The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  sprung up—in the Americas and Africa, but especially in France. In the same way that some nutty groups look to salvation by aliens from space in UFOs, these people preached salvation by a frozen disciple of Jesus Christ. One group, the Luministes, began sending its own expeditions into the Alps, and in 2022 they were vindicated when Bonhomme was found. He was revived at once. After a stomach transplant * and a course of imprint therapy he found himself at the head of a very large and rapidly growing movement. The Lumin-iste administration is the real power behind him, but his pronouncements carry a lot of weight."

  "I begin to see. After a year or two the Durvas people wanted to revive their own ice-prophet as a counter to Bonhomme."

  "In essence, yes. You were their sleeping superhero, their King Arthur, their Ilya Maromyets—check your imprints later, those two have big entries."

  "So, I was unfrozen in Durvas."

  "Earlier this year, yes."

  "But not revived."

  "No."

  "But Bonhomme's Luministes had me abducted." "Yes."

  "Then revived me." "Yes."

  "You then rescued me."

  "Yes and no. As far as the modern equivalent of your seneschal, Lord Wallace, and everyone else in Durvas is concerned, I am an unknown, expensive contract agent. Durvas has been making inquiries about you, however, but the clinic has strict orders not to tell them anything until I am good and ready."

  "But Durvas is my village. It only exists to help me travel through time. If I can't trust Durvas people, who can I trust?"

  "You could trust me."

  "Yes . . . but would it be unreasonable of me to be confused?" "No."

  "All right, then, what is going on?"

  "I don't know everything that I need to as yet, and mean-

  time I will not have you doing anything rash out of sheer ignorance. You are in serious danger, but you are obviously aware of that."

  "So I'm to be kept in ignorance?"

  "No, no, that's not what I meant. I tell you what: ask one of the staff for a travel-sim called TourHead, and say that you want to run Decius Museum, Antarctica. That should give you more than enough to think about for now." _5

  the declad

  Houston, Texas: 10 December 2028, Anno Domini

  According to Baker, the wallscreen was a limited tool for doing research, yet Vitellan liked it for that very reason. It was like watching a play or an oration, so he had a parallel of something like it in his background. He had already tried VR

  helmets, but found that he disliked them. It was like being someone else, and Vitellan wondered if he would ever adjust to that medium. He lay back on his bed, using a remote control unit to select video footage from newsbases. Nearly all of his searches were on Bonhomme the Prophet. He watched rallies, revival meetings, and airport interviews, and after a dozen major events Vitellan had the gist of Bonhomme's message: beware false prophets, and win back the world for Christianity. The face was the same as Vitellan remembered, as was the manner, but Bonhomme had been heavily imprinted to adjust to the modern world. His meeting with Bonhomme had been only a few days ago at Marlenk, even though now he was on the other side of the world and over six centuries had passed. The soul of Bonhomme was missing in this century. Will I too become someone else so that I can adjust to this century, Vitellan wondered. When he had seen enough, he scrolled down a menu of tourist videos until he found the most recent trip of the Deciad time ship. Paradise Vistas and Tourhead Distribution present THE DECIAD TIME SHIP. Gregory Pine of Famewar and Shore Street

  is your sense-host on a tour of the Roman time ship in Antarctica that features in The De-ciad of Quintus.. See the Roman time travelers lying frozen and still traveling through time before the Awakening Project begins. Date of Recording: 17 May 2028. Running Time: 41 minutes. Adapted for Wallscreen 8 from True-VR.

  As Baker had said, it was adapted from dataspex cameras, and translated badly to a wallscreen. The sense-host walked down a dimly lit corridor that still contained the litter of recent construction. Vitellan wondered if that was why they kept it badly lit. At the end his host walked through a pair of sliding doors and into a brightly lit auditorium where about fifty people were already seated. He sat in the front row, and almost at once the guide arrived. She introduced herself as Gina Rossi, Italian by birth and Espanic by adoption. Without another word she opened the book that she carried and began to read:

  This is a tale of the world's end, and of the ships that ran before the flames. The vessels were the very peak of our empire's craft, and they bore the best of our learning and the finest of our citizens.

