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CHAPTER THIRTY

Barbaricum of Germania Antehac Libra

August 15th, 167 CE

Well, there they are and here we are,” Mark said, standing in his stirrups and using a pair of binoculars from Fuchs’s hoard.

The sun was up enough that he could do that though the people he was looking at were to the east. He went on:

“Someone’s going to lose their temper if we’re not lucky.”

He said it in Latin, and Sarukê laughed aloud where she lounged in her saddle. Filipa was riding beside her, and her face had been a little strained; now she relaxed and chuckled. Jeremey was looking that way too and the other guards were stolidly watching with the interest of spectators.

“Har. Har-di-ha-har,” Jeremey said sourly, drawing out each syllable. “Chr . . . by Mars, but there’s a lot of them.”

Mark had made up a bunch of notepads with paper between thin board covers held by spirals of copper wire at the top. He’d also come up with something that worked about as well as a pencil, involving graphite from deposits not far from the Villa Lunae packed into a wooden tube, though it was soft and crumbly.

Now he wrote on the pad he had braced across the pommel of his saddle; his riding had continued to improve, in the manner of a skill for which you had no talent or liking, but were forced to practice constantly anyway.

“Approximately . . . sixty thousand,” he said as he wrote. “Possibly . . . more . . . behind . . . northeastern . . . ridge.”

Then he signed it and tore off the page and handed it to a messenger who galloped off.

“How do you do that?” Jeremey asked. “Get an exact figure?”

“Ummm . . . it’s not exact. Not to within a couple of thousands. You just take an area, count the men in it, then multiply it by the number of times the area is—”

“Oh, forget I asked, that’s why the Prof has you here,” the young man from Wisconsin grumbled, and looked over his shoulder, and visibly found it reassuring. “Our army’s pretty big too. Not as big, but quality has a quantity all its own.”

“That’s not what Stalin said—”

“I know, Mark. That was irony.”

The field of battle both sides had chosen by unspoken mutual consent was an undulating slope a little over a mile long, gentle overall and facing southwest. It had been in fields of wheat and rye, laid out in long rectangular strips and nearly all stubble when the Romans arrived. And pasture, plus supposedly bare but actually weedy fallow. An occasional tree or small grove dotted it; most of those were still there, though the buildings near them were smoldering cinders. Forest crowned the ridge behind the Americans, and patches of woodland more or less defined the sides; the ground declined from the Marcomanni position to a fordable stream, then rose to a wooded ridge.

The Marcomanni and their allies were a swarming dun mass made individually tiny by distance, studded with standards of cloth and wood and bone, each amid a glitter of polished helmets and the often-gilded sparks from crests of animals real or mythical, or the actual gold of torcs and armbands. You could smell them too; that was as many people as a small city like Vindobona, and composed of men with little sense of personal hygiene.

They normally lived fairly thinly scattered, where sewage wasn’t much of a problem and bushes did duty for latrines.

“If they don’t get to move, they’ll all die of dysentery in a couple of days,” Jeremey said, wrinkling his nose as they got a wind carrying a whiff.

Behind them and much closer, the Roman army was an ordered array of iron and bronze, the standards of legion, cohort, century and ala instantly recognizable.

“Like the pieces at a wargaming convention,” Jeremey said, glancing their way. “I went to those when I was a teenager.”

Five legions were drawn up by cohorts, a bit under twenty thousand men. The two new legions, Italica II and III, were close to their theoretical strength. The two legions of the Twins from Vindobona and Carnuntum were at a bit over half, and the Claudia from Durostorum was around three-quarters because it had gotten the survivors of its vexilliationes back and they hadn’t yet. The auxiliaries were as many again, including about five thousand horsemen.

Before the legions were their new carroballistae, 126 now; then blocks of archers and then a thinner line of auxiliary infantry, and the cavalry on the wings in a forest of lance points and pennants.

