by L. Sprague de Camp;Frederik Pohl;David Drake;S. M. Stirling;Alexei
“Now, Jorith!” he shouted.
The girl had lain down behind the sacks, with her slippered feet braced against them. She shoved, and they wavered and toppled forward. Momentum took over, and the sacks tumbled down. Acrid white dust billowed in choking clouds, and Tharasamund reflexively threw an arm across his face, coughing. One of the toughs behind the mantlet looked up and shouted, gesturing frantically—and his comrades followed the pointing arm, which was the worst possible thing they could have done.
Screams sounded sweetly, and strangled curses. The mantlet was thrown aside to crash on the hard cement floor beneath, and men ran—up out of the cloud of alkaline dust, or down and away from it. The Goth grinned behind his protecting face mask as he bounded erect and drew his spatha. A man staggered up the stairs, coughing and wheezing, his eyes already turning to bacon-rind red.
He swung a club. Tharasamund skipped neatly over it and lunged, his point skewering down over the thug’s collarbone; muscle clamped on it, and he put a booted foot on the other’s chest and pushed him back onto his fellows. More cursing and crashing; then two came forward, with their handkerchiefs held over their mouths. Both had swords, and one even had some idea of what to do with it. For a long minute it was clash and clatter and the flat unmusical rasp of steel on steel, and then the Goth sheered off half a face with a backhand cut.
“Ho, la, St. Wulfias!” he shouted exultantly, then found himself coughing again; some of the dust had gotten through the silk, and his eyes were tearing up as well.
Jorith came up beside him and offered a flask. He drank; it was citron water, and he used some to wash his eyes as well. The acid in it stung, but it would be better than leaving lime dust under his eyelids.
“Saw them off, sir,” he wheezed to Padway, and Jorith clapped her hands and rose on tiptoe to kiss him. At another time, he would have paid more attention to that, but…
“For now,” Padway said. “But if Justinian didn’t send idiots, and his agentes in rebus usually are fairly shrewd, they’ll—”
The noise below had mostly been bellowing, cries of pain and shrieks of I’m blind! and departing footfalls as many of the strong-arm squad decided there were better things to do in a riot-stricken city than have quicklime poured over their heads.
Now a crackling sound arose as well. All three looked at each other, hopelessly hoping that someone would deny that the sound was fire. When smoke began to drift up from between the floorboards, no doubt at all was left.
“Captain,” Padway said.
“Sir?”
“I’m going to give you an order,” he said. “You’re not going to like it, but you’re going to do it anyway.”
“Sir—”
“Grandfather—”
“Take Jorith and get out of here,” Padway rasped. “No, shut up. I’m an old man—a very old man—and I haven’t six months to live anyway.”
Jorith went white, and Padway waved a hand and then let it fall limp. “Didn’t want to spoil your birthday, kitten, but that’s what the doctors say. My lungs. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent that expedition to find tobacco....I’ve lived longer than I ever had a right to expect anyway. Now get out—they won’t have enough men to chase you, not when they see I’m not with you. I put my granddaughter in your hands. That is your trust.”
A racking cough, and a wheeze: “Go!”
Tharasamund hesitated, but only for an instant. Then he brought his sword up in a salute more heartfelt than most he’d made, sheathed it, and put a hand on Jorith’s shoulder as she knelt to embrace her grandsire.
“Now, my lady,” he said.
She came, half-stunned, looking back over her shoulder. Tharasamund snatched up a coil of rope, made an end fast, looked out to the rear. Padway had been right; there were only two men out there, and they backed away when they saw the tall soldier coming down the rope, even hindered with a woman across his shoulder. He landed with flexed knees, sweeping the princess to her feet and drawing steel in the same motion.
“Follow me…and run,” he said.
“No!” He turned, surprised that she disobeyed. Then he stopped, forgetting her, forgetting everything.
Light speared his eyes, and he flung up a hand and squinted. Light, not the red of flames, but a blinding light whiter than the very thought of whiteness in the mind of God. In the heart of it, a brazen chariot shone mirror-bright, turning gently with a ponderous motion that gave an impression of overwhelming weight—it must be visible to all Florence, as well.
