Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “I haven’t. Leastways, not officially.” He grinned. “A poor scout I’d be if I couldn’t find a path through a castra unseen.”

  “Such undue stealthiness could get you killed.”

  “Perhaps. But I’m no use to you here. If I’m to be of service, I need to be out feeling the lay of the land. Learning to think as the redskins do.”

  Marcellinus eyed him. “This territory appeals? Perhaps you’re thinking you’ve served Roma long enough?”

  “The scenery’s to my taste, I’ll admit. I sojourned in Vinlandia awhile, did you know? And Graenlandia before that. I like the spaces empty, and the skies big.”

  “Then why are you here in my tent?”

  “Because I still work for you, Praetor. I wouldn’t want you to imagine I’d deserted. And, to advise you.” Marcellinus raised his eyebrows. “To tell you my impressions, rather,” the Norseman amended quickly.

  “You have the floor,” Marcellinus said ironically, and sat in his chair.

  Bjarnason sipped his wine. He must have grown unused to it during his weeks in the woods; it was the first time Marcellinus had seen a Viking sip anything. “Very well, then. They’re a powerful people, the Iroqua. Warriors the like of which I’ve not seen before, in Europa or beyond. Bloodier than we Norse. We generally leave people alive, but they kill for sport. I’m keeping my wits about me, I don’t mind telling you. I don’t sleep much.”

  “And these are the people I shouldn’t massacre?”

  “Nay,” said Bjarnason, “I don’t give a hoot about the Iroqua. Vile folk, but you’ll be out of their territory in a few more days anyway. The people you shouldn’t kill are the next lot, the Cahokiani. Great builders, they are: longhouses, thatched roofs. Not the equals of the Norse great halls, but they could be, with a tad more practice. And they build mounds of earth, too, wide and tall. And riverine harbors and irrigation canals. They’re like no people you’ve seen yet.”

  “Do they have gold?” Marcellinus asked automatically, and almost laughed at himself for the question.

  The Norseman shook his head. “We’ll not make our fortunes there. Furs and pretty shells. Aside from that it’s mostly stone and bone, wood and feathers. Especially feathers. For they’re flyers as well as runners and swimmers, you see.”

  “We saw what their wings could do in Appalachia. It’s a fancy trick, but not one that leaves much of a dent on Roman steel.”

  “You’ve not seen the best of what they can throw into the air,” said Bjarnason quietly. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “But we can beat them,” Marcellinus said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Oh aye, handily, should you choose to. But maybe you should consider the advantages of trade over pillage.” Bjarnason smiled ruefully. “And when a Norseman says that, you should probably listen.”

  “We don’t need any shells. How much farther, Bjarnason?”

  “To the city of mounds? As the crow flies and the legion marches? Six weeks.” The Norseman waggled his hand to show that his estimate was rough.

  “Six?” Marcellinus said, appalled.

  As the year wore on, Marcellinus was becoming uncomfortably aware of just how long this march was taking. He worked the dates in his head. In all likelihood, the Ides of Julius were already past. Six weeks further would take them well past the limit of how far west they could travel and still have any hope of making it back to the Chesapica before winter closed in. For a moment, his heart already felt the chill.

  The mounted Norse scouts had made it to the city of mounds and back again in a couple of months. It had always been obvious that the Legion would take longer. No one had expected it to take this long.

  “You’re worried about supplies?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t be. They have better corn than you’ve seen so far, and soon ready for the harvest.”

  “Enough to feed the 33rd over a winter?”

  “Enough to feed a city,” Bjarnason assured him. “Take the city and you take the food, too.”

  He put the wine-cup down and stretched. “I haven’t been inside that city, mind. Can’t even get close. There’s no cover in the last stages, and I’ll not get far trying to disguise myself as one of them. But ten thousand people’s my guess.”

  “If you’re wrong-” Marcellinus caught himself.

  On their arrival at the Chesapica the weather had been surprisingly blustery and fierce for the latitude. If Marcellinus had to build a fortress and overwinter the 33rd out here in the desolate backcountry of Nova Hesperia, he would really have problems. The decimation of his troops from starvation and infighting would make their losses at the hands of the natives look paltry. Marcellinus could hardly expect the locals to feed his legion out of the goodness of their hearts.