Some of the horsemen were out skirmishing with their Germanii counterparts, and getting very much the better of it to judge by who ended each clash running as fast as they could, and who came back leading captured horses and triumphantly waving the odd gold or silver torque or bracelet.

Sarukê watched that with interest; she was still a little thinner from her illness, but the wound had healed solidly and her color was good. The First Victorious Thracians trotted by, victorious once more, as another ala cantered out to take their place and let them rest their horses. Several of the First recognized the Sarmatian, and shook their new lances in the air.

“Like fighting men with one hand tied behind their backs, wirapta!” one of the troopers shouted to her with a gap-toothed smile as they passed. “We knocked ’em heels over ass with every passage, the way you did me! Only they’re dead!”

“You stay right here, sword-sister,” Filipa said to her a second later. “No rushing off for heroics!”

The ex-nomad blinked pale eyes at her. “Why, of course!” she said. “What you say, I do!”

And added, with an obviously counterfeit simper:

“Mâtar.”

Which meant “mother” in her language. She grinned and dodged a punch on the shoulder from Filipa that was only half playful. The guards all laughed too.

“Here they come,” Jeremey said.

They all looked around. The tormentii were coming out, trotting with the left-hand mounts in each six-horse team bearing a man each, guns and limbers bouncing along behind over the rutted, uneven surface that had been plowland, and the rest of the crews following on their own riding cobs. They went past the Americans on their slight rise, then swung right and deployed before them.

That started with the first gun when it reached its firing position; the rider on the lead horse swung the team around and halted. That left the muzzle pointing toward the enemy. Men sprang down from the saddle, including two whose rotated duty was to hold the individual mounts.

The optio who led each gun crew whipped the circular wooden tompion blocking the muzzle free by its rope handle. Others were lifting the trail that connected the gun carriage to the two-wheeled limber free of its joint and letting it drop to the ground. More hands unhitched the limber from its connection to the horse team, and threw open the wooden doors, exposing the tubes that held thirty-two rounds.

Artorius spurred his horse from the battery and toward them.

“Here comes the Prof,” Jeremey said. “Prepare to be convinced. The man missed his vocation, he should have been an Evangelical minister.”

* * *

Artorius drew rein. “All right,” he said—in English. “Gather ’round.”

They did, as much as you could on horseback. “First,” he went on in the same language. “You’ve all seen some really bad shit since we crossed the Danube.”

Mark looked queasy, and Filipa gave a curt nod. Jeremey looked . . . blandly attentive.

I’m not really a fan of vastatio either, Artorius thought grimly. Though it works, no dispute.

“Bear in mind a few things. First, the Marcomanni started the war. Second, in our history this war went on for fourteen years, with the same bad shit on both sides of the river and as far south as Italy. For every single one of those fourteen years, and it didn’t settle squat. So it got refought over and over for the next century and a half. And then Attila the Hun arrived, and then . . . eventually . . . human beings blew up the planet fast, because it wasn’t satisfying enough to fry it slowly. If we pull this off, we settle this war in two years instead of seven times that long, and it’s a step toward people possibly not blowing up the world. That’s worth some spectators’ PTSD. Am I right?”

He caught each of their eyes. Mark and Filipa nodded . . . reluctantly. Jeremey gave a broad smile and an enthusiastic nod.

Which is not all that convincing, Artorius thought. I think it’s more like watching old episodes of House of the Dragon to him.

He dropped back into Latin:

“Sarukê, you listen too.”

She obviously did.

That lady has an admirable ability to exclude the irrelevant and focus on the necessary, he thought, and continued:

“OK, those guns”—he pointed to the eighteen cannon just finishing their deployment, neat as a parade exercise—“are not going to destroy that.”

His finger swung northeast to the barbarian host.

“What we want to do is break their patience, and make them attack, because that makes it much more likely we can win this without screwing our own army up beyond repair. We want this to be a decisive battle, the last big battle in this war, so the Marcomanni and Quadi surrender and the vastatio ends. Mark, you’re here because you’re good at visual assessments. Filipa, you’re here because you’re the best we’ve got at estimating ranges on the fly.”

