CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Near Vindobona
August 30th, 166 CE
Filipa Chang sat her horse and gestured Sarukê forward, doing her best to look aloof, mysterious and powerful as she remained with the Prof and her friends and the Sarmatian cantered forward, her tall horse stepping high and effortlessly controlled despite its spirited gait.
It was a bright summer morning on a broad dusty field taken over by the Imperial army as a maneuver ground as the reinforcements arrived. There was a smell of wood fires in the air from the tented camps nearby; also of men and horses and their sweat and wastes.
One huge camp showed infantry from the newly arrived Legio III Italica swarming like disciplined ants as they built field fortifications topped with rows of sharpened stakes. When the temporary fortifications came down and the tents disappeared, some farmer or landowner was going to get well-dug-over and abundantly dunged fields out of it.
In the middle distance one luckless soldier was trotting in a wide circle around the whole parade ground with his lorica segmentata held at arm’s length—no easy feat for any long period, since it weighed over twenty pounds—shouting:
“Rubigo!”
Which meant: Rust!
—at the top of his lungs every second stride, while a gimlet-eyed tesserarius with a face like a hobnailed boot leaned on his staff and watched him sweat.
From the sidelong glances the three-hundred-odd troopers of the recently arrived Ala I Thracum Victrix—the First Cavalry Regiment of Victorious Thracians—were giving the Americans, Filipa thought her think-of-me-as-a-Goddess act was working. Or something was.
The reputation of Artorius the War-Wise and his four companions had lost nothing in the telling since the victory won in the spring. Some were calling him a God, anything from Hercules to Mithras, and the rest of them were rumored to be demigods or spirits of wisdom who’d taken on human form.
More and more troops had been arriving, too. Not rapidly, the Roman Empire was too big for that, when feet and hooves were the fastest means of travel and the armies were mostly dispersed along the frontiers of a territory that covered nearly two million square miles, going on for two-thirds the size of the continental US.
But steadily.
Units arrived in good order, according to schedule, fully equipped, their numbers close to the duty rosters sent on ahead, and well fed. Arrangements made locally were much the same. Everyone was slotted into a prearranged position, and pitched uniform camps. Even supplies of firewood arrived on schedule.
A bit intimidating, really, when you think of what they have to work with. The Roman central government is surprisingly small and it isn’t very bureaucratic . . . except the Army, and that is, and very effectively so. An army with a government attached, was the way the Prof put it.
The cavalry troopers were in ranks by squadron, each thirty-one troopers and a decurion, and standing by the heads of their mounts, except for the command group and the standard-bearer, who stayed in the saddle. The regimental flag was the bronze open-mouthed head of a snarling dragon, carried on a pole, with a hollow silk body behind it cased in shimmering gilded scales. It stirred and writhed and rustled in the breeze from the river, looking almost alive, amid a hissing noise.
This was a standard cavalry unit, not the cataphracts whose head-to-toe armor and armored horses and long contus spears imitated Sarmatian or Parthian lancers, nor wild Numidians riding bareback. They were equipped with spatha swords and spear and oval shield, the troopers wearing short mail shirts and helmets with broad neck guards and cheekpieces.
And they would all speak Latin. Many people in northern Thrace and Moesia—what she thought of as Bulgaria, though neither the original Turkic Bulgars nor the Slavs who took their name and absorbed them were anywhere near it yet—did these days, and professional soldiers most of all. It was the Army’s command language, and the Army pumped out a steady stream of Latin-speaking veterans and their families every year. Which made Army bases constantly spreading pools of Latinity and Romanitas over the generations.
Sarukê cantered up in front of the cavalry and brought her horse to a stop with a shift of her body, not bothering with the reins, and rested her hands casually on the pommel of her saddle before she spoke. She was in mailcoat and her native garb; the voice and the blonde head revealed with her helmet off didn’t leave much doubt of her gender, though.
The Sarmatian woman’s voice carried well—projecting it over distance was a necessary skill in her homeland.
“I am Sarmatian. Your word. We say Aorsi in tribe mine.”
There were nods at that; everyone in the Roman cavalry knew the reputation of Sarmatians, as light horse archers and armored heavy cavalry both. Sarmatian amazons were not unknown either, though not as frequent as they had been once. Certainly they’d all have heard of them.
“In tribe mine, I was . . . we say . . . wirapta.”
She smiled unpleasantly, a curving of her lips away from her teeth.
“Means in Roman tongue, interfector hominum.”
