If they weren’t careful, there was a real risk that their arrows might fall among their own fellows.

  As the Iroqua swooped over the densely packed line of the Legion, their own deadly projectiles rarely failed to find a mark. These arrows needed only to wound, poison-tipped for sure; legionary after legionary toppled to the ground like a cut-string puppet moments after suffering no more than the shallowest nick. Fortunately, most of the arrows plinked off armor.

  The trumpeters looked to Marcellinus for commands. A pair of flying Iroqua buzzed them, an arrow thwacked into the ground by his side, and Marcellinus found his tongue. Over the pandemonium he shouted, “First, Second, Third: split line! Fire outward! All other cohorts: orbis!

  The signalmen nodded, and the trumpets brayed.

  As always, the 33rd Legion spread over several miles. The Iroqua attack was concentrated on his first three cohorts, bottling up the men behind. Expecting a ground assault from both sides, Marcellinus had planned a split line anyway, and it was also the best formation to resist an attack from the air. The cohorts in the rear were overextended, and for them the hollow-square orbis formation would form the best defense even if hordes of barbarians flooded down the ravine behind them, given the advantages of discipline and metal armor.

  More Iroqua swooped and soared, more legionaries fell. Up on the hill the cohorts of Tullius and Aelfric were breaking into sections and forming ragged squares. Beyond them, in the distance, the slaves were crawling under the supply wagons. From somewhere came the unmistakable scream of a horse.

  On either side of Marcellinus, the First and Second fell into close-order parallel lines, facing out to left and right. Behind the First, the honor guard clustered around the Aquila.

  From the sky came stones as well as arrows. Some of the flying warriors were armed with slings rather than bows. More arrows came from Iroqua archers standing on the crags above, shooting from much greater range.

  One of his signiferi took an arrow in the neck and went down, screaming. Carrying no shields, the standard-bearers made easy targets from above. Next to Marcellinus an adjutant received an arrow to the arm; calmly, the man knelt and used his pugio to slice into his skin to yank out the arrowhead and then sucked the poison from his wound.

  Then the Third Cohort broke in panic. Legionaries milled and shouted, unable to evade the soaring enemies without trampling their comrades. Such a loss of discipline was unacceptable; where was Corbulo? Marcellinus recovered himself, left the First under the control of his senior centurion Pollius Scapax, and ran uphill into the ranks of the Third.

  Marcellinus thought Corbulo was down and wounded until he reached his tribune’s side. Instead, Corbulo was watching the wings whirl over his head with something like terror, his hand thrown up as if to ward off a curse.

  Marcellinus applied his foot to Corbulo’s ribs. “Up, man! Must your men see you trembling and afraid?”

  “What?” Corbulo’s eyes searched for him, as if the tribune were drunk or in darkness.

  “Men in kites! You’re not so daunted by that?”

  “Kites?” said Corbulo in a daze, but of course he was too young to remember the party-tricks that Vespasianus II, the Imperator-before-last, had imported from the Chin twenty years ago and sent twirling gaily over the Palatine Hill in the lamplight.

  “Aye, kites,” said the Praetor. “And aboard them, just men.”

  “Men!” said Corbulo. “Of course, I see it now,” and rose to his feet. Rushing into a group of his archers, he marshaled them to shoot long at the Iroqua who stood on the crag tops waiting to launch. A fusillade of arrows knocked a good half dozen of the attackers off their perches, while several more leaped off the crags, consigning themselves to the air. At least one crashed to earth immediately, a victim of the treacherous winds swirling up the valley.

  Marcellinus leaned back to study the flying braves. It was the Praetor’s job to think strategically, but he was hard pressed to devise a strategy against an enemy that soared out of reach.

  Now, up the hill, he saw smoke. A flaming arrow had embedded in the canvas of one of the supply train carts and was setting a merry blaze. Provisions were at risk.

  Marcellinus grabbed up a pilum from a fallen soldier and ran to launch it upward at the nearest Iroqua. The javelin drifted lazily behind the wing and dropped back to earth; Marcellinus had badly underestimated the flying brave’s height and speed.

