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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Municipium Aelium Carnuntum,

Capital of Pannonia Superior

November 9th, 166 CE

Marcus Aurelius looked at the men in the map room the Americans had made in the Praetorium; his comites were there, and the provincial governor and higher local commanders, all seated at the table. Logs crackled in the fireplace behind him, and even then some of them who hadn’t seen the innovation yet gave it an appreciative glance for the way it took the wet-chill curse off the air. Those same eyes went up to the new-style suspended lanterns with glass chimneys that gave a fair degree of brightness to an overcast November morning on the middle Danube. The sun wasn’t going to do that, during the short period it deigned to lift over the southern horizon at all.

He doesn’t miss much, does he? Artorius thought, reading the monarch’s glance.

“It seems I owe you yet another debt,” Rome’s Emperor said to Artorius. “And, possibly, my life.”

The American shook his head. “You were secure in the fortress, and well guarded by good troops, Caesar Augustus. The Quadi were desperate and made a reckless throw of the dice that had little chance of success. I do hope my warning made our victory swifter, less costly.”

“Very much so,” Marcus Aurelius said.

There were nods from the others, some friendly and done with a smile, some grudging of this alien newcomer’s swift rise among men of good family.

None of the men in military garb were ready to deny the warning had helped. Surprise multiplied force, they all knew it and knew the others did too. It was impossible to say how much more damage the Quadi might have done with that on their side and their scaling ladders on the fortress wall before the garrison turned out.

“And since you deny that you read the stars or do auguries, Tribune, how did you realize that the Quadi would attack that very night?”

“I . . . and more immediately, my clients . . . simply examined all the intelligence available, sir,” he said, and outlined what he’d set Mark and the others to doing, and what they’d found:

“So I was then certain that the Quadi expected to attack, and attack a place where Roman forces were strong. Given that advantage of ours, added to by the new weapons, a night attack was only logical, because it minimized our strengths. I was not certain that that would be the day . . . the night . . . the Quadi attacked, or that the castra of the fleet in Carnuntum would be the target. But it seemed very likely, and better safe than sorry, as the saying goes, sir. Better I look a fool shying at shadows than Roman soldiers die because I feared looking a fool. But I was lucky.”

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” the Emperor said.

Then he sighed and shook his head. “I would not have thought barbarians such as the Quadi would have the intellect . . . and the patience and discipline . . . to carry out such a plot.”

Artorius shook his head ruefully too:

“Where I come from we have another saying, sir. If you play at latrones long enough with good players, you will become a good player yourself. Rome has halted on this frontier and the Rhine for over a hundred years; and the Quadi and others have learned from the Empire, in more ways than one. Their forefathers in the days of the first Augustus could not have done this, but they most manifestly can. It is not safe to leave a good player on the frontier.”

Latrones—the Game of Soldiers—was a Roman board game basically similar to chess. Marcus Aurelius took the meaning immediately; he could see the others getting it in a ripple of amusement, discomfort, or dawning thoughtfulness. The head of the Praetorians looked as if he’d bitten into something very sour.

“What do you recommend, then, Tribune?” the Emperor said, an edge of amusement in his voice. “It is your place to advise me, after all.”

“Exactly what you had planned, sir. Cross the river as soon as the weather is good and our forces gathered, then vincere superbos until there’s nobody left up there but obedient Roman subjects.”

He thought for a moment and went on: “What the Empire needs and needs badly, sir, is . . . how shall I put it . . . a finalem solutionem Germanis problemata.”

Which meant: a final solution to the German problem. Mark made a choking sound behind him. One of the officials from the office of the Praepositus a rationibus—basically the treasury—was also almost whimpering, though for a very different reason:

“Great Caesar Augustus, the cost! The garrisons necessary—”

“The equivalent of four legions and an equal number of auxiliaries,” Marcus Aurelius said thoughtfully. “Suitably distributed. And a network of roads and fortresses. That to begin with. Eventually, cities and towns and harbors and much else.”

The Praetorian Prefect nodded; he was as close as the Romans had to Chief of the General Staff. That prediction meant about forty to fifty thousand men, which would be something around fifteen percent of the Empire’s current armed forces.