Which translated as: killer of men.
“Then on raid captured—sling-bullet—became gladiatrix—”
Which was the feminine of gladiator. Again, very, very much less common than the male variety and considered unnatural and scandalous by some even allowing for the arena’s raffish standards, but not vanishingly rare either.
“—of sixteen combats. Five victories in death fights.”
She smiled again. “Two of them with men, so still wirapta, eh? Now free. Retainer of Lord Artorius.”
She pointed to him.
“You know him-of. Master of war, war-wise, slayer of Prince Ballomar of Marcomanni. Taker of his head! I there, fight for him there, I see that. Artorius fight Ballomar bare-handed against sword and shield! Then take his sword and with that”—she drew a bladed palm across her own throat to illustrate—“cut neck.”
There was a stir as the cavalrymen looked over at Artorius. They would have heard a great deal from the others now based here in the week since they arrived, some of it embellished. They probably believed most of it, too.
“Lord Artorius wise in all way of war. Horse-war, too. You horse now iron shoe.”
There was a murmur, this time pleased. Roman roads had been designed for infantry in hobnailed caligae, the military sandal-boot, and Roman infantry could do a bit over twenty miles a day on them, day after day, in anything but a howling blizzard in February. But unshod hooves on hard stone, or gravel over stone, were a perennial problem, chipping and cracking. So were horses getting splints because the paved surface was a strain on their forelegs. Both of those were why you rode on the roadside verge when you could.
That wasn’t always possible. It hadn’t taken long—usually no more than one route march over the roads—for the merits of horseshoes to be fully apparent, and for the regimental smiths to eagerly learn their mysteries from the instructors sent around. Bar iron and blacksmiths weren’t hard to get.
From simple to complex, Filipa thought. Build confidence from the bottom up. The Prof was sure right about that! And I’m saving a lot of poor horses from going lame. They don’t volunteer for the cavalry.
“Lord Artorius give iron shoe! He also give new saddle. I learn, I use. I show now to you.”
She did, in a routine she’d developed that . . .
Would have wowed them at rodeos, Filipa thought with pride, and warm fondness. Even Prof the Glorious Cowboy Leader is impressed. And it’s mostly things you just can’t do at all with Roman . . . or Sarmatian . . . gear, no matter how good a rider you are. They know it too, I can see they’re gaping.
It ended with her putting on her helmet, tying off the cheek guards under her chin, then snatching up one of a pair of lances standing with their butt spikes in the dirt.
By then the men were murmuring, pointing out the way she was doing things, and keenly interested—they were professional horse soldiers after all, and proud of the skills that kept them alive and their enemies dead.
The lance had an ash-wood shaft about nine feet long, two feet longer than the type the Thracians were carrying. It also had a ball of leather on the end, tightly stuffed with wool, rather than a spearhead.
She used it to prod its twin.
“Beat me with spears, get one hundred denarii and promotion,” she called. “Who?”
She rode up and down in front of them, whirling and tossing the lance in circles like a baton in a casual display of skilled strength.
“Who can fight like woman?” she taunted.
There was a boiling, and then one man leapt into his stirrupless four-horn saddle and galloped out, snatching up the other practice lance with an effortless motion as he went by. Behind him the Roman centurion who was Ala praefectus—regimental commander—cursed and stopped himself from grabbing at the man. Roman cavalry were disciplined, but not with the machine obedience legionary training aimed at.
Oh, I do hate this part, Filipa thought.
This wasn’t the first demonstration she’d attended.
The modern saddle’s a big advantage and she’s the best rider I’ve ever known . . . even the best I’ve ever imagined . . . but still . . . What did the Prof say? You always meet someone better than you are, if you keep looking long enough?
The two figures trotted away from each other until they were a hundred yards apart, then turned and charged at a pounding gallop, amid rhythmic cheering by the Victorious Thracians for their champion. The horse hooves—both sets shod—tore gouts of dirt and clumps of grass out of the light sandy-loam soil.
The trooper of Thracum Victrix rode well, his oval shield slanted across his body and up under his eyes, spear held ready in the overhand grip, though he’d been a bit puzzled by the way it thickened toward a weighted butt spike.
There was a murmur from the regiment too; probably bets being laid. Then a rising buzz as they saw how Sarukê was holding her weapon, not two-handed as Sarmatians wielded their great barge poles, but not overarm either, instead with the rear of the shaft right under the armpit.