The roof of the building exploded upward in a shower of red roofing tile and shattered beam, and through it he could see a form rising.
It was Martinus Paduei. It could be nobody else. Borne upward on a pillar of light…
Dimly, he was aware of the remaining rioters’ screaming flight, followed by their Greek paymaster. He was a little more aware of Jorith beside him, tears of joy streaming down her face as she sank to her knees and made the sign of the cross again and again. He sank down beside her, holding up his sword so that it also signed the holy symbol against the sky. The light was pain, but he forced his eyes open anyway, unwilling to lose a moment of the sight.
There was a single piercing throb of sound, like the harp of an angel taller than the sky and the light was gone, leaving only the fading afterimages strobing across his vision.
“He was a saint!” Jorith sobbed. “Oh, Grandfather—”
“Yes,” the young man said. “I don’t think there’s much doubt about that now. He was a saint.”
He looked down into the girl’s face and smiled. “And he told me to take care of you, my lady Jorith. We’d better go.”
Martin Padway opened his eyes, blinking. For a long moment he simply lay on what felt like a very comfortable couch, looking at the faces that surrounded him. Then two thoughts sent his eyes wide:
I don’t hurt. That first. All the bone-deep aches and catches were gone, all the pains that had grown so constant over the years that he didn’t consciously notice them. Yes, but how I notice them now they’re gone! he thought.
The second thought was: They’re all so young! There were a round dozen men and women, every color from ebony-black to pink-white via a majority of brown that included several East Asian types. But none of them looked over twenty; they had the subtle signs—the flawless fine-textured skin, the bouncing freshness of movement—that were lost in early adulthood. It was far more noticeable than the various weirdnesses of their clothing.
Behind them were what looked like movie screens showing aerial shots, or various combinations of graphs and numbers, all moving and in different colors.
“Time travelers, right?” he said. After all, I know time travel is possible. I’ve had going on fifty years to get used to the concept.
One man—young man—gave a satisfied smile. “Instant comprehension! Just as you’d expect from a superior individual. I told you that the Great Man theory—”
He seemed to be talking upper-class sixth-century Latin, until you noticed that his lip movements weren’t quite synchronized with the words and there was a murmur of something else beneath it.
Fascinating, Padway thought. And that’s an academic riding a hobbyhorse, or I was never an archaeologist. Evidently some things were eternal.
Some of the others started arguing. Padway raised a hand:
“Please! Thank you very much for saving my life, but if you wouldn’t mind a little information…”
“Yes, excellent sir,” another man said—he was in a plain coverall, albeit of eerily mobile material. “From four hundred years in your future. We are—well, mostly—a study team investigating a crucial point in history…your lifetime, in fact, excellent sir.”
“Four centuries in which future?” Padway said. “Gothic Rome, or my original twentieth? Twentieth century A.D.,” he went on, to their growing bewilderment.
There was a long moment of silence. Padway broke it. “You mean, you didn’t know?” he said.
The argument started up again, fast
enough that Padway caught snatches of the language it was actually in, rather than the who-knew-how translation. His mind identified it as a Romance-derived language; something like twentieth-century Italian, but more archaic, and with a lot of Germanic loan words and other vocabulary he couldn’t identify.
A slow, enormous grin split the ancient American’s face. “Fifty years,” he murmured.
Fifty years of politics and administration and warfare and engineering. None of them his chosen profession, just the things he had to do to survive and keep the darkness from falling. If this bunch were from only four centuries ahead in the future Padway had made, he’d done that, with a vengeance; they were from the date that in Padway’s original history had seen the height of the Vikings.
He’d kept the darkness at bay, and now…now he could go back to being a research specialist. The grin grew wider.
Better than that, he’d actually get to know how things turned out! Making history was all very well, but he’d always wanted to read it more.