Oh, please, Parthian Kingdom, stay beaten for a while! Artorius thought, as close to a real mental prayer as he’d come in a while.

We’ll probably have to conquer Parthia—before the Sassanids take over and make it a real menace.

In the history he’d studied, that was due in 224 CE, just short of sixty years from now. But the changes already in place made the date utterly unpredictable either way.

The Parthian state was a ramshackle affair; it had a succession crisis every time one of its shahs died, and the Roman wars against it were manageable. The Sassanids were a different kettle of fish entirely; for starters they were convinced that Ahura Mazda had commissioned them to re-create the ancient Persian Empire.

At times they’d overrun everything from Anatolia to Egypt. Eventually they and the Byzantine successor to the Roman Empire had crippled each other with one massive war after another and so enabled the early Arab conquests.

Not that anything’s going to be remotely the same in a couple of centuries from now . . . but not another Parthian war just yet, pretty please! Let’s settle the Germanii first.

The Emperor went on to the man of the fiscus: “But within ten years, if we do not make large mistakes in the manner of Varus, and fortune favors us, it would be possible to move the Danube garrison units north instead to the new frontier. And of course, new territories mean new, additional revenues.”

“Oh, Caesar Augustus, they wouldn’t come near—taxes on barbarian lands with little trade and only weedy little patches of farmland . . . then the roads and fortifications necessary—”

Artorius cleared his throat. “May I speak, Caesar?”

“By all means, Tribune. You are frequently . . . instructive.”

He rose and went over to the room’s southern wall and pulled the cord that scrolled up the linen curtain that covered it. There was a murmur of astonishment from the spectators—to begin with, the Romans hadn’t come up with that arrangement for moving curtains yet. What was behind it was a huge map, twelve feet from top to bottom and twenty-four long. It covered the Mediterranean, North Africa, Europe all the way north and the Middle East as far as the Zagros and the Gulf. There was a rustling and the sound of stools scraping as men shifted to look comfortably.

“My former people had considerable skill in making very accurate maps,” he said. “Which I and my clients have shown to the local artificers.”

This would look different from any map they’d ever seen before, but thunderpowder and the other innovations and just lately warning of the Quadi attack had given him a lot of credibility when he made a claim. The borders of the Roman Empire were shown, its neighbors across them and its provinces within, and the major cities; so were the rivers and the larger mountain ranges, and in the Barbaricum the tribal territories and the names of the major peoples beyond the frontier, all neatly handprinted in the same block letters used for inscriptions.

“Like a view from the halls of the Gods!” someone murmured.

Artorius picked up a pointer and tapped it on Carnuntum.

“We are here.”

Then he moved it north and a bit west, to what would have been Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic in his time.

Or a mass of radioactive ruins and scorched bones very shortly after my time, he thought grimly. A pity, very pretty town. Mary loved it when we had that holiday there.

It was less than two hundred miles, but until recently most literate Romans had thought that took you all the way to the Baltic shores. He went on aloud:

“This is the former land of the Boii, a Gallic tribe, overcome by the Marcomanni over a hundred years ago, and it is now the core of their realm. With regard to the fiscal issues just raised, there is a very large silver deposit . . . here.”

He tapped the site of what another history would have known as Kutná Hora—Cowl Mountain—in central Bohemia. It was marked by a small cross.

“Large, excellent Tribune?” the fiscal official said, looking less silly and more intent. “How large?”

Large enough to supply a fair proportion of all the silver used in Europe for three centuries, he thought, and went on:

“Comparable to the largest of the silver mines in Hispania.”

Especially with better ore-refining techniques like pan amalgamation, which we will helpfully supply. That’ll up the output in the mines they’ve already got, too.

Spain was where much of the Empire’s silver coinage came from. The news went through the watching men like a jolt of electricity; and by now they took what he said very seriously indeed. Even Marcus Aurelius’ eyebrows shot up, and others were grinning like so many hungry carnivores contemplating a bound, gagged and nicely plump victim. The rabbity little man from the fiscus blinked and began to smile himself.

He’s seeing himself freed from sitting in a bathtub with three drains and only one plug. Where likely as not he’d be blamed when it ran dry, not the Equestrian Order guy who’s head of the fiscus.