And because you won’t let Sarukê go into danger alone and she won’t let me do that, but leave that aside for now.

“Jeremey, you’re here because you thought with your balls, not your brains. And you’re quite competent at this stuff, our second best at visuals and ranges, so I’m glad you volunteered.”

“Thanks, Prof . . . I think,” the younger man said.

Filipa and Mark looked startled as they realized why it was a good idea to have a spare to fall back on.

Welcome to the Army, infants, Artorius thought sardonically, and continued aloud:

“So if the enemy charge and keep coming long enough for the guns to shift to canister, get out. Ride over to where the Emperor is. I’ll give you a heads-up, but even if I don’t, get going then.”

He pointed southwest, where the Imperial standards and a cohort of Praetorians were grouped under the great black-red-and-gold banner.

“Believe me, I’ll be right on your heels. Julia and I have a baby coming any day now and I want to see him or her grow up. And we’re planning on more.”

He or she could already have been born. Probably has. Messages take a while to get here.

Artorius thrust the thought of Julia dying in childbirth out of his mind. Little Claudia had come with no problems at all, he’d heard, and Galen and Paula and the midwives they’d put through the new training would be there. Plus Paula had their store of uptime medical supplies on hand, apart from a few packages in his baggage.

“So Sarukê, when I give you the high sign, you and your squad get everyone out of here, understand?”

She nodded cheerfully. “I do, lord. Fake retreat—draw them in.”

Her horse-nomad people used that tactic all the time; unlike the Germanii they had a whatever-works attitude to war almost Roman in its pragmatism, though less sophisticated. Barbarian cultures differed from each other as much as civilized ones did.

“Right, let’s get started.”

They rode with him over to the artillery battalion’s—cohors tormentorum, in Latin—HQ, standing neatly not far behind the gun line, with the supply wagons and a horse-drawn ambulance not too far off.

Just like the Civil War, only everyone’s in a Mother Hubbard sack dress as Jeremey so accurately puts it, helmet, lorica segmentata and hobnailed sandals, he thought. God, I wonder what Netflix would have made of this, back in the day?

He raised his binoculars again. One of the things he’d done in the last couple of months was to collect—and send couriers to collect—descriptions of banners from all over the Barbaricum. He scanned carefully along the front of the enemy host.

“Marcomanni and Quadi in the center,” he murmured. “They put this alliance together, they get the post of honor.”

Plus they’ve dug a ditch and heaped up a berm . . . sort of a berm, it doesn’t look too solid, their warriors don’t like digging . . . in front of their position, too, he thought.

They hadn’t exactly learned quickly, but they had learned something. That was the problem with fighting the same people for too long; they picked things up, they came up with counters to your specialties . . . 

Their problem is none of their allies have yet. Let’s not give them a chance to wise up and shed their illusions. We want to boil this Froggie as fast as we can, not give him ideas about jumping to a better lily pad.

He handed the glasses over to Filipa.

How the skills do come and go. I’m used to getting ranges with equipment that just tells me to a fraction of an inch, or aims itself. Usually anything that shot could take ranges and adjust its own sights automatically. Now it’s a crucial eyeball skill again and I turn out to just not be very good at it beyond a couple of hundred yards.

“See that banner, on the left? Looks like a mummified horse head on top, and a white figure with a sword on the green cloth hanging from the crossbar?”

Filipa hunted for a moment, locked on and thought for a moment.

“Yes, got it, Prof. Eighteen hundred yards give or take ten.”

He turned to the cohort commander. Who looked the way Antonio Banderas had in his first big roles back in Artorius’ father’s youth and was called Gaius Baebius Miccius.

“Centurion, cohort will load solid shot, all tubes,” he said.