***
TO BRING THE LIGHT
David Drake
King Amulius’ herdman (whose name is said to be Faustulus) found the infants and brought them home to raise....When the youths [Romulus and Remus] grew up, they made a habit of attacking bandits [herdsmen of Numitor, King Amulius’ brother]....The bandits ambushed the youths while they were performing a religious rite. Romulus escaped, but Remus was captured....Numitor recognized the youths as his grandchildren. They wove a plot against Amulius…and killed him.
Livy: Ab urbe condita, Book I
Numitor gave Romulus and Remus everything that was necessary to found a city....Some say Remus yielded leadership of the colony to Romulus, but with resentment....Whereupon Celer…stuck Remus with a mattock and killed him.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Roman Antiquities, Book I
*
Flavia Herosilla leaned on the bronze balcony railing and craned forward to get a better look at the placard which the wagon-driver’s attendant held over the snarling tigers. “Egypt?” she read aloud. “That’s nonsense! There aren’t any tigers in Egypt! If the emperor doesn’t have better generals than he has geographers, Rome won’t last another thousand days, much less years.”
“Well, I suppose they’re talking about the port of entry on the Red Sea, then down the Nile and by ship to Rome,” said her host, Gnaeus Julius Maternus. “India isn’t part of the Empire.”
Herosilla snorted. “Neither is Dacia, not really,” she said. “But there’s supposed to be a Dacian display coming later in the day.”
Maternus had extensive shipping interests which paid (among other things) for this mansion on the Palatine Hill. The high balcony, facing the Sacred Way with the Forum on the left, was the perfect location from which to watch the parades Emperor Marcus Julius Philippus—Philip the Arab—was giving to mark the Thousandth Anniversary of the Founding of Rome.
Herosilla frowned thoughtfully and added, “I wonder if the Dacian display will have the traditional Sarmatian wagons with painted frames?”
Following the caged tigers were a dozen men whose leader waved a placard reading guardians of the Nubian frontier. The dark-skinned men had bushy hair into which ostrich plumes were woven, adding to their already amazing height. Their shields were naturally-patterned oxhide, and their spearheads seemed to be hammered out of pig iron.
“If that’s what’s guarding Egypt from the south,” Maternus said, “then I’m thankful Rome’s grain supply comes from Africa now.
“I suppose the emperor’s picking the most colorful troops for the festival,” Herosilla said. She lived most of the year in Cumae on the Bay of Naples, so she could afford to be philosophical about the chance of bread riots among the Roman poor. “There are wonderful opportunities for an ethnographer here.”
“Perhaps you should write a monograph,” Maternus said, shaking his head. He looked up at the clouds. The sky rumbled though there was no immediate sign of rain.
On the broad Sacred Way, a dozen armored horsemen blew a cacophony on silver-mounted horns. Behind them was a convoy of caged hippopotami, one to a wagon. The hippos would soon die along with the tigers and thousands of other animals in the arena, as part of the month-long festivities.
“My goal is to know rather than to teach,” Herosilla said. She was thirty years old and already—in her well-justified opinion—the finest mind of her day. “Although the emperor could do worse than have me for a teacher.”
She gestured at the parade route. A squad of horse archers interspersed the procession of hippos. “For example, I know that the best authorities follow the dating of Eratosthenes. The real thousandth anniversary won’t be for another two years.”
Maternus began counting. The gold and polished stones of the several rings he wore on each finger winked in the wan sunlight. Finally he gave up. “What would the founding date be according to the Christian reckoning, then?” he asked.
“Have you added that superstition to your ridiculous list as well?” Herosilla asked with curl of her lip. Her face had the chiseled beauty of a statue. Men had told her often enough that she was as hard as marble; but for that, it depended on the man. “Since you ask, though, it would be 751 bc.”
The calculation had been easy for her. She’d learned the Indian method of counting, using a zero.
“One can’t be too careful, my dear,” said Maternus. “What I’m really looking for is one that’ll let me take it with me.”
He lifted two fingers without looking behind him. A slave wearing a silk tunic as fine as Herosilla’s own put a bite-sized fishball in the corner of her master’s mouth.