“There are other large . . . though mostly not so large . . . deposits—”

Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . 

His pointer flicked to locations on what some twenty-first-century tourist guides had called the Silver Route, all the way up into Saxony, all helpfully picked out on the map with the same little crosses. That silver had financed a lot of impressive medieval and Renaissance architecture, which people had still come to gawk at in his time. Fuchs’s ever-helpful baggage had included specific locations, complete with detailed topographical maps, cross sections of the ore deposits, plus total reserves and grades.

“Ending with another very large deposit here—”

His pointer went to what would have been Rammelsberg, in central Germany, on the northern edge of the Harz mountain range where it sank toward the great flatland that ran from the Atlantic to the Urals.

“Silver here on a very large scale, also copper, lead, sulfur and zinc.”

“Ah, sulfur,” one of the military men murmured, as if reminding himself; now very necessary for thunderpowder.

One of the watching Imperial legates actually ran a hand across his mouth and wiped it off on the skirt of his tunic. That was even fairly appropriate if you knew what a tasty morsel it was.

Metaphorically speaking.

Mining in Rammelsberg had started not long after Charlemagne and lasted a continuous thousand years, only ending in the 1980s.

The officer of the fiscus muttered under his breath, his fingers moving in patterns on the table, as if he was flicking the markers on a counting board: “Call that sixty-five hundred talents of silver annually, thirty-nine milliards of denarii, minus costs of . . . ”

The Emperor brought them down to earth:

“Let’s not try to shear the sheep before we have it in the pen, gentlemen,” he said evenly. “But this is important news. Money is the fuel of war, and war is, alas, necessary to safeguard and extend the imperium of the Senate and People of Rome. Silver on that scale turns this from a sorrowful . . . and expensive . . . necessity to an opportunity to secure both our frontiers and our treasury, without a lasting increase in taxation.”

He wasn’t having the visceral reaction most of the others were, but there was an ironic acknowledgment in the glance he gave the American, a sort of tip of the hat thank you.

Artorius had just solved two difficulties for him at the same time; the long-term financial problem of paying for incorporating the Barbaricum or big chunks thereof into the Empire, and the political one of getting his inner circle—and eventually at least most of the senatorial class—on board with his new policy despite its up-front costs in men and money. No individual senator or even clan could oppose the Imperial will . . . but Emperors who alienated too many important, wealthy, powerful families usually didn’t have long lifespans.

Precious metals were technically an Imperial monopoly, but visions of leases to exploit them under contract were certainly already running through any number of heads. The necessary societās and collegia—the closest things Romans had to joint-stock companies—would be handled by businessmen of equestrian rank as far as the management went, but a lot of the money would come from the upper aristocracy and even more would . . . 

Flow right back into their hot little hands. Making the rich richer is always popular. With the rich.

Plenty would spill over along the way to encourage swift Romanization of the new territories, not least by luring settlers from the older provinces. And rich mines made farming anywhere within reach profitable as well to feed their labor force; plus they bred cities, whose own demands bred villas and villages around them.

And within reach is the operative word, but in a year or two . . . or five . . . we’ll introduce long-distance canals with miter locks, starting small; hard graft, but a lot more doable right away than railroads. The Chinese have already built big chunks of their Grand Canal; ultimately there’s no reason we can’t join the Mediterranean and the Atlantic . . . the Bourbons did that in France in the seventeenth century . . . and the North European Plain all the way from there to the Baltic and Black Seas . . . eventually, to the Volga and the Caspian. And link the Danube and the Rhine as well. That’ll cut transport costs to a fraction of the overland haulage prices and feed plenty into the Mediterranean too.

He’d also just given the wealthy men here a leg up on the process of exploiting the new mines, which would make them happy, and he’d given the Emperor vast new patronage to hand out. Bassus, governor of Pannonia Superior, had a calculating look in his eye; at a guess he was wondering who’d get the governorship of the new provinces.

The high-ranking freedman from the fiscus was virtually squirming in delight. Better than three-quarters of the Empire’s revenues went to the military and there was never, ever enough. The Spanish mines of the High Imperial period were so massive that they had left traces across the globe. Scientists in his own time had detected their airborne pollution as far away as deep-drilled ice cores from Greenland.

