Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Barbaricum of Germania Antehac Libra

June 25th, 167 CE

“Two years exactly since we arrived,” Artorius said through the window of the traveling coach.

It looked a lot like a Western stagecoach, though the Roman artisans had painted it in gaudy designs of red and orange and vibrant green, including putti and mythological scenes on the doors. Whoever had first associated Classical times with white marble had been using his imagination, or just forgetting what two thousand years of weathering did to stone.

Or just had a fetish about “purity,” he thought. Romans slather bright primary colors on anything they can reach. This coach makes an old-style Costa Rican oxcart look restrained.

“Hurrah,” Mark said from inside.

He and Filipa had been avoiding looking out at the swath of carnage the Roman army was cutting through a bright June day as they came north. Sarukê was riding on the other side of the carriage and looking absolutely unconcerned, as were her arena-recruited Brute Squad of bodyguards.

The four of them just looked as if they wished they were participating in the killing, rapine and pillage.

Those are some very hard men . . . of course, they’d be dead if they weren’t.

Artorius suspected Jeremey was only pretending to be grossed out. The young man had a very hard edge himself. Some people just did, wherever or whenever they were brought up and regardless of what was typical or average for the time and place.

Paula was back in Vindobonum with the fifth guard following her like her shadow, discussing medical education for young women with Galen, who was proving surprisingly receptive to the idea. Apparently there had been occasional women doctors in Athens and some other parts of Greece for a long time. It was a product of the near-purdah Athenian women had traditionally suffered, which made their menfolk reluctant to let a male physician into the women’s quarters, but often wanting someone with more formal training than the midwife.

Paula has more than occasional in mind, and cunning plans to encourage it.

As Paula had said, she’d sold her soul to the devil, or the Roman Empire, but that didn’t mean she had nothing better to do with her time than take a guided tour of the slums of Hell.

The smell of smoke and decay was heavy in the air.

Clink-clink-clink . . . 

The sound of hammers on rock echoed from the forests to either side, where broad bands of stumps showed where the woods had been roughly cleared back and circular scorch marks marked the points where piled brushwood and trees had been burnt to get them out of the way. More was stacked, neatly split, by the roadside for the troops to use as needed. A fair mob of prisoners—containing no males over about twelve—was sitting by the side of the road, using smallish hammers to turn moderate-sized rocks from local deposits into smaller ones that would fit through a screen of two-inch iron rings.

The screen hung from a tripod of tall poles by ropes. Once the stony road metal had been shaken through that screen—and the ones left too big had been returned to the workers by the simple expedient of soldiers throwing them hard at the captives, whose bruises and bleeding showed the result—they were shoveled into wheelbarrows and taken to the cambered dirt of the roadbed. That and the roadside drainage ditches had been shaped by Fresno scrapers, a horse-drawn device of cunning simplicity from the late nineteenth century.

The crushed rock was spread across the dirt in a mass a little higher at the center than the edges. Then it was raked to a careful shape under the watchful eye of military engineers. And then pounded by more captives, this time with hardwood blocks on poles lifting them and ramming them down. These gangs did include a fair number of adult men, all in ankle fetters and watched carefully by the auxiliary infantry guards. Unlike the traditional Roman way of building a paved road—something rather like a fortress wall laid on its side—this didn’t require much skilled labor, just careful supervision, and it was much, much faster. As an added bonus it was also vastly easier on hooves than blocks of stone.

One of the auxiliaries cheerfully kicked a laggard, hard enough to knock him down.

The threat of another kick got the man back on his feet.

“That’s right, Hermann,” the auxiliary said, or jeered.

In what Artorius now knew was Latin with an accent from southwestern Gaul, near what he thought of as Bordeaux and was now Burdigala. The dwindling local language there was some sort of collateral predecessor of Basque, not Celtic.

“Welcome to the first day of the rest of your short, sad and sorry life. Now work! Or you get more of the same!”

Artorius grimaced slightly.

War’s a brutal business, he thought.

Then, dryly:

What an original observation!

That was one reason apart from nearly getting ripped to pieces he’d changed professions. When you came right down to it, war amounted to beating on people until they did what you wanted. Or beating on them because you didn’t want to do what they were trying to beat you into doing.

And then . . . 

Hi-di-ho, we all change partners and the dance continues. The Germanii aren’t any nicer; more savage, if anything. The Romans are just more . . . systematic. And in the Empire, war’s usually limited to the borderlands. Inside it, cities often don’t even have walls anymore and a man with a sword is a rare sight on a busy street. Among the barbarians, it’s all border, all the time. Men take a spear along to go water the bushes every day of their lives because raiders might come screaming out of the bushes when the first drop hits.

He’d still be glad when this was over.

* * *

Artorius looked down at the map across his saddlebow on the morning of the first day past the Ides of Augustus—or the 14th of August, to use the calendar he’d been brought up on.

Calendar reform, he thought; one of the innumerable mental notes he made every day. Gregorian calendar, suitably altered to use local names.

The sun was bright, or would have been except for the thin haze of smoke, and a smell like the ashes of the world’s biggest campfire.

“Well, sir,” he said to the Emperor, tapping a spot. “It looks like they want to try and fight us around here, from what the exploratores say.”

