Debt of Ages

by Steve White

  “How, father?’ she asked. “You can’t send enough men back to keep me safe from the bandits in the mountains.”

  “It’s true, Augustus,” Andreas put in helpfully. “She’s safer with us.”

  Ecdicius seemed about to explode, but he gradually subsided. “Very well,” he grated. “You can come with us, until—and only until—I can find some proper lodging for you. In the meantime, now that everyone knows you’re not a boy…” He gestured vaguely in Andreas’ direction. “Andronicus, I want you to guard her, and try to keep her out of trouble!”

  “I’ll do my best, Augustus,” Andreas replied, all dutiful resolve to carry out his orders, however distasteful. He looked like a Roman recruiting poster would have, if they’d used them. Sarnac somehow managed not to burst out laughing.

  “And now,” Ecdicius continued grimly, “let’s proceed. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.” As he turned his horse around, he gave Julia a final glare—or what was intended to be a glare but fooled no one. Then he shook his head. “Where you get your stubbornness and boldness from is beyond my comprehension!”

  Sarnac continued to keep a straight face, nearly rupturing himself in the process.

  A group of riders came out from the Arvernian villa to meet them. Ecdicius shouted a greeting to their leader and spurred his horse forward. Sarnac followed, urging his horse into a gallop.

  He’d done a little riding in his youth, which combined with the trained reflexes conferred by Tylar’s implants to make him an above-average horseman of this era. He was, in fact, just good enough to recognize greatness when he saw it, as he did when Ecdicius mounted a horse and they became a single organism with a single will. There were, he reflected, a few sights in the world that were in a special class by themselves. A clipper ship running before the wind under full sail. A cheetah building up to full speed as it pursued an antelope. A stooping hawk. Ecdicius on horseback.

  They met the party from the villa, and its leader dismounted and saluted. “Ave, Augustus.”

  Ecdicius flung himself from the saddle and embraced the man. “Ah, enough of titles, Basileus! It’s been too long.” He held Basileus at arm’s length and examined him with mock disapproval. “You’ve gone to fat since we rode together against the Visigoths! You must breed strong horses in these parts, to find one that can carry you!”

  Basileus—about Ecdicius’ age, and not noticeably overweight—grinned amid the general laughter. “You’ll find I can still ride, Ecdicius. So can all of us. I’ve sent word to others of the old Brotherhood, and several are on their way here now. We’ll ride again, this time for the rightful heir of Artorius Augustus!” His men broke into a cheer, even the younger ones, who knew Ecdicius only from their elders’ stories.

  “Splendid! We’ve been spreading the word that we’re all to rendezvous at Clermont next month.It’ll be a reunion of the Brotherhood, Basileus.”

  They had first passed through the Burgundian lands and made sure of the allegiance of those Roman allies. Then they had moved on into the Auvergne, stopping at the estates of Ecdicius’ fellow cavaliers whom he’d led to the victory of Bourges, not on a hopeless exercise in gallantry as in Sarnac’s history. They were mostly men in their late forties like the new Augustus of the West, but Basileus was right: they could still ride like centaurs. And the response had been the same everywhere. Clearly, Ecdicius would be able to throw limitless gallantry and elan at the hardbitten professionalism of Kai’s veterans. Sarnac wondered if it would be enough.

  Ecdicius remounted, using the stirrups Artorius and his men had inherited from that Sarmatian lump in the British melting-pot from which they were descended. In Sarnac’s history they had been lost sight of after Artorius’ downfall, vanishing from Europe until reintroduced by the Avars a century later. Here, of course, they were part of the standard heavy cavalry kit by now. So as far as cavalry technique went, it would be a wash between them and Kai.

  Kai. The image of his onetime friend, soon to be his enemy, came crowding in. Does this Kai remember me at all? If he does, it’s probably as a damned deserter! He must have wondered what became of Bedwyr and his mysterious employer Tertullian shortly before the Battle of Bourges.

  He hauled his mind back to this late-summer day in Gaul, to this field he was riding across at Ecdicius’ side. The rest of their party had joined them, and as they rode toward the villa Ecdicius was undergoing the embarrassment of introducing his daughter to Basileus. It wasn’t as bad as it had been their first few stops; they’d gotten her some socially acceptable clothes, and her hair was growing back.