  "So begins the Deciad," said the guide, looking up from the slim, leather-bound volume.

  "The author, Quintus Flavius, was an educated stonemason. He was quite familiar with the Aeneid of Virgil, that epic describing the escape of Troy's last nobles after their city fell to the Greeks. He saw this voyage as a similar epic journey. Perhaps he hoped that his chronicle of the flight from the fall of ancient Rome would become as famous as Virgil's Aeneid itself.

  "I think you will agree that there is nobody better qualified to tell the story of this great voyage than Quintus himself, so I shall read some more passages from the Deciad to set the scene. After that there will be a tour of the chambers and tunnels that he eventually built. The more adventurous among you will also have the option of going for an excursion on the beach outside."

  There was a shuffling restlessness in the tour group, mainly from some classics students. Their faces stood out, alert and eager; they were awestruck. They were actually here at last, at the very site of the famous Deciad epic. Vitellan shared their eager restlessness to get on with the tour. The guide began to read again.

  At that time of death and pillage the very gods of Rome herself assembled the best remaining scholars and craftsmen at the fishing port of Larengi, together with five warships and a small body of marines. We saw little of the fighting while in that small port. Our days were peaceful and strange, with the marines learning the use of the tools of masonry while the scholars and craftsmen learned to fight with sword, spear, and bow. Sometimes wounded were brought in from the fighting around Rome, and this reminded us that the Visigoths were abroad. At that time none of us knew why we were there, except that we were to help with some mighty undertaking.

  Valerius, a skilled blacksmith, said that the revolts in Africa and Britain proved that the gods were abandoning Rome to decay and ruin. With that we all agreed, being good guildsmen. Our ceremonies and secrets had been suspected of being pagan by the Christian authorities as they closed the temples of the rightful gods and persecuted their followers. Many of our ceremonies were indeed pagan, and quite rightly so. The gods of Rome and the walls of her masons had kept her inviolate for eight hundred years. Who were these cultist Christian upstarts to tamper with the very foundations of our world?

  On the morning of the forty-first day after my arrival in Larengi we were roused long before dawn by the sounds of galloping horses and men shouting. Torches and bonfires flared up as we ran into the street, buckling on our swords and rubbing the sleep from our eyes. Publius, the officer in charge of our training, led us to the docks. There we saw an exhausted horse, its

  sweat turning to steam as it stood shivering in the cold night air. Its rider was slumped against a wall, a goblet in one hand. He was being questioned by Epictetus, the captain of one of the warships, and by Decius, who was commander over us all.

  "You are sure that they come?" Decius asked urgently.

  "Commander, all I know is that several riders left as I did, and that I was ordered to ride ahead and say 'Nemesis protect the Gods of Romulus' when I arrived."

  "It is quite fantastic," exclaimed Epictetus. "Rome will stand forever. This is some mistake."

  "No mistake, sir," gasped the messenger. "I was there. Visigoth freedmen within Rome's walls betrayed the city to Alaric's men."

  "This is the end, then," Commander Decius said quietly, before he turned to a
ddress us all. "Soldiers, craftsmen, scholars of Rome: prepare to sail at once. Officers of the guard, station your men around the boats. Everyone else, stand by the boats to load and row."

  Very soon more riders streamed into the port and made for the beach, where we waited. All were robed and cloaked, but by the bonfires' glare I could tell that many were women. Most were tall and fair to behold, though their eyes were bright with fear. There were no children. Close behind them were pursuing horsemen, and as we struggled to launch the boats the enemy smashed into our thin line of marines.

  The fighting was savage and desperate, but the stout marines of Rome held the pursuers back. Arrows poured down on us as we pushed the boats through the shallows. I fell, struck in the leg.

  "Save Quintus, the mason!" shouted the commander. "We need him more than a dozen centurions." In the ruddy light of the bonfires I saw Valerius wading back for me. He took me up in his great arms and with a heave threw me bodily into a boat.