The orders were relayed. The two-hundred-odd men poised waiting broke into action as stylized as a dance routine in a Bollywood film. The man at each limber pulled out a round—a cylindrical linen bag of powder, topped by a round wooden disc tied on, and the cast-bronze ball strapped to the disc by thin copper bands looped over the top of the shot in a cross and nailed to the sabot’s sides. Bronze turned out to be a bit heavier than cast iron, so the ball had been made with a slight hollow in the center.

And the quartermaster begged us with tears in his eyes to retrieve the balls for recasting; bronze isn’t cheap and stone’s too brittle. We must get around to cast iron, in our copious spare time . . . 

The first man walked briskly back and handed the round to a second, who turned and slid it into the waiting muzzle. Since this was the first round, the man with the rammer could push it down without swabbing out first; he did it with a couple of smart two-handed lunging motions. A third stepped up to the breech as soon as the round was solidly planted and plunged the sharp end of a thin bronze spike through the touchhole to pierce the powder bag; it had a ring on the other end, and was attached to his wrist by that via a leather strap. A fourth inserted the primer, which was a quarter-inch copper tube, filled with fine powder, sealed on the bottom with wax and topped by a short length of quick match. He stood by with his Ronsonius, lid pushed up and ready to flick.

All eighteen guns were ready within fifteen seconds of the order. The centurion nodded somber approval—doing something in a drill was one thing, but doing it equally well in action was real discipline.

“Targets, Tribune?” he asked Artorius.

“Take a look at the banner at the end of their right flank, Centurion,” he said.

The man raised a brass-and-leather tube to his eye and adjusted it. The first telescope had gone to the Emperor, the second to Legate Fronto, and all eight of the rest were in this cohort, for now. They weren’t perfect—no more than x3 magnification, blurry and weirdly color streaked. But they worked.

Sort of. Better than Eyeball Mark One, at least.

“I have it, sir.”

“It’s eighteen hundred yards—extreme range. All tubes on it, and on my word. Two volleys, then switch to the next, work your way right, until you reach the Marcomanni banners. Ignore them, traverse across to the other side of them and the Quadi, and start with that one—the antlers on a bear’s skull, see it?”

“Got it, sir.”

The centurion passed on the orders. Each battery centurion trotted between his six guns, pointing out the target. The tesserarius—crew chief—clipped the removable ladder-and-ring sight into the slot at the rear of the guns, adjusted it to the maximum eighteen-hundred-yards setting and straddled the trails to peer through it. He made hand signals, and the men who’d run a metal-shod pole through the horizontal ring at the end of the trail heaved on it. The muzzle moved in increments, left and right, while the gunner worked the screw-mounted handwheel that elevated the muzzle as high as it would go . . . 

“Tube ready!” each gun chief shouted, as he stood aside and raised a hand.

“Battery ready!” came from the three junior centurions.

Artorius pulled felt-and-leather earplugs joined by a thong out of a pouch and distributed one to each of the party, including Sarukê and the bodyguards. The gun crews were pushing theirs in.

“Do you know how you can tell a retired gunner?” he said—in English, as they draped them around their necks.

“No, Prof, how can you?” Filipa said.

Artorius put his cupped hand to his ear. “Eh? What’s that you said? Speak up, don’t mutter!”

It took a moment to sink in, and then the three younger Americans all chuckled.

“That one’s ancient,” he added, noting that Filipa and Mark at least looked a little more relaxed.

He took a deep breath, and switched to Latin: “Centurion . . . on my signal . . . unleash hell.”

The man looked slightly baffled, the more so as the Americans all chuckled again, but it was a good idea to look relaxed and confident in a setting like this. Some of the men had glanced over their shoulders at the command group, and they’d probably be saying something to their mates as they turned back at crisp barked commands.

Then there was a sound, a sort of massed growling booming mutter coming from the Germanii, loud even at a mile’s distance as tens of thousands of them took it up.

Ah, the barratus, he thought. Unpleasant, when you realize how many people are right there and really, really have a yearning, burning desire to kill you.