  Ecdicius turned to him and smiled. “Look at them, Bedwyr,” he said, swinging his arm in a circle to indicate Basileus and his retainers. “Have you ever seen such a crew of madmen? Kai will know he’s been in a fight!” Then he turned serious, and seemed to echo Sarnacs earlier thoughts. “What courage and love of country can do, we’ll do. But I can’t stop thinking of what we’re going to have to face. If it were just cavalry against cavalry, I’d face it willingly. But Kai’s a master at using those damned longbowmen of his in conjunction with his cavalry. They can break up a formation, blunt a countercharge…”

  Now’s as good a time as any, Sarnac decided. “Augustus, it seems to me that we must match him with archery of our own.”

  Ecdicius’ brows drew together. “But how, Bedwyr? We can’t just copy the idea of longer bows; it takes time to learn to use them properly. Those men Artorius brought back from western Britain had been doing it since they were boys! You can’t duplicate that kind of skill overnight.”

  “True, Augustus; it takes time to train a longbowman. But…” He turned toward one of Basileus’ men, who looked like he was just back from hunting, and pointed at that which hung from the saddle-bow. “It doesn’t take long to learn how to use one of those, does it?”

  “Why of course not.” Ecdicius looked blank. “Anybody can learn to use a crossbow; there’s little skill to it, you sight along it and pull on the handle. Every lad in Gaul uses them for shooting game. But what’s that got to do with… ?

  Artorius had warned Sarnac to expect this. The Romans had had crossbows for a long time, and they were as popular for hunting as Ecdicius had indicated, not just for the relative ease of learning how to use them but also for the fact that you could leave the quarrel nocked indefinitely while stalking game and be ready to get off a quick shot as your prey broke cover. But the thought of using them in war had never occurred to anyone. They were hunting weapons, period. Why? Because that was what they’d always been. It would have surprised Sarnac before his previous brush with the fifth century, but now he knew about the conservatism of preindustrial societies.

  “Since so many Gallic men know how to use them, Augustus, or can be quickly taught to do so, why not form a corps of them to give our men some missile support? Kai’s longbowmen would have the advantage in range, but as you’ve said he has only a small number of them. We could put masses of crossbowmen into the field.”

  Ecdicius’ expression had gone from inability to understand what Sarnac was talking about to rejection of an obvious absurdity, and then to dawning interest. “Massed crossbows in battle,” he finally said, very slowly, and shook his head. “But nobody ever…” He trailed to a halt and thought for another moment. Then, with one of the dizzyingly abrupt movements that typified him, he leaned over in his saddle toward the man with the crossbow and asked to see it. Then he inspected the weapon in silence. When he spoke again his voice was matter-of-fact. “What about the disparity in rates of fire? A trained longbowman can release arrows a lot faster than any crossbowman can get off quarrels.”

  Sarnac released a quiet breath of relief. It was going more smoothly than he’d dared hope. But, then, this was Ecdicius. “I have an idea on that, Augustus. Perhaps you’ll let me demonstrate it later.” Actually, it wasn’t his idea.

  The semi-historical Sun Pin had thought of it eight centuries before, when the newly invented crossbow was coming to dominate the
battlefields of the Warring States, and Tylar had passed it on. (Sarnac had once rhetorically asked his old friend Liu Natalya if the Chinese had invented everything. She’d pretended to think about it for a decent interval before nodding judiciously.)

  He examined the weapon. It was nothing like the steel arbalests of his history’s Late Medieval Europe. Those things were designed to pierce the high-quality plate armor of their own era; here and now, that kind of steel-smashing power wasn’t needed. And, by the same token, it didn’t require any elaborate mechanical gizmos to draw it—and therein lay the practicality of his third-hand idea for overcoming the problem of its slow rate of fire. (Nobody in Europe would ever dream up a repeating crossbow like the Chinese chu-ko-nu, and there was no time to introduce it.)

  They had reached the villa and were dismounting when a dusty courier rode in from the east. Basileus had a brief colloquy with him, then gestured to Ecdicius to join them. The three of them talked for a few moments, then Ecdicius returned to where Sarnac waited. His face really was hopelessly expressive; it told Sarnac what the message was before he even opened his mouth.