  “Lead with your bows!” he shouted. “Fire ahead of them! Well ahead!”

  Across the Legion the wave of superstitious terror was ending. The cohorts were getting back under control, shields arrayed in defense and bows at the ready. The men had found themselves an enemy they could fight. It became a game now, though a deadly one; the more practiced Iroqua slew three Romans for every wing the legionaries sent tumbling into the rocks.

  Marcellinus took a bow from a man of the Third who had fallen to his knees, cradling his arm. Nocking an arrow, he swung it upward and let fly. And then he did it again. His second arrow pierced an Iroqua’s stomach, and he savored the brave’s scream as he plummeted into the ground.

  The bow was not Marcellinus’s favored weapon. But no man could say the Praetor was not flexible, in a pinch.

  ***

  When the final tally came in, the Legion had lost two hundred and fifty men in the skirmish. In return the Romans had shot down several dozen of the wings. Perhaps a couple of dozen more of the Iroqua had fallen out of the sky due to overzealousness, or had misjudged the canyon walls, forging their own disasters.

  Marcellinus loathed the loss of even a single legionary out here beyond the edge of the world, where they could not be replaced. Yet the deaths of their comrades brought such fire and fury to his men that, considered as a whole, his Legion might well be the stronger for it.

  “Cowards and skulkers, shooting their poison arrows from on high! We can hardly clamber into the air and meet them blade to blade!”

  Side by side they rode at the head of the Legion, Praetor Gaius Publius Marcellinus and First Tribune Lucius Domitius Corbulo, as they had in happier times out east. Corbulo had advanced to the vanguard of the Legion, with the alleged aim of helping Marcellinus select a site for the night-camp.

  “Aye,” said Marcellinus, tactfully. Corbulo was obviously not taking his momentary lapse of reason on the battlefield well.

  Corbulo skewered him with a glance, and Marcellinus added, “As cowardly as picking off our legionaries when they step out of their marching-line to fetch firewood.”

  “Worse. What kind of man hides in the air?”

  “The flying itself is not without risk,” Marcellinus pointed out. “Merely learning the skill must present its hazards. Plenty of opportunities to tumble out of the sky onto your head.”

  “The basic trick looked simple enough,” Corbulo grumbled. “Those men were not warriors.”

  Marcellinus doubted the simplicity of it. He had ordered his men to ensure that one of the crashed wings was packed into his cart for later study. The wing appeared to be constructed of deerskin scraped thin as parchment and stretched over pine and cedar spars and adorned with feathers. Certainly Marcellinus would never jump off a cliff under such a flimsy frame and knew of no other sane Roman who would. And once the Romans had organized and begun to get their enemies’ range, the Iroqua had retreated by flying back to land on the crags once more, also hardly an easy task.

  Th
e skills of these aerial warriors must take a lifetime’s learning. More ominously, the flyers must be supported by their community while honing their talents. On the shores of the Mare Chesapica it had been every Hesperian’s chore to trap his own fish. Here, though, they were no longer scrabbling farmers and part-time warriors, but specialists. It was the beginnings of civilization.

  “But there’ll be no next time,” said Corbulo, shaking Marcellinus out of his reverie. “It’s a trick that only works once. You know how the wind rises, on meeting a steep slope? Their kites ride on that. But the mountains are behind us now, and I see no terrain ahead where they’d have that advantage.”

  Marcellinus glanced sidelong at his First Tribune. “No more element of surprise.”

  “No more surprises,” Corbulo agreed.

  And yet Marcellinus almost regretted that he would never see such a thing again. If the flying Iroqua had not been deadly enemies, he could have watched them all day. Idly, he imagined himself jumping off the Palatine Hill and circling over the glitter and marble of the Roman Forum before alighting in front of the new Curia building where the Senate met. Now that would be a triumph!

  He wished he’d opened his eyes even wider, to take it all in.

  Domitius Corbulo checked back over his shoulder. “And speaking of surprises . . . a word in your ear about Aelfric.”