They were bellowing into the hollows of their shields. In his history the Roman Army had taken it up about a century later, a mark of their becoming more and more like their principal enemies and recruiting heavily from them in the desperate traumas of the third century as the Empire came within a hair of collapsing. Right now the ordered ranks were resting behind them in their traditional disciplined silence . . . 

He raised his hand and chopped it downward, with his field glasses trained on the Anglian standard.

Strange to be blowing up his own linguistic ancestors . . . probably a few physical ones too, though the first of the Vandenburg family to settle in America had been Dutch originally, back in the early eighteenth century. Or Germans from Lower Saxony, which had been a distinction without much difference back then.

Only vague family legends remained; Border South dirt farmers mostly didn’t bother keeping detailed records. The same legends said that the ones who’d moved to Texas in the 1830s had had urgent, practical reasons to leave West Tennessee. Involving either bad debts they didn’t intend to repay, or accusations of horse theft, or the un-mysteriously pregnant daughter of a very irate neighbor known for his marksmanship.

And we became purebred American mongrels anyway, fast enough, once we got off the boat in Philadelphia . . . English, Scots-Irish, touch of Cherokee, probably the odd octoroon who managed to skip out, move two hundred miles over and pass . . . then a couple of Tejano girls grafted themselves onto the Vandenberg family tree once we got to Texas . . . and then there’s Dad’s grandfather’s mom, who arrived as a pregnant war bride from Seoul in 1953. And my descendants here are going to be Romans. Who are just as . . . eclectic.

The centurion barked an order. Eighteen Ronsonii flicked—none more than twice—eighteen quick matches sputtered, and eighteen men skipped briskly to the side because . . . 

BOOOOOOM!

Each bronze tube shot a long plume of dirty-white smoke that reeked of rotten eggs . . . or of hell, if you thought about it. The recoil also shot the whole one-and-three-quarter-ton weight of gun and mount back about six feet, with the crews standing well clear. Plenty of practice with live ammunition drove that point home well and truly, or left crippled or dead examples of why you should take it to heart.

As soon as the recoil stopped men flung themselves on the wheels and ran them back up.

The moment the piece was back where it started the rammer was back at work—this time running the big wet sponge on the other end of his rammer down the barrel with a long hsssssh sound of steam, dipping it in a bucket and doing it again.

That was to get any embers or bag fragments well and truly put out. Practice also drove that lesson home. What happened if you tried to ram a bag of gunpowder down on top of hot embers had to be seen to be believed, and Artorius wished he hadn’t had to see it. The rest of the routine was the same as the first time; sponging out added about ten seconds to the process.

Artorius had his field glasses up and was looking at the end product when it hit around two and a bit seconds later. Eighteen twelve-pound shot struck the densely packed shield wall around the Anglian banner, with only about thirty yards between the leftmost and rightmost hit, good practice at nearly a mile with round shot from smoothbore tubes. Most of the balls were still in the air when they struck. The impact was shattering—literally so, because a man struck by twelve pounds of metal still traveling at nearly a thousand feet per second disintegrated instantly.

He spattered, and the ball plowed on through to do the same to the man behind . . . and the one behind him . . . and the one behind him . . . and the same for several more repetitions.

Some of the balls hit short and bounced, with very much the same effect. The ones which hit shorter still and rolled still tore legs off right at the hip if they struck anywhere on the limb from the foot up. It was all doll tiny with distance even with the binoculars, but he still winced a little at the sight.

Not too much, he’d seen things just as bad, up close and personal. The scale here was a bit daunting, though.

BOOOOOM!

The sound was spread out a little more, the guns firing as fast as their crew chiefs considered them ready.

“Cease fire! Shift to second target! Load and stand ready!” the cohort commander called.

Filipa and Mark were carefully not looking at the fall of shot; they were both naturally shortsighted, but they’d also had the surgical correction routine in their generation. Jeremey was looking, and he had better than 20/20 natural vision, even if he didn’t have a telescope or field glasses.

“Why don’t they drop flat? Take cover?” he asked, frowning and shaking his head. “That would cut their losses. A lot.”