  Of course, if he had to turn and slink back to the Chesapica without having found gold or achieved substantial military success conquering new territory for the Imperium, Marcellinus would have wasted the year. Hadrianus would not view that favorably.

  He really had no choice. None at all.

  They had to go on.

  “I’m not wrong,” the scout said.

  Hating himself, Marcellinus clutched at a further straw. “If you’ve not been in, how can you be sure there’s no gold?”

  “I suppose they might have a bit, if it was well-hidden.” The Norseman leaned forward. “But these people have more than that, Praetor. They know this land, and they know the air above it. The air! Gods’ sakes! And they don’t think the way we do. I can’t really explain it, because I only speak a few words of their lingo. But there are virtues to them. There are virtues.

  “You’ve seen it yourself, I know; I heard you trying to persuade that clod Aelfric, back there by Thorkell’s corpse. The Cahokiani husband the land even more so than the Iroqua, they live almost inside the land. And that’s how they fly, you know. They’ve tamed the air because they have an understanding of it that we lack.”

  Marcellinus drained his cup. “Tell me something I can use, Isleifur Bjarnason.”

  “You’ve only seen the small wings,” said the Viking. “Wait till you see the larger. In their language, they call them Thunderbirds. If the little birds are like sparrows, the Thunderbirds are like . . . well, eagles.”

  “Eagles.”

  “Flying through the air, quick as ballista bolts.”

  Larger wings. Marcellinus’s pulse quickened, but he remained resolute. “The bigger they are, the larger the hole they’ll make in the ground when we shoot them down. They’re a gimmick. There’s little strategic value to them.”

  “Well,” said the Norseman. “That may be so, and it may be not.”

  “You do realize that I should arrest you?” Marcellinus said bluntly. “Fraternizing with the enemy, pleading their case with me, breaking in here by night?”

  Bjarnason grinned. “I’m at my Praetor’s disposal.”

  “Yes, till you turn renegade on me. I haven’t forgotten what good pirates you people make.”

  Bjarnason looked pained. “Damn it, now . . . sir. That’s the Danes. The Danes were never anything but trouble. I’m a Geat, one of the true Scands.”

  “Then go, Geat, and spy some more.”

  The Norseman shuffled backward, and now Marcellinus saw the fabric of the tent hanging loose where Bjarnason had uprooted a tent peg or two and crawled under it to gain ingress.

  “Oh, and if it’s nationalities we’re talking, I wouldn’t put as much stock in Aelfric as you seem to. He’s a Briton first, a Roman only in name. You’ve got to keep both eyes on the Britons. They’re not like us.”

  “Us?” murmured Marcellinus.

  “Aye. Romans and Norse, we’re solid stock, hard dreamers with a vision and the guts to make it stick. Both out to claim the world for ourselves. Oh, the Norse bow to the stronger,” he ducked his head in deference, “but if it wasn’t you Romans, it’d be us out there, carving an empire.”

  “You’re something of a freethi
nker,” Marcellinus said dryly.

  “It’s true. If Roma had fallen to the Visigoths and Vandals and all–and that was a closer-run thing than people like to suppose, these days–you can wager it’d have been we Norse sweeping up and building an Imperium now. Who’d have gainsaid us? The bloody Mongols, eventually. But certainly not the Gauls or the Parthians or the Britons. Stay-at-homes with mud on their faces, the lot of ‘em, no soldiers, and no sailors either.”

  Marcellinus grinned. Despite Bjarnason’s impertinence, he liked the man. “Very well. I withdraw the accusation of piracy.”

  “Right, then.” And with a flourish, the Norseman shuffled backward, wriggled through the tiny gap between the tent canvas and the ground, and was gone.

  “Anyone else like to put in an appearance?” Marcellinus said to the goatskin walls of his Praetorium, but if any further spies were present, they remained mute. He went to bed.