The prospect of duplicating that revenue flow had the treasury man nearly in ecstasy. Everyone else was fairly happy too, enough that there was only a little well-disguised grumbling when the Emperor told them that Marcus Claudius Fronto would be the second-in-command when he arrived in the spring with the Eleventh Claudian Legion from Durostorum on the lower Danube.

As the room emptied, Marcus Aurelius signaled Artorius to remain. He stood silent as the Emperor of the known world went from one end of the map to the other, close enough that his short-sighted eyes could see it all clearly.

Glasses, he thought. We should be able to make a pair of glasses that’ll help him. That’s a medieval invention, thirteenth century, and we can skip the development phase.

When he reached the Danube, he reached out a hand and Artorius put the pointer in it. It was marked off in Roman inches, and a scale at the bottom of the map showed the conversion into Roman miles, all units much easier for an American to think in than it would have been for a metric-raised European. The local foot was 11.65 American inches, and the inch they used was 0.97 percent of the one he’d grown up with. Roman miles were five thousand feet, very slightly more than nine-tenths of his.

The Emperor measured the distance from Carnuntum to the Baltic Sea, and his lips moved as he used the new Pannonius arithmetica to calculate.

“Just as you said, about six hundred and forty miles . . . is there any truth in the story you have told of your origins, Tribune?” Marcus Aurelius said.

He’d dropped into Greek, which was what Roman aristocrats often did when they wanted to keep a conversation between themselves private from the help. This wasn’t a culture where anyone important could expect to be truly alone very often. The Praetorians at parade rest just inside the door with their scorpion-blazoned shields presumably spoke only Latin, or at least he thought they did—and Artorius was willing to bet on his knowledge. The Guard regiments got nearly all their recruits in rural and small-town central and northern Italy in this period, anyway, where there weren’t many Greek speakers.

I expected this but not so soon, as the man wrote on his tombstone, Artorius thought.

He fought down an impulse to bare his teeth, and his stomach clenched.

That’s the downside of having a brilliant thinker and trained logician as boss. They notice things. And they draw conclusions wherever the logic leads them.

He licked his lips, and they were dry; this could get sticky. Everything was in the balance at this instant. He knew Marcus Aurelius by now . . . a little. But at seventh and last, he was a man of this century. How might he lash out?

“Just about all of what I said about where I . . . we . . . came from is true, sir . . . but I will admit it is not complete in some crucial respects. If you don’t mind me asking, what made you think so?”

“I was not certain until today. Your new engines, the thunderpowder, the mathematics, all these might well simply come from a people with more knowledge of natural philosophy and the mechanic arts than ours. So could your knowledge of mapmaking. But why would a distant people . . . across the very ocean itself . . . know so much of the Barbaricum just north and east of the Empire? If your knowledge came from books—from Tacitus and his Germania, shall we say—then it would be limited by ours. I put that together with the puzzle of your appearance here on the middle Danube when you say you came from across the western ocean, and certain other facts, and eventually my doubts became certainties.”

Artorius glanced involuntarily at the door the others had left through. Marcus Aurelius followed the thought without effort, and chuckled dryly:

“No, I have confided these doubts in nobody but Galen, and he shares my analysis . . . and is also a man who knows how and when to keep his mouth shut. The others”—he shrugged—“are now convinced of your worth as an oracle, and do not doubt your story of vast riches, nor will they likely bother to puzzle at how you know when once they accept that you do. And now that prospect of a war winning great wealth preoccupies their minds; some from greed, others seeing in it the good of the State. Many both, like Marcus Iallius Bassus. There is no harm in ambition securely yoked to duty. So if—”

The Emperor raised an eyebrow, and Artorius nodded confirmation that the deposits were really there.

“I do not doubt your claim is true, to the inch. You have yet to make one that was not borne out, some much more extraordinary than the location of a mine. What I would like to know, Tribune . . . what I must know, and must insist you tell me . . . is how you know what you know.”

Artorius told him, down to the way they’d left Fuchs’s laboratory and awakened here.