  “The provincial border guards on the Rhine at Strasbourg report that the lead elements of the Army of Germania are within sight of the river. They’ll be crossing over soon.” Ecdicius’ face abruptly transformed itself with a grin. “Maybe you’d better show me your idea for using crossbows this very evening!”

  The barges passed back and forth in stately lines, depositing their loads of troops on the Gallic side of the Rhine and then going back to the eastern bank for more. Kai stood on a bluff overlooking the Gallic bank and the formations that were taking shape. It would have looked like chaos to a civilian, but Kai looked it over with a professional’s eye and nodded.

  Somewhere nearby, he’d heard, was the field where the Emperor Julian—a good general, for all his apostasy— had smashed the barbarians at the Battle of Strasbourg and saved Gaul, over a hundred and thirty years before. But Kai had no time for sightseeing. He had to deal with a constant procession of aides with requests from his officers for orders, clarifications and resolutions of disputes. He kept things in order with half his mind. The other half was on the riverside village he’d seen. Or what had once been a village.

  He hadn’t crossed over with the vanguard; there had been too much organizational work yet to do on the Germanian side. But one of Nicoles’ troop of officials had. Kai couldn’t really blame the officer who’d allowed himself to be led by the man, who after all claimed to speak with the voice of the Augustus. But…

  He became aware of Nicoles’ litter, coming up the path to the bluff. The bearers set it down, and the chamberlain emerged. “Ah, General! An inspiring sight, is it not?” Nicoles swept an arm out, indicating the coalescing army. ‘The unstoppable might of Rome, on the march!” He noticed Kai’s expression and reined in his enthusiasm. “I understand that you had some questions concerning the activities of my underchamberlain Theophanes.”

  “I don’t recall ever giving him permission to cross over with the first wave,” Kai said stonily.

  “Oh I do apologize, general! Doubtless we violated military protocol by not soliciting your permission. But I felt it was important to get a personal representative of the Augustus onto Gallic soil without delay. I would have done it myself, but I’m under instructions from the Augustus—and the Augusta, whose compassion is exceeded only by her beauty and wisdom—to avoid exposing myself to undue danger. And Theophanes is an excellent official, if occasionally prone to overzealousness.”

  “But… was that necessary?” Kai gestured vaguely in the direction of the charnel house that had been a riverside village.

  “Oh, that.” Nicoles made a little moue. “Most distasteful, I agree. But Theophanes assures me that the villagers displayed insufficient enthusiasm—indeed, outright surliness—when he raised the image of Wilhelmus Augustus. They actually offered violence to the image! He felt that an example should be made. Coming immediately after our entry into Gaul, it should have a salutary effect Your own officer, I should add, came to agree; he was, no doubt, looking to the future—and his own career.” For the barest instant, Nicoles’ expression slipped, and Kai glimpsed something other than courtliness in his eyes. “Great changes are coming, General. Indeed, ‘change’ is the Augustus’ watchword. There are even those” —an insinuating smile, seeming to say “Oh, aren’t we being just too, too wicked?”— “who feel he uses it to excess.” Kai had become used to this kind of ploy, and declined to rise to the bait. “At any rate,” Nicoles went on, “we must all be prepared to bend with the shifting winds, General. AH of us.”

  For a moment they looked at each other in silence, for nothing needed to be said; they both understood matters perfectly. Then Nicoles spoke briskly. “I understand your lieutenant Marcellus has completed his preparations for the landing in Britain.”

  “Yes. He’s assembled all our available shipping at his base, near the Rhine’s mouth, and built all the barges he needs.” Kai didn’t add that in the old days the Britons would have smashed the invasion at sea. But with the Saxons and other sea-raiders conquered and incorporated, the Saxon Shore Fleet had been allowed to rot away. Marcellus would have an unopposed voyage, he thought, carefully not trying to define his own feelings.

  “Excellent! If all has gone according to plan, the Irish raiders should have already begun attacking from the west. So my last correspondence from our agent there assured me. He also assured me…” Nicoles hesitated uncharacteristically, and swallowed. “He assures me that the Fomorians have kept their bargain—in all respects.” Kai felt his neck hairs prickle. “You mean the… ?”