  “Aelfric?” said Marcellinus, startled.

  “He presumes too much. And you allow too much.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. Have a care, Marcellinus. Your friends should be good Romans, not Norse, Britons, or any other bloody outlanders. You’ll be chumming it up with Fuscus next.”

  “Last I heard, Britannia was still solidly part of the Imperium.”

  Corbulo gave a laugh so short it was almost a cough. “Well then, you’ve never been there. Did you know I was stationed up in Caledonia, at the Wall of Antoninus? For three years.”

  “That’s a long time,” said Marcellinus.

  “Dismal bloody weather, and a complete mess politically. You wouldn’t believe so many client-kings and bizarre religions would fit onto such a small pair of islands. I could write you a list of the odd things they believe. It’s one of the few regions left in the Imperium where they still have genuine shamans, you know. The Hibernians are the worst: mystics and moaners. They’d wail as soon as talk.”

  “Somehow Aelfric never struck me as the wailing type,” said Marcellinus.

  Corbulo would not be distracted from his theme. “Britons are all natural plotters and counterplotters; it’s in their blood. And they mask it with congeniality. They’ll worm their way inside your thoughts, get you talking, though they’re quiet ones themselves. Before you know it, you’ve told ‘em secrets they can use against you.”

  That brought Marcellinus up short. He had certainly discussed many things with Aelfric that it would never have occurred to him to tell Corbulo. About his wife and daughter, his doubts that they’d find gold, and probably a dozen other topics that he probably shouldn’t have confided to a tribune. All because he felt comfortable with the man. What did he really know of Aelfric’s motivations?

  “I see I’m not wrong,” said Corbulo. “And what do you know of him, in return? Do you even know where he was born? I do. Eboracum. He’s a Brigante.”

  The Brigantes were a Celtic gens with an ancient heritage in the north of Britannia, one of the last tribes to fall to Roma during the conquest. But that was a long time ago.

  Marcellinus frowned. “He’s really a Celt? Isn’t ‘Aelfric’ a Saxon name?”

  “Celt, Saxon, they’re all mixed up together now. But either way, Aelfric is too familiar by far. Ponder on it, that’s all I ask.”

  “I’ll take care,” said Marcellinus. He paused. “Thank you.”

  Corbulo smiled.

  ***

  The castra was a roving town that re-created itself daily in its own image. They rebuilt it identically every afternoon, occupied it for one night only, then abandoned it the next morning; civilization on the march through Nova Hesperia.

  Again tonight they selected the site and leveled the ground, measuring and marking with a knotted rope where the streets would be laid out. Up went the ramparts, earthworks six feet high around the perimeter surrounded by a deep defensive ditch. Down came any trees unfortunate enough to be located within the square, their wood pressed into use to construct the raised guard platforms at each corner and above the four gates. Up went the tents, down went the latrines. And, finally, up went the four temples obligatory for feeding the Legion’s superstitions: the Mithraic temple, the shrine to Cybele, the open-air altar and prayer rail of the Christ-Risen, and the small but rather forbidding statue of Jupiter Imperator, which had more presence than any of the real-life Imperators Marcellinus had served.

  The castra was square, with streets constructed on a grid. Its alignment was as constant as its arrangement, with the wide main street called the Cardo aligned north-south so that the evening and morning light would shine down the long cross-streets, named for the cohorts and centuries that lived along them. The rank and file lived one contubernium–eight men–to a tent. Marcellinus’s own Praetorium tent formed the center of the camp, with the latrines, the field hospital, the stables and the armory arrayed around the rim, and open areas at the corners for the supply carts, wagons and horses, and slaves.

  The camp was their home from home. Whatever skies the Legion slept under, the streets that surrounded them were always the same. By now, the layout of the castra was more familiar to the legionaries than the streets of the towns and villages they grew up in.

  ***

  “You didn’t tell me about the wings,” said Marcellinus.

  Fuscus gulped, but carefully. The Praetor’s pugio was at his throat, and the word-slave was rammed painfully back against the wooden walls of the cart he’d spent the day helping to haul across his own country.