  "Rome fallen, Romans fighting Romans. What times are these," the blacksmith growled as he climbed in after me.

  "But it's Visigoths that pursue us," I replied.

  "The horsemen wore Roman armor, and the arrow in your leg is Roman, Quintus. Perhaps Rome would have her gods fall with her in this night of blood."

  At about a quarter mile offshore the warships lay at anchor. Four were dromons, solid and stately, each with two rows of oars, and armed with spidery catapults. The other was a trireme, the Tenebrae, sleek and proud, her weapons under cover. One and all, the boats made for the Tenebrae, and I could hear the rattle of anchor gear being drawn up as I was hoisted aboard.

  "Why flee?" cried a sailor who was staring back at the shore. "If Rome is gone the world's heart is cut out."

  "If Rome has had its Trojan horse, then Rome can have its Aeneas, too!" said Valerius, shaking him roughly. None of us knew this to be our purpose, but all carried hopes that it might be so. At that moment, cold, wet, and in terrible pain, I resolved to chronicle our voyage.

  The guide led the group out of the auditorium to an antehall where two quarter-scale models of oared warships sat on aquamarine polymer waves within glass cases. She pointed to the ship on the left.

  "This vessel is a dromon, a heavy, slow warship of the late Roman Empire. Rather than ramming the enemy ships, it fought from a distance with catapults and flamethrowers."

  "Flamethrowers?" said a tourist with a veteran's pin on his cap. "I didn't know they had gasoline back then."

  "They used a mixture of pitch and sulphur called Greek fire," said one of the students. "It had much the same effect as twentieth-century napalm."

  'This other ship is a trireme," said the guide hastily, anxious not to lose control of her tour to the students. "It had three banks of oars, was very fast, and was designed for ramming. It fell out of general use about a century before the Deciad

  was written.

  "Quintus mentions several times that the trireme Tene-

  brae seemed new, and it is possible that the ship was built especially for this mission. As you will hear, it was armed with very advanced catapults and was probably the fastest ship on the Mediterranean Sea at that time." Vitellan smiled at the irony of his own fascination. He was a citizen of the Roman Empire learning about the Empire's future as ancient history.

  Several days after the morning of our flight we drew close to the Straits of Gibraltar. Though hardly able to walk, and burning with fever, I still had to work with one of the catapult teams. This was because so many of our marines had been left fighting on the beach to cover our escape.

  Very late in the evening our lookout called a warning, and we beheld a great fleet of warships in our path. At once the commander ordered the sails furled and the masts lowered on all ships. All those not sailing the ship or manning the catapults were ordered to the rowing benches. Even the Gods of Romulus strode from their quarters and took up positions at the oars beside the craftsmen, scholars, and surviving marines. Shivering sometimes, burning sometimes, I sat by a forward catapult. Valerius, too, was on this team, his great strength needed for the winding ratchet. The drumbeat began and our ships formed up, two dromons ahead of us and one on either side. The oars were soon in time, and we made straight for the waiting fleet, attempting no evasion. The catapults were drawn and aligned. These weapons were really half catapult and half ballista, with an iron frame. They shot fused clay pots of Greek fire with prodigious range and accuracy.

  I sat ready to light the pots' fuses while Valerius worked at the winding handle. The enemy ships converged on the place where we would meet, and we cried out in amazement to see so many Roman dromons scattered among the barbarian vessels. Our dromons began to fling their fire pots, and many warships halted, drenched in smoky flames. We passed among crippled ships in safety, but many more were speeding to block our path.

  Our drummer raised the speed, first to maximum, then to ramming, and the Tenebrae easily pulled away from the escorts. The enemy captains had not known that any ship could move so fast, and were not able to close with us or block our path. Our catapults thudded at closer and closer range, and soon the stones and Greek fire of the enemy began to crash down on our own deck. Arrows struck the barricades around us, and we could hear screams from men aboard the burning ships. Our steersman fell with an arrow through his neck, and Decius stood up and seized the steering oar, shouting orders all the while.