The Emperor’s face remained impassive, as usual, except for the rise of his eyebrows; this was a man singularly difficult to startle. Artorius was close enough to see his pupils expand, though, and several times his breath caught.

Artorius concluded:

“It is . . . as if you were suddenly conveyed to the Troad in the days of Agamemnon and Achilles and Odysseus, sir. Or to the time of Romulus and Remus on the banks of the Tiber, when Rome was a new-founded village of thatched huts. But longer, for me and my companions. We came from the year . . . two thousand seven hundred and eighty-five anno urbis conditae.”

Which was the equivalent of 2032, if you were counting from the legendary foundation of Rome in 753 BCE, a little under a thousand years before this night. He wasn’t going to go into the putative future history of Christianity and its dating system just yet. It wouldn’t necessarily happen that way now in any case.

He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the angles were right to conceal it from the guardsmen, and pulled out his phone.

“Mary and me, sequence one,” he murmured in English. Then aloud: “If you would examine this, sir?”

Her picture appeared, holding little Maddy, and Vincent standing beside his father, then segued into another view.

Marcus Aurelius nodded, and came to look at the picture. He reached out a wondering finger and touched the surface of the phone, blinking until the alien medium suddenly became real to him, and then murmuring astonishment at the lifelike rendering and the way pictures appeared and disappeared.

“Almost like sorcery in truth . . . but perhaps merely art, refined by many centuries. Your first wife, your children?” he said, when the sequence froze at the first shot again.

“Yes, sir. Severed from me forever, and probably . . . almost certainly . . . dead,” Artorius said as he tapped the phone closed and put it back in his tunic’s pocket.

“Ah, that is a great grief, and I can see that you feel it keenly. Yet you bear it manfully, and do not let pain crush your spirit, recognizing that love is a loan from fortune, not a gift that we may securely possess. I am sorry for your loss, Tribune, much though it has rebounded to my advantage, and that of Rome. That was this war you said sent you into exile? That you now say destroyed the mechanism that delivered you to the neighborhood of Vindobona, across the gulf of years?”

“Yes. Compared to the weapons used, the thunderpowder you have seen is as a little child’s toy wooden sword. Or as a figure scrawled on a wall by an idler with a stick of charcoal is to this,” he added, tapping the phone.

Then the Emperor fell silent for long minutes, walking to the window and gazing out through the thick, wavy, rain-streaked glass before he turned back. Artorius’ tension grew.

“One thousand, eight hundred and sixty-six years,” he said quietly at last. “I believe you; the alternative is that the Gods are making sport of us . . . and I do not think They do so, whatever Homer and the other poets wrote. And hence your knowledge of arts arcane to us, as Agamemnon or Aeneas would know nothing of the forging of iron or the building of aqueducts in the Age of Bronze. And once all men wandered, living by the hunt, and dressed only in skins, long before Troy . . . What would they make of Rome, or Alexandria or Athens, with their myriads of folk and great buildings?”

“Yes, sir,” Artorius said. “Knowledge accumulates over the years. And past a certain point, if certain discoveries are made, knowledge breeds knowledge faster and faster. But knowledge is not the same as wisdom . . . witness the way only unimaginable flight saved us from a war fought with the weapons of Gods, but wielded by ordinary men consumed with fear and hate. Men willing to see a whole world go down to destruction, if only they could take their enemies with them.”

The Emperor stroked his beard. “You bring us knowledge as Prometheus brought men the gift of fire, something that may warm in winter or cook a meal . . . or burn them to death in the ashy ruins of their homes. Yet something of us remains in your time, apparently.”

“Yes sir, though our knowledge is incomplete,” Artorius said.

Marcus Aurelius suddenly laughed, his grave face growing lively for a moment.

“Thus your tears of joy at reading all of Euripides, as your lady wife Julia told me! And she mentioned your Jewish client’s dance of joy when he saw Claudius’ histories! You knew only a few of the great playwright’s works in your time? The histories of my predecessor were lost?”

“Precisely, sir. Though your book of philosophy—it is called The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius—that did survive. I kept it with me when I served my own Republic in war, to ponder in my moments of rest. I’m afraid I’ve quoted it to you, passing off your wisdom as mine, but it sustained me in a dark and bloody time.”