  ***

  The Iroqua war party hit them two days later in the early afternoon, rising like ghosts from the long grasses to fling their spears and fire their arrows into the side of Fabius’s Seventh Cohort, howling like banshees all the while. Though they had been on the march for six hours without a break the Seventh responded instantly, bursting out of its marching line to hammer the braves with Roman steel. The assault turned into a running battle amid the trees of hickory and beech, and if the Iroqua were surprised at the turn of speed a fully armored legionary could attain, their surprise generally did not last long.

  Throughout the Legion, Roman discipline prevailed. The cohorts behind and in front of the Seventh came to order, the nearer groups dashing into the fray while the centuries farther out hunkered down in a defensive posture. Sure enough, two more Iroqua bands burst out from behind the trees, one assaulting Marcellinus and the Roman standards at the head of the Legion, the other aiming to destroy the baggage train and, perhaps, capture the Romans’ slaves for their own use.

  Neither attempt succeeded. The elite troops of Pollius Scapax mowed down the forward band of savages with surgical skill and utter ruthlessness, and Marcellinus bloodied his gladius in combat for the first time on this campaign, cutting down four braves and crippling another. Meanwhile, in the rear the terrified Powhatani and other Algon-Quian slaves circled the wagons and aided the stragglers of the Sixth in holding off the ululating Iroqua until the massed line of the Fourth slammed into the barbarians, slaughtering them to a man.

  Other smaller bands of painted Hesperians appeared helter-skelter amid the trees, and the Fifth and Second were the next to engage in a running fight in the meadows. This ended with the remains of the war parties encircled by Romans. Some twenty of the Iroqua tried to escape by climbing into a tree; the Romans set the tree ablaze and made them choose between death by fire and death by steel. Dozens of others, trapped on the ground, threw aside their slings and bows.

  If by surrendering they expected to be spared to join their eastern brethren in the slave line, the Iroqua were sorely disappointed. The Legion needed no more slaves, and Marcellinus would not have trusted a warrior in the role as readily as a fisherman. Slavery was an economic contract between thinking beings. These Iroqua were feral creatures who would never knuckle under.

  After mourning Thorkell Sigurdsson so recently the men were not inclined to award their captives easy deaths, and Marcellinus would hardly insist upon such a thing. Several more of his legionaries were dead and others still thrashed on the ground with poisoned flesh wounds, and he had no sympathy for an enemy that adopted such foul tactics. He withdrew to secure the front of the legionary line, and left his troops to their revenge. The screams of the Iroqua troubled him little enough. He hoped the gruesome sounds would travel far enough to deter any further Hesperian foolishness.

  They had marched sixteen miles that day, and it would have to be enough. Marcellinus sent in his tribunes and Scapax to declare a temporary halt to the festivities, and his men cheerfully yielded and threw up the castra then and there in the clearing. Camp had never been set up so quickly.

  ***

  “I see you’ve divorced the Briton,” said Corbulo, dismounting to walk beside him. “A worthy decision.”

  Gaius Publius Marcellinus was leading his horse, allowing it to walk unencumbered for a while. For his own part, it felt good to shake the stiffness out of his legs, and the brisk exercise was helping to shift the fog from his thoughts.

  He missed Aelfric’s easy companionship, but was not about to confess it. “You were right,” he said shortly. “It’s easy for a man to grow careless.”

  The views in Appalachia had often been stunning. Here in the lowlands, often surrounded once more by forest, the tedium of marching had taken over again. By now Marcellinus heartily endorsed Tully’s conviction that no Roman would want to farm here. The land had become ungodly flat. His eyes ached for want of a hill or even a hummock. He had never seen such a terrain. Like all learned men, Marcellinus knew that the earth was round like a ball, but even for him it was easy to imagine the world petering off into an increasingly featureless desert as they marched out of reality altogether.

  “Killing Fuscus,” said his tribune. “Another worthy simplification. Easier not to hear his lying tongue at all than risk being misled by it.”

  With uncanny precision Corbulo had just congratulated Marcellinus on the second matter that was troubling him. He could not dispel the uneasy feeling that cutting down the word-slave in cold blood had been shameful, and possibly as bad an error as that of the unnamed Roman captain who had slaughtered the Norse pirates to a man. Information was always valuable. And in the Praetor’s personal experience, his acting in anger had rarely produced laudable results.