Sarukê brought the boxing-glove-like head down level at the last minute, clamped the lance under her arm with her hand only one-third of the way up from the butt, and leaned forward with her feet braced and her own griffon-blazoned shield up.
WHUMP!
The padded end of the lance struck the cavalry trooper squarely in the middle of his shield, well before his spear was within reach for a thrust. Sarukê was slammed back against the raised cantle of her Spanish-style saddle, and her horse stumbled for a half pace before she brought it back up.
The trooper of the First Thracians catapulted back over his horse’s tail, spear and shield flying in opposite directions, turned a full heels-over-head circle in midair and landed with a bone-jarring thump facedown. His horse galloped on for a few yards, slowed, then stopped and looked around with a visibly puzzled—
Where’s the boss? Where did he go?
—running through its equine mind, followed by:
Oh, there he is!
Filipa suppressed a giggle and thought:
It looked like a kid’s cartoon! Perfect!
The Roman saddle’s rear horns gave you some protection against getting knocked back ass over teakettle, but not anything like the degree of support you got from the combination of stiff frame and cantle and stirrups. Which was why the couched lance technique hadn’t been developed until a long time after this. When you used a lance like that, you weren’t stabbing with your arm muscles, you were using the entire momentum weight of horse and rider traveling better than thirty miles an hour. Over sixty, if it was against someone galloping toward you.
It made a big difference in the weight of the punch behind the business end.
The cavalry trooper wasn’t unconscious, not quite, but there was blood over his face when he raised it groggily, and the chin strap of his helmet had snapped, leaving it lying a few yards away. The Sarmatian woman turned her horse in its own length, then leaned over and rapped him sharply in the face with the leather-covered business end of her practice weapon. The man flopped down limp, open mouth drooling spit-diluted blood.
Sarukê raised her lance, and pointed with her rein hand at its head as she pitched her voice to carry to his comrades:
“This be iron, he”—she jerked a thumb over her shoulder—“be dead man. Any else? Any want hundred denarii?”
There was an echoing silence, in which the slap of the ala commander’s callused palm on his own forehead could be plainly heard, along with several horse snorts and the stamping of ironshod hooves.
Sarukê grinned, just visible behind the cheekpieces of her helmet, and the horsetail plume atop it bobbled in the wind.
“When he wake up, I send him bottle of superwine for ache in head. That too from Lord Artorius!”
That got a couple of laughs; the troopers had probably all tried the new brandy in the week since they’d arrived.
The ala commander glared those to silence and jerked an equally silent thumb as he ground his teeth. Two troopers from the beaten man’s turma led his horse back and tossed him across the saddle and strapped him in, before the entire unit mounted, turned and cantered off at trumpet signals. Many of them were looking back over their shoulders, and Sarukê waved in friendly fashion.
Besides giving these object lessons in why the new gear was being introduced, she was also helping to supervise saddlers learning to make it, and various target devices for learning how to handle a couched lance. She’d more or less developed that herself, from hints and pictures Filipa had provided.
The provincial governor wanted all the horsed units to be reequipped by the time the Emperor arrived, with a convert’s fervor. But first she trotted back to the Americans, removing her helmet and hanging it at her saddlebow.
“Work to do, lord,” she said cheerfully, saluting Artorius and nodding respectfully to the others.
Then she leaned in and gave Filipa an enthusiastic kiss; garlic and wine, the smell of horse sweat and oiled metal and leather.
“Later, sword-sister.”
Mark grinned as she trotted off. He could ride now, in the sense that he could stay on as long as he didn’t try to go very fast, or turn quickly, and they picked a horse with a good sense of plodding docility. Paula was mounted too, wearing very full loose trousers that looked more like the skirt of a woman’s tunic when she was on the ground.
Filipa had to admit they were practical and got her fellow American far fewer hostile and puzzled what-is-this-weirdo-who-disrupts-my-categories sidelong glances, but she’d decided to tough it out. Being around Sarukê most of the time helped with that.
“Fil’s in luuuuuuve,” Mark half chanted.
“You know, Mark, someday you’ll be older—emotionally speaking—than a bratty eight,” Filipa observed. “It’s sort of like dog years with you, but in reverse. Yeah, I am. So?”
Am I really? she thought. We don’t have much in common . . . can I actually be in love with someone who doesn’t know how to read or write, when so much of my life has been books? We weird each other out fairly frequently. And gross each other out occasionally. I do like her quite a lot and I’m massively, massively in lust with her, which is very nice too . . . let’s see how this goes.