The upcoming battlefield was about halfway between Brno-that-wasn’t and Prague-that-wasn’t-either, in what was the heartland of the Czechs in his native century. Here and now the pre-proto-Slavs were wading around spearing fish and boiling porridge and dodging marauding Gutthiuda—Goths—in the Pripet Marshes a long way northeast of here. Right now this was where most of the Marcomanni had lived since they beat and then gradually assimilated the Celtic Boii. Acquiring things like Prince Ballomar’s Gallic name along the way.

I wonder what Chopped-Off Head would be in Boiian Celtic?

The Roman force had been marching roughly northwest for some time now. Their course was quite near to the alignment of Euro Route E65 according to Fuchs’s maps, since the topography hadn’t changed much and that was the best Vienna-Brno-Prague passageway. And they’d moved through weather as warm and dry as this part of Central Europe ever got, even in the Roman Warm Period, which meant it only rained about one day a week and not too long even then, you sweated freely in the daytime, and you didn’t need a down sleeping bag at night.

About half the land was in forest, particularly the hillier bits, and half in plowland and pasture, the cleared proportion getting bigger as they approached the central part of the Marcomanni territory; a lot of the forest looked second growth, fields abandoned when they stopped yielding well. The thatched hamlets of rectangular houses half buried in the earth had been mostly abandoned and the livestock driven off by the time the Romans arrived and put them to the torch. By now they weren’t bothering with burning the equally abandoned, half-harvested grainfields that had been frantically worked up until the last minute, and they carefully preserved any heaps of sheaves found.

We’ll find them very useful ourselves, and if absolutely put to it the soldiers could harvest the rest.

That was one reason every contubernium carried a sickle.

I don’t mind the smoke being thinner, either. It’s eerie, though—we might as well be marching through a world where humanity just vanished yesterday morning.

The occasional hilltop palisades of the Marcomanni elite’s fortified halls were all empty and stripped now too, when the first fringe of Roman cavalry arrived to check for valuables and then set them on fire. A few demonstrations of what the new thunderballs and ignis Romanus could do to a not-very-large wood-and-earth fortification had sufficed to drive that lesson home, though the Romans could have taken them with their traditional gear too, if less briskly. The new weapons made it easier and faster, and the fear they spread even more so.

Legate Fronto was on the Emperor’s other side, also on horseback. He blinked for a second as he craned to look, being a bit less used to the new maps, and then nodded as it clicked into his mental picture of the terrain. He had a very good eye for ground, which wasn’t surprising.

“They’ve realized they can’t delay us much more, Tribune,” he said. “Not without being pushed so far back that half or more of them would starve anyway, and this is harvest season here. They didn’t expect us to move this fast.”

“Nor did I,” Marcus Aurelius said thoughtfully.

“It is largely the new things, so we could not be sure in advance,” Fronto said, inclining his head to Artorius. “Not any single one of them, but the effect of them all together, each magnifying the other. That new method of paving a road is quicker, that lets us use the new heavy freight wagons and bring up supplies more quickly, the thunderballs and Roman Fire reduce forts more quickly . . . particularly these rickety German ones. Quickly enough that after the first week they didn’t even try to hold them against us. Add it together with other things, and they haven’t really been able to slow us down at all. It’s like a training march combined with a roadbuilding project. Just enough skirmishes and ambushes to give the men practice and keep them alert.”

“An interesting thought!” Marcus Aurelius said. “The sum is greater than the total of the parts, then!”

“We Americans had a word . . . first made from a combination of Greek terms . . . synergy,” Artorius said.

Romans certainly used synergy, but Artorius didn’t think they had the abstract concept yet, or a single term to express it . . . except that he’d just given it to them. Romans as smart as the Emperor—and Fronto paled only in comparison—would take it and run with it, and often do things with it he hadn’t thought of himself.

“Ah, from together and work,” the Emperor said.

Romans with an upper-class education would also discuss matters of language at the drop of a hat, or less, and often stop anything else they were doing for the pleasure of hashing a term out.

Artorius hid a grin; he’d really put the cat among the pigeons a little while ago, having dinner with the Emperor and Galen and a few others, by pointing out that Greek and Latin—and Gallic and Germanic and Persian and Armenian and Sarmatian—were all descended from a common ancestor language. Then he’d listed the word correspondences and similarities of grammar which showed it. That conversation had lasted late into the night, and the Emperor intended to write a book on the idea when and if he had time.

“Yes. As trained and disciplined men working together are more effective than if they were merely individuals added one to the other,” Artorius said aloud.

Synergy,” the Emperor murmured to himself several times, a trick he’d noticed people in this century used to commit a new term to memory. “I like the word. It is . . . compact. Heavily freighted with meaning.”

“I wonder why they have picked this precise place,” Fronto said, getting out his own map.

“The lie of the land, with enough open space to deploy most of their host, sir,” Artorius said. “At a guess, they plan to entrench and force us to come to them. Or at least the Marcomanni and Quadi leaders do.”

Fronto’s brows went up; this wasn’t his first encounter with the European Barbaricum. Germanics of this era prided themselves on aggression, at throwing themselves on an enemy and overwhelming him by their ferocity and contempt for death.

Then he smiled like a shark with an exceptionally low sympathy quotient . . . even for sharks.

“Ah. The Marcomanni have told their so-called allies enough to make them realize what running the gauntlet of the new carroballistae throwing thunderballs . . . and now your even newer tormentii . . . can do to an enemy charging through the beaten ground before them.”

Artorius frowned. “But I doubt they have really taken the realization to heart, Legate,” he said thoughtfully. “And they have no idea of the increased range of the tormentii. Something might be done with that.”


Back | Next
Framed