The Emperor laughed again; twice in one day was unusual for him.

“Is it passing off another’s work as your own, if you quote something not yet written? Most of it will probably be nothing but my poor renderings of Zeno, Diogenes and Attalus.”

He sobered. “And is it possible, then, to frustrate the Fates and turn the river of time from its course?”

“I do not know with certainty,” Artorius said honestly. “But I am convinced that it is. The man who invented the device for traveling upstream against the current of time thought so. And much of what we have already introduced here, things that now spread widely and cannot be expunged, would not have been thought of for centuries, some not for many centuries. The footrest saddle, Marcus’ paper and printing, distilling, thunderpowder. Filipa’s mathematics, Paula’s preventative for childbed fever, Jeremey’s new crops, and the rest. And these will change the course of events in ways no mortal man can foretell.”

“This war with the Germanii we are fighting? It happened in your . . . your history? So odd, to think of there being more than one! Yet has not every man said to himself, if only I had done this otherwise or decided that differently, how changed my life would be? And as for men, so with cities and with empires.”

“Yes it did, and you won it, though at great cost and with much loss,” Artorius said. “But it took you fourteen years, and exhausted you and the Empire, and ultimately your successors—”

Let’s not mention that that means your son Commodus the tyrant and prancing Neronian-style lunatic. Not just yet.

“—abandoned what you had taken. Ill came of that.”

“Ah,” the Emperor said; his face became intensely thoughtful. “And that you are from the years yet to come puts some of your advice in a different light . . . yes, indeed. For instance, at your wedding you told me that suppression of the Christian cult would not work well . . . that too was foreknowledge?”

“Yes, sir. The Christians of my time were descendants of those of this age, and they had a saying: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

The Emperor’s brows went up. “Were you a Christian yourself?”

“Not as a man of full years, sir, no. My study of philosophy . . . and the experiences of my life . . . convinced me that the world was not such as a single all-knowing and all-benevolent deity would fashion.”

“Indeed, that seems reasonable. Though not certain; would merely human thought be able to fully fathom the plan of such a God?”

Artorius chuckled. “That argument was made to me, sir! But many of my family remained steadfast in that faith; my wife, for one.”

Marcus Aurelius nodded again, his brows knotting in thought.

“And tell me then, does Rome fall in the end, as Troy did and Athens after, and Alexander’s empire later still? Despite our pretensions to empire without limits or end?”

“Yes, sir. Though not in your time; three and a half centuries from now. Then there is . . . will be . . . was . . . a long age of darkness and ignorance and petty wars before civilization advanced again. But memories of Rome remained, of her greatness, even the ruins of which spread awe. And memories of the Roman peace that stretched so far, for so long. Hence my own country of America was ruled by a Senate from a domed building with Corinthian columns and marble floors, and statues in niches! I . . . and my companions . . . hope to aid you, so that there will be no fall, and no end to that wonderful peace either in time or space. No terrible war such as destroyed our world. Instead one world, one law and one strong hand enforcing universal peace. Truly an imperium sine fine.”

Marcus Aurelius nodded soberly. “That too explains a great deal. Why you spoke of Rome as . . . something seen from a distance. Now I know it was a distance of years more than miles. But this must remain between us! You did right to keep the secret, for it would sow fear and unpredictable chaos if revealed. Does any other know?”

“Only Josephus the merchant, sir. He is a man of very keen wit, and he saw us just after we . . . arrived, and deduced that we arrived by no normal means. He even noticed that the coins we brought all looked new minted! But he has proven . . . very reliable, and a true friend. To the best of my knowledge, he and you are the only human beings of this time who know the truth, and he is fully with me in the plan to strengthen Rome.”

“Let us keep it so, then. Or nearly so; Galen will have to know, and he can bear the knowing. I trust his discretion implicitly, and it would be very useful for him to know the source of the medical knowledge he finds so confounding.”

He looked at the map again, shaking his head. “Let us hope that together we can—”

He moved his hand from left to right in a sweeping gesture, indicating the stretch of miles.

And of years, Artorius thought.

“—draw an even better map than this, eh, Tribune?”

By God, this is a man I can follow!


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