The Prof smiled. “Fil could do worse,” he said. “Unless we take up with each other, we’ll all be in that boat sooner or later.”
“Or in that bed,” Paula said . . . rather sourly.
She didn’t think Roman men were much of a bargain, on the whole.
I agree, but—lucky me—that doesn’t apply. Poor Paula!
The Prof nodded: “This is where we have to live all our lives. And that’s part of life.
“Even,” he added softly, “if you feel for a while like the capacity has been . . . taken away.”
“Each other? Sorry, Fil, but you’re just not my type,” Paula added with genuine amused regret.
She’d confessed once in the baths—the habit of gossiping and chatting in the caldarium was contagious—that she’d found by dismal experiment that she was straighter than a surveyor’s set square and that was that.
Artorius turned to the others who’d travelled a one-way trip in time with him:
“And there’s a lesson here for us. We can’t do all of what we want to do by ourselves. We need help, lots of it. And ideally, the people who help us should know why, and want to do it.”
Jeremey nodded. “I’ve got to admit your girlfriend is very persuasive about anything to do with horses, Fil. Saves us a lot of time and aggravation with the cavalry. We may have the legate of the Tenth and the provincial governor on our side now, but some of the others . . . Romans understand foot-dragging and slow-walking and yes-of-course-sir-whatever-you-say-but-but-but just fine when they want to.”
“Obedezco pero no cumplo,” Mark said; that was an old saying from the Spanish colonial empire about orders you didn’t like from far-off Madrid, many months distant across pirate-haunted oceans and bandit-frequented mountains.
It meant: I obey, but I don’t comply.
“Showing not telling helps,” Artorius said. “And that Sarukê’s a woman, even if she is Sarmatian, drives it home.”
Filipa grinned, an evil expression: “It drives the Roman cavalry . . . well, Thracian and whatnot . . . batshit crazy when she does that who can fight like a woman thing and then knocks whoever volunteers clean out of the saddle.”
“Always some macho idiot to fall for that one,” Mark said, grinning in his turn. “Even when it’s obviously like trying to fight a six-shooter with a flintlock on a wet day. And I thought our jocks were dumb.”
“Then once they’ve had their faces rubbed in it they can’t wait to get the new saddles so they can do all that stuff too and don’t feel emasculated anymore,” Filipa said.
“Oh, God, do they ever think that way,” Paula said wryly. “Dicks with a dick fixation.”
“And the Germans think that way, and Thracians and Greeks and Gauls and Nabateans and Phoenicians and—” Mark pointed out, ending with: “No! Don’t hit me, you two! I’m harmless!”
“Which makes them want to do what we want them to do,” Jeremey added thoughtfully. “And on a personal level, Sarukê’s absolutely gorgeous in a big, healthy, athletic, outdoorsy, strapping country girl, horsey sort of way, yeah, Fil. But it would be too much like going to bed with a leopardess for my taste. That woman is dangerous. No, really. She’s a killer.”
Filipa gave him a long, chin-out, eye-slitted smug feline smile before she said judiciously:
“Well, I don’t notice your girlfriends . . . plural . . . doing anything for the Noble Cause of Civilization but interrupting your sleep.”
And yes, it is a bit like sleeping with a leopardess. A truly affectionate, very horny and hot leopardess. And she likes to just cuddle too, which is something I’ve really missed.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Mark said suddenly. “Did anyone else notice?”
“Notice what?” Jeremey asked.
“We’re having this conversation in Latin. I was thinking in Latin.”
Filipa checked her memory of precisely what she’d been saying.
“Christ and Buddha on the same skateboard, we were!” she said—in English.
The Prof started to laugh, and then his face grew grave. “We’re five drops of ink in a really, really big tanker-truck of milk,” he said. “Let’s say we all live another forty or fifty years. How much time will we spend talking in Latin, or thinking in it, by 210 CE? Or 963 AUC? By then, it’ll be our language too.”
Hooves thudded. Artorius looked up; it was a legionary on horseback, and one who actually knew how to ride well—every legion had a small cavalry unit, to carry messages and provide the legate and tribunes with escorts. The trooper saluted—though technically he shouldn’t, since Artorius didn’t hold any formal Roman military rank—and handed over a message on a diptych.
“Well, playtime’s over,” Artorius said, returning the gesture and reading. “The Emperor is arriving within the next week.”
“That’s pushing it!” Jeremey said, and whistled.