  “Is not know,” Fuscus whimpered.

  “Oh? ‘People of Hawk and Thunderbird will drop on you’? Words chosen carefully. Aren’t you a clever rascal, Fuscus? ‘Man of smart,’ no?” He pushed the blade a little harder.

  “No! I stupid man!”

  “That’s right,” said the Praetor. “So, what next? How soon comes the next surprise from your people?”

  “Mercy!” said the word-slave, his eyes full of tears. “Mercy!”

  Aelfric ambled over. “Not to stand up for the little weasel, but Fuscus is quite likely farther from his birthplace now than he’s ever been before. I doubt he knows much more about this place than we do.”

  Marcellinus glared at him for the interruption, but he recognized the truth when he heard it. Anything Fuscus knew would be hearsay, tales told over a campfire. He’d established long ago that the little runt knew nothing substantive about the Great City. But it had been worth a try.

  The Praetor dropped his word-slave on the ground, giving him a kick for good measure. “All right, Fuscus. One more chance. One!”

  “You do know there’s no gold ahead, right?” Aelfric said quietly as they walked away. “Fool’s gold, maybe. A coppery mirage or two.”

  “Hush,” said Marcellinus, though the men nearby were hard at work getting the castra situated. “Such talk is treasonous.”

  He was only half joking. Few of his common legionaries gave a fig for the lofty ideals of global conquest, or would be indefinitely content to molest and slaughter barbarians. Today’s battle with the flying men had been a novelty. But by now they were marching on half rations across an uninteresting and seemingly endless plain, interspersed with forestland that would be equally boring if not for the danger of being picked off and slaughtered by hidden braves.

  Aelfric tutted. “You still cling to the hope that these simpletons are hiding cities of gold? You know better. You had to show that woman what gold was. She’d never seen it before.”

  “The gold is just over the horizon,” Marcellinus said with a straight face.

 
“It always is.”

  “Maybe we’ll find them something else worth the effort,” said Marcellinus.

  “‘Course you will,” Aelfric said. “That’s your job. But you might want to plan ahead for what that’ll be.”

  “Hmm,” said the Praetor. “You’re a real bearer of good cheer tonight.”

  “One more word,” said Aelfric. “Corbulo.”

  Marcellinus sighed.

  “The centurions are reporting rumors of him freezing up during the ambush. Panicking. Not giving timely orders in the heat of battle.”

  “I hear rumors about giant rodents, too,” Marcellinus said carefully.

  “Oh, I didn’t say I gave them any credence,” said Aelfric. “I mean, a veteran like Corbulo? It’s surely nonsense. But I thought you should know.”

  “Right,” said Marcellinus.

  Up the Cardo they saw Leogild and Corbulo step out of their respective side streets and head toward the Praetorium tent. “Speak of the devil,” said Aelfric.

  “He feels the same way about you,” said Marcellinus.

  “Does he, now?” Aelfric said thoughtfully, and Marcellinus kicked himself. Once again, he’d spoken too freely.

  He nodded to Aelfric and walked on, vowing it would be the last time he’d make that mistake.

  ***

  Once his meetings with his quartermaster and tribunes were over, Gaius Marcellinus liked to walk the camp. A Praetor should never be a stranger to his men, not if he wanted to keep his command and his neck intact.

  At dusk the castra was alive with sound, movement and purpose as the men set their campfires to cook their fry-bread and soup and corn hash. Given a cool night and an area with enough free wood they might build a larger bonfire and sit around it telling stories and bawdy jokes over their wine-and-water, but tonight they were too battle-weary for that additional luxury.

  Marcellinus strolled among the tents, past the cookpots and the knucklebone games. Around him, men were sharpening blades, polishing armor, tightening a strap here and loosening another there, hammering a new sole onto a sandal, lancing a boil or a blister, and trying to rinse stiff sweat stains out of their tunics. Some were writing letters that they would not be able to send for months, to sweethearts who had probably already forgotten them.