  “Yes. By the way, the agent has learned the beings name…”

  “Balor, Lady. That’s what they call him. I saw him with my own eyes! I saw him as I lay in a ditch hiding while they passed by. May God strike me dead if I didn’t!”

  The Ordovician chieftain sat a the focus of a half-circle of listeners in the great hall at Cadbury, trembling in the grip of exhaustion and memory. His skin gleamed with sweat under the flaring torches.

  The word had only just come that the Irish raiders, so long held at bay by the terror of Artorius’ name, had crossed over in their leather curraghs and were spreading terror in Gwynedd. Just behind the news had come this man, fleeing south from his villages destruction. Now they listened to him with varying expressions: Gwenhwyvaer’s unreadable, Cerdic’s worried, Constantine’s scornful, and Tiraena’s perplexed as she tried to recall where she’d heard that name.

  “So, fellow,” Constantine said condescendingly, “you tell us that the Irish are led by some gigantic one-eyed man, eh?” Old Cador had died last year, leaving his son as chief of the Dumnonii. He was in an uncomfortable tangle of conflicting moods these days, afire with enthusiasm for Gwenhwyvaer’s declaration of British independence but seething with resentment at having to fight alongside Saxons in defense of that independence. On one’ point he was absolutely certain: they needed to focus their attention on meeting the invasion everyone knew was coming from the Germanian coast. His tone left no doubt about what he thought of the distraction posed by this yokel and his wild tales.

  But the man stood his ground, clearly not about to be intimidated by any Dumnonian princeling. “No! A giant indeed—half again the height of a man, and squatty for all that. And, yes, one eye—huge, glowing with an unsanctified light in the middle of his head. But he was not a man!” He shuddered with a fear that had nothing to do with Constantine, then took command of himself. “He stood upright on two legs, and had two arms, but there was nothing about him that was like a man—or anything of this world! It wasn’t his ugliness. It was…” The shakes took him again. He turned to Gwenhwyvaer. “Lady, it was his wrongness! He’s something that doesn’t belong in God’s creation!”

  Cerdic leaned forward, frowning. “You’re saying he’s a… demon?” The ealdorman had finally received baptism—without noticeable improvement, Constantine had been heard to m
utter. The Teutonic paganism he’d left behind had held giants. He would have preferred one of them to a denizen of the Christian hell.

  “Well,” Constantine said with forced heartiness, “if he is, we’ve nothing to fear. The priests can send him shrieking back down into the pit from whence he came!”

  “Oh, I fear not,” the man said in a near-whisper. Exhaustion was quickly taking him, but he smiled up at Constantine grimly. “A priest—I’d known the old fellow, but never dreamed he had the courage of any two warriors—advanced on Balor, crying out the formula of exorcism. The savages drew back, for they fear all holy men. But Balor smashed him to the earth with the great club he carries, then grasped him by his two ankles and pulled…” He couldn’t continue. This was a man who had lived his life on the semibarbarous fringes of this brutal world, but he was obviously gagging on rising vomit. But he again mastered himself and continued. “And through it all, the monster was silent as always.”

  “What?” Gwenhwyvaer cocked her head to one side. “You say this Balor is mute? How, then, does he give his commands to the raiders?”

  “No one ever heard him speak, Lady. But he wears an amulet of curious design around his neck, from which come words in a strange tongue, sounding as though spoken by a throat of metal…”

  “Oh, this is too much!” Constantine flung himself back in his chair. “Talking amulets indeed! Must we waste any more time listening to this? I ask, you, Lady…” He turned toward Gwenhwyvaer, then stopped short, for beyond her he saw Tiraena. They all followed his gaze. She was sitting like a statue, with an expression none of them could read, in a silence none of them disturbed.

  Over the last six years she had been an occasional visitor to Cadbury, known to be in Gwenhwyvaer’s special favor. Most people made surreptitious signs when they saw the foreign-looking woman, for it was whispered that she gave counsels beyond the common knowledge of men. (Gwenhwyvaer had known about Artorius’ death, and thus been able to begin implementing her declaration of independence, before anyone else had heard the news; and the tall woman had just arrived on one of her visits at the time.) Some claimed to have seen her standing distracted, as though listening to voices she alone could hear. And… she never seemed to grow any older.