They’d all gotten graphic—sore-muscled—lessons in how hard getting from A to B was here. The just-arrived Legio III Italica had done it in about a month . . . but from their training camp in the vicinity of Aquileia, east of where Venice had been in their home century. Rome was a good deal further, and meant crossing the Apennines as well.
“He’s not a dawdler. And we’re to hold ourselves ready to meet with him—a public thing, the victory parade for the Tenth Legion, then we’re invited to dine. Which is a major honor, by the way, and don’t forget it. OK, let’s get as much as we were scheduled to do today done as we can, and at dinner we’ll meet to prepare how we handle this. I hope I don’t have to tell you how crucial it is.”
He heeled his horse into a canter. Paula snickered in good-natured mockery as he rode away.
“Fil, Jem, I’ll give you odds you’re not the only ones who’re going to be locally hooked up soon.”
At their looks she went on: “Have you noticed how Lady Julia tends to gravitate to the library back on the villa when it’s the Prof’s turn for his rationed time with the books? Actually the scrolls, mostly. When it got warm enough, walks together in the peristyle and the garden. Carrying scrolls, sitting on benches reading together, playing with her kid . . . ”
Jeremey laughed. “Don’t tell me they’re making out among the priceless lost works?”
Paula rolled her eyes. “Get your mind out of your crotch, Jem.”
“It’s not nearly as interesting a place as you think it is,” Filipa put in.
Paula snorted and went on: “It’s all discussions of literature and history so far and reading poetry to each other and talking about her daughter and the stories he’s telling the kid, which incidentally are mostly cribbed from Grimm’s with a soupçon of Disney but a lot of them are new here. Little Claudia thinks the sun rises and sets on him now. There’s no way the Prof and Julia could keep any hot stuff secret in that little village setup and I’m plugged into the gossip circuit there. Besides, there’s always someone else with them; her lady’s maid, mostly. Who incidentally is her half-sister, which everyone knows but nobody talks about.”
Filipa asked, interested: “How do you know it’s not just a we’re-friends thing?”
Paula smiled. “Because Julia’s been asking me questions about him, mostly in the baths. About his wife, and children and his family and his career and all that good shit.”
Mark frowned. “That’s a sign of romantic interest?” he asked.
Filipa, Paula and even Jeremey stared at him.
Paula explained: “It’s an infallible sign, oh Mr. Oblivious . . . though I don’t know whether Prof Oblivious realizes she’s interested yet.”
Jeremey snickered. “How did he manage to end up with kids?”
“He married his high-school sweetheart a month after he graduated from West Point and I doubt he ever strayed or even thought much about it in the ten years after that,” Paula said. “I checked around for safety’s sake when he contacted me for the . . . trip.”
“The man’s not human,” Jeremey replied.
“Just sort of old fashioned and . . . steady. Also a respectable country-bred Texan.”
“But we’re not on the villa anymore,” Mark said.
Paula’s smile got wider. “They’re exchanging letters, too. He smiles this slow smile and puts it in his pocket and pats it when he gets one.”
“Oh, yup,” Filipa said. “Got it bad whether he knows he does or not.”
“Yeah, probably,” Jeremey agreed.
“No bout adoubt it. Though it could be awkward. From Sextus Hirrius Trogus’ point of view, we’re all seriously déclassé. Honor of the family stuff, and he’s her legal guardian, their father died a while ago, so she needs his consent,” Paula agreed.
“You mean the Prof’s not rich enough and not high-status enough?” Mark said.
“Well, yeah, wasn’t that what I just said?” Paula said, exasperation in her tone.
Mark Findlemann surprised Filipa by laughing knowingly.
“Oh, that can be taken care of. Probably will be. Highly probably. Highly probably very soon.”
“How?” Filipa said.
“Not how, who.”
Jeremey started laughing too, before he spoke: “By Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, of course.”
Filipa nodded. “If it isn’t off with their heads at the parade.”
“Oh, if this was Domitian, or Nero or Commodus, yeah, maybe,” Mark said confidently. “Not Marcus Aurelius. Haven’t you read his Meditations? We won a battle for him. We protected—”
He waved a hand around him.
“He takes that seriously.”
I hope he’s right, Filipa thought, who had read the Meditations and had found them rather platitudinous. You know . . . suddenly I realize I do have a lot to live for. And we’re all young.
Mark frowned. “Though . . . he hasn’t actually written the Meditations yet. He did that during the Marcomannic Wars.”