“Because that would mean showing fear in front of their lords and oath comrades and kin,” Artorius said quietly.

“You think they’ll break and run away eventually?”

Artorius shook his head. “No, we can’t kill nearly enough of them with the cannon to do that. If we had a hundred guns, then maybe. Or two or three hundred. Like one of Napoleon’s grand batteries, but sure as hell not with only eighteen. Not against a host that large.”

“Then what’s the point?”

No flies on Jeremey, not at all, Artorius thought, and went on with the lesson:

“The ones from outside the Marcomanni and Quadi territories are mostly what passes for professionals in those tribes, not called-up farmers who fight once or twice a year or steal the odd cow or pig. They left the ordinary peasants home when the Marcomanni envoys convinced their kings and chiefs that the Romans need slapping back before they got big eyes about the whole Barbaricum, and dangled visions of loot in front of their eyes. They’re mostly brave as hell, and they take that feasting-with-the-Gods thing seriously.”

He smiled thinly; he knew from the way it felt it was an expression he’d seen in a picture someone had taken of him, back in his Ranger days. Memories of it had been one more reason he’d switched trades. It wasn’t a smile you wanted to see in the mirror very often, or at least he hadn’t.

“But they’re used to being brave at sword’s length or spear distance from the ones trying to kill them, or after charging a hundred yards with a few arrows and javelins and slingstones falling. That’s a different thing entirely from standing still and taking it from people a mile away you can’t hurt. And as I like to say, they’re not necessarily stupid.”

Jeremey made an enquiring sound, and he continued:

“After a while, it’s going to occur to them . . . the young hotheads, the berserkers, and the chiefs who have to stay standing around those banners too if they want to keep the young warriors’ respect . . . that we can keep this up all day, and that they have a choice of running away, being smashed to bits as helpless as sheep until sundown, or running toward us and seeing how that turns out. Pulling back would be the smart thing to do. We don’t want them smart, we want them angry.”

Jeremey nodded. Filipa grimaced, and Mark blinked.

“Ah,” Jeremey said, smiling at seeing a point. “That’s why you’re not having them shell the Marcomanni and Quadi? It’ll make them angry at the people who got them into this, too?”

“Right. Among other things.”

Mark spoke, frowning: “That’s logical.” The gangly student of ancient publishing history added, “But . . . you know, usually I approve of logical thinking. That . . . I don’t know . . . seems sort of . . . weird.”

“No, it’s not weird, Mark. It’s just nasty logic; we’ve put them in a position where all their choices are bad. But this is a nasty business we’re in right now and they were doing their best to do unto us, first. Hopefully, we’re not going to be doing this much longer. I’d rather be reducing maternal and infant mortality and increasing food security, you betcha.”

BOOOOOM! BOOOOOM!

More hell-stinking smoke drifted back around them as the sound thudded through the air and into chest and gut with palpable impacts, and Filipa grew white around the lips as she kept calling the ranges, as regular as a machine.

BOOOOOM! BOOOOOM!

Is this what Kitchener felt like at Omdurman? he thought, his own lips drawn thin in resigned distaste.

That had been where the British brought the Sudanese Mahdists to battle and broke them in 1898 in one overwhelming blow. The losses had been about 15,000 deaths to 48 in that one—a classic Maxim-machine-guns-versus-spears colonial massacre, complete with things like bayoneting the wounded. To a degree that had shocked even the Victorians, a little, though what the Dervishes did to enemy wounded when they got the chance made that look like a love pat.

No, from what he said, Kitchener was mostly concerned about the expense of wasted ammunition. And anyway, I don’t have Maxim guns here, or Lee-Metford rifles, or even Martini-Henrys. This battle is going to be decided the old-fashioned way, with swords and what the participants can arm power in the other direction. The cannon are just . . . what were those guys in a bullring called? The ones who get the bull worked up for the matador by jabbing those barbed darts into it? Right, picadors. This is picador work.

BOOOOM! BOOOOM!


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