  They hiked in silence. Marcellinus recognized that an olive branch was being offered, a bid to return to their former camaraderie, but could not find the words to respond. Corbulo’s moment of failure still hung in the air, surely the cause of the remaining awkwardness between them. Everything’s all right, Lucius, he wanted to say, and I think no worse of you. But that would admit the possibility that another man might have. Corbulo had ambition, and a persistent rumor about him panicking on the battlefield could be deadly to his career, sinking his chances of one day getting his own legion or advancing in politics. Somehow the thing must be dealt with without being acknowledged.

  Unexpectedly, Corbulo raised the topic himself. He turned to Marcellinus and said:

  “I apologize for my dithering, back at the ambush. Thank you for plucking me upright. It was well done.”

  Marcellinus recovered quickly from his surprise and waved his hand dismissively. “We were all startled.” He leaned over. “I hope my sandal print in your ribs is not causing you too much anguish.”

  Corbulo laughed. “Always better to be beaten up by a friend.”

  Beaten up veered a little close to Marcellinus’s most painful childhood memories, but he swallowed and said easily enough, “I would never mention it to another soul, you know.”

  “And I thank you for that,” was all Corbulo said, but he felt the man’s spirits lift.

  If only Marcellinus’s own mood could be elevated so easily. “I responded to murder with murder,” he said.

  “What?”

  Marcellinus bit his tongue and walked on, facing straight ahead.

  “What choice did you have? You did what you had to do. I’d have done the same.”

  “Would you?”

  “Of course.”

  Marcellinus looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Very well, then. I should ride again.”

  “We each have times when we doubt,” said his First Tribune quietly. “But we need to stick together and get the job done. Whether or not there’s gold here, we can make this work for Hadrianus, you and I. In the conquest and annexation of such a vast area we can cover ourselves in glory. Let us not be enemies, Gaius. And let us not forget who rules this world.”

  “I never shall,” said Marcellinus. “Count on it.”

  ***
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br />   It was not Marcellinus’s habit to brood, but that night sleep would not come. Dark images and invisible fears coursed through him, banishing rest.

  Finally, he could stand it no longer. And so he dressed in a simple dark tunic and walked out beyond the castra into the relentlessly forested hills.

  It was a risk, but a calculated one. Since repelling the Iroqua assault they had seen no signs of hostile activity, suffered no sneak attacks, passed no villages. They appeared to be passing through a sparsely populated area.

  If Marcellinus was truly destined to master Nova Hesperia, Land of the Evening, he needed to visit it alone, by night.

  The nights here were far from silent. The din of the crickets baffled his ears and rendered him all but deaf. A stealthy brave could be at his throat before he knew it. This, above all, led Marcellinus to dispense with caution and trust to the gods, although whether he was relying on the deities of his own people or to unknown Hesperian elementals, he did not know.

  Fearlessly, he roamed the forest, equally aware of the feel of the earth beneath his feet and the silhouettes of the tree branches against the sky. Sometimes he reached out to touch the bark of a tree, or knelt to sift the loam of the land between his fingers.

  Marcellinus walked for many hours, and saw no one, came across no signs of human life at all. He was neither consumed by a man-bear nor set upon by giant rodents. He was observed by a rather large owl, and interrogated briefly in the softest of night-hoots, but he chose not to respond.

  If Sigurdsson could meld with the land, so could he. A Praetor must understand the terrain.

  He returned changed, his confidence restored. He felt himself healed of the damage caused by his several rages at Aelfric and Fuscus. In accepting the land he had regained his inner peace and flexibility, just as in his youth he had subdued the harsher human landscape of Subura.

  Although he had not been keeping a good account of his direction other than by awareness of the Moon’s location, his unnamed gods did not abandon him. Or perhaps he merely followed his nose back to camp. In either event he regained the castra well before dawn, passed into it with a nod and a wink to his astounded sentries of the watch, and captured an hour’s sleep before rising refreshed into a new day.