Maternus chewed, grinned at Herosilla, and continued, “Of course one reason Philip probably chose the earlier date because he can’t be sure he’ll still be emperor in another two years. Recent history makes a depressing study, and I must say—”
He glanced at the grim sky again.
“—those clouds provide no good omen for him.”
“Don’t spout superstitions even you can’t believe,” Herosilla said tartly. “As for your real point, the state of the empire—the things that happen on the frontiers needn’t bother a truly civilized person. Now of course I’d rather be reading in my villa at Cumae, particularly since I agree with you that it looks like a storm coming. But these celebrations are a unique event for which a true scholar is willing to undergo the discomfort of a trip to Rome.”
Next in the procession, dark-skinned pygmies led a pair of—were they deer or oxen? Herosilla had never seen anything like them. The beasts’ hides were a dun that was almost purple, with horizontal stripes on the haunches. The long necks suggested kinship to the giraffes that would doubtless be following soon.
“Your problem, my dear,” Maternus said in a voice that was hard beneath the banter, “is that you’re always a scholar. You should remember occasionally that you’re a woman.”
“Oh, I assure you I’m aware that I’m a woman, Maternus,” Herosilla snapped. “I just don’t choose that to be a factor in my relations with you. You’re an amusing enough companion and your house has an excellent view of the procession route, but that’s all. If you need another lesson in what I mean by, ‘No,’ however—”
“Peace, my dear, peace!” Maternus said, holding his palms forward. “I’m still bruised from the other evening.”
“One of the men who had no reason to doubt my femininity,” Herosilla said with a satisfied smile, “was a Bactrian wrestler whom I kept for a time. I learned quite a number of useful things from him.”
She returned her attention to the parade. Egyptian slaves in cotton breechclouts carried pallets with models of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. The men must have been miserably cold, dressed like that in the middle of February in Rome. Perhaps they were giving thanks that they were only part of the display, not the slaughter to come in the Colosseum.
“Of course,” Herosilla said thoughtfully, “any date is really guesswork. All the stories say gods were
involved in the founding of Rome—which means all the stories are fantasies.”
“Oh come now, my dear!” Maternus said. “It’s bad enough that you sneer at other people’s gods. Now you’re blaspheming your own! This is really too much.”
“They’re not my gods,” Herosilla said. “They’re not anybody’s gods because they don’t exist. Isn’t that a simple enough concept for you to understand?”
Maternus sucked in his lips and shook his head in disapproval.
“Well, what will you take for proof, then?” Herosilla said. She heard her voice rising with the frustration that she felt so often, an intelligent woman in a world of credulous fools.
She raised her clenched fist to the heavens. “You there! Gods!” she shouted. “If any of you really exist, I demand you strike me down this instant!”
A big drop of rain whacked the railing. The bronze rang in echo. The hair on Herosilla’s neck prickled.
The thunderbolt an instant later was all the light and noise in the universe, focused on a single point.
Herosilla’s vision pulsed. Her nostrils were full of the sulphurous stench of burned air. She didn’t think she’d lost consciousness but she wasn’t sure.
For a moment she wasn’t even sure she was alive.
The veils of throbbing color thinned slowly. The roar that filled her ears was her own blood; that began to subside also. Beneath Herosilla’s palms was dirt mixed with pebbles and coarse grass, not the smooth mosaic floor of Maternus’ balcony.
She was aware of figures or at least shadows that moved and gabbled words at her. There was a sudden consciousness of pain: burning sensations from her arms, ankles and around her throat where her gold filigree necklace hung.
Her jewelry was blisteringly hot. Now that the reek of the lightning had dissipated somewhat, she could smell her hair singeing around her jeweled diadem.
Herosilla shouted and jumped to her feet, shaking the anklets of gold chain away from her flesh. She stripped off her armlets: double-headed snakes with ruby eyes. All she could do about the necklace was bend forward to let as much of the metal as possible hang away from the white skin of her breast. She’d never be able to release the catch in a hurry. In fact she didn’t even remember how it worked; that was a task for her maids.