  Then we were in the clear with the open ocean before us, and though the rear catapults still shot at the swiftest of our pursuers, we were safe. The marines cheered and embraced each other before leaving their stations to put out the fires. At about twelve stadia from the battle we shipped oars and raised the mast again. It was dark by now, and as Valerius helped me to my feet I looked back to the horizon where our trapped escorts fought and burned among the enemy ships.

  "Such a fierce batde, yet only a glow now," I said.

  "A glow where brave Romans die," replied Valerius. "First the marines give their lives for us, now entire ships doom themselves so that we may flee. We should have stayed to fight."

  "They burn that we may escape, my friend. Our mission is worth those lives."

  "No mission is worth dishonor," said Valerius grimly. "Better to have no New Rome than to found it in cowardice, betrayal, and flight."

  I told myself that Aeneas might have felt thus when he left Dido to her funeral pyre and sailed away to Italy, but the words cut deep. Were Roman virtue and honor too high a price to pay to found a new city?

  The guide led the group to a map of Africa just beyond the model ships. It reached halfway to the ceiling, and was la- beled in Latin and English. A heavy red line ran from Italy through the western Mediterranean, then down the west coast of Africa.

  "The islands referred to in the next passage are the Cape Verde Islands," she explained, pointing to their position on the map with a spotbeam. "The remains of a small Roman garrison have been found there, and the best dating techniques available suggest that it was razed by fire early in the fifth century a.d. Several dozen graves were also found."

  This was all a curious mixture of the future Rome and the Rome of the distant past, Vitellan noted yet again. There was also something odd about the guide—she seemed strangely dynamic, larger than life.

  "Quintus wrote most of the Deciad while the expedition was staying there. The base had been set up by Decius during an earlier expedition as a place for rest and provisioning. He also had three cornships waiting there. These were much better suited to the voyage ahead than the trireme, and some naval historians have said that if Columbus or Cook had been given a Roman cornship to use on their own expeditions, they would have done just as well.

  "The next passage deals with part of the voyage to the Cape Verde Islands on the trireme. They were sailing south along the African coast, and had just entered the tropics."

  Delirious, near death, I lay oblivious to all around me as we sailed many hundreds of miles. As the fever broke and I revived I n
oticed how warm and humid the air had become. At first I could see only the blurred outlines of the cabin, and feel the pitch and roll as the. warship crashed clumsily through the waves. Then I heard voices behind me. Commander Decius was speaking with a woman.

  "The fever has broken, Decius," she said with a low, gentle voice. "He will live to build our chambers, perhaps even to grow old."

  "Good, Helica. Very good," he replied in a voice more tender than I had ever heard him use. "One less trouble for us."

  "Does the crew still mutter about being near the

  edge of the world, or that the sun will drop from the sky and destroy us?" /

  "They do. They are frightened to see it so high overhead."

  "Such foolishness, my love, but then they are not like us. Did you reassure them?"

  "Yes, many times. They know I have sailed much farther than here already, yet they still talk. Captain Epictetus ignores them and says that sailors understand only wine, buggery, and the cat, but now the wine runs low, and there are few marines to beat obedience into them. As for the other, there are thirty beautiful women aboard this ship, and this is the longest voyage that the crew has ever madg."

  "Attack us, the Gods of Romulus?" Helica gasped. "They would not dare. They must know better." I could hear Decius begin to pace slowly, and the creak of the boards beneath his feet.

  "What special powers have we?" he said with a sigh. "Our usual lifespan is several times longer than that of most mortals, but that means only that we accumulate more learning and experience. These sailors think that we are just rich nobles, they do not know that our kind guided and governed the Roman Empire for eight hundred years."

  "Several lifetimes of training make deadly fighters of we Temporians," replied Helica ominously.

  "Indeed, we could kill many in a mutiny, but we need a live crew to sail the ship. In a way it is good that the trireme sails so badly in these rough seas. The caulking of seams and bailing of leaks takes more time with each day that passes." The commander ceased his pacing, and there was a long silence. I was wondering if they had left when Helica spoke again.