CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Danube bridge, south bank,
Entering former Kingdom of the Marcomanni,
Barbaricum of Germania Antehac Libra
May 5th, 167 CE
Aha, me proud beauties! Artorius thought.
As the cannon rumbled onto the planks of the pontoon bridge that spanned the Danube just upstream of Vindobona, Artorius automatically gentled his horse as it shied a little at the thunderous drumbeat sound. Then the iron tires of their wooden wheels crunched off onto the pounded crushed rock of the macadamized road now making its way north toward the Marcomanni heartland, and the noon sun glittered almost painfully on the surface of the Danube.
Odd how war smells different here, he thought. No burnt hydrocarbons or nitro powder or electronics. Lots of horse byproducts, though, lots of leather and dirty wool cloth. The shit and sweat and dirty feet and old blood . . . those stay the same.
“You’re looking good, sir,” Artorius observed to Marcus Aurelius.
The Emperor was, with better color than he’d shown when he arrived most of a year ago, and holding himself easily, without the hint of painful stiffness the American had noticed earlier. He also had speckles of blood on the hem of his tunic—one surprise had been just how much time an Emperor’s religious duties took, sacrifices and whatnot at every significant event and throughout the calendar.
“I am well, Tribune. My stomach is at peace night and day for the first time in many years; for which, my thanks to you and to Galenos. What is the advantage of these over the carroballistae throwing thunder-powder bombs?” Marcus Aurelius asked.
Likes to be indifferent to things like physical discomfort . . . and he really is. There are worse affectations!
“Because the fiscal officials complain to me daily of their greater cost!” he went on with a slight smile.
The little joke showed that he was feeling better. And that he hadn’t asked until now reflected his management style; he trusted Artorius, so when told they were necessary had simply agreed.
“They throw projectiles about six times as far and the shells travel about eight times as fast, sir,” he replied. “Solid shot from them hits much harder—hard enough to knock down thick stone walls, with repeated hits—and at close range, a hundred paces or less, it can be loaded with hundreds of lead bullets traveling about as quickly.”
After checking that nobody was in hearing distance besides the brace of his own bodyguards, he spoke more quietly:
“My great-great-great-great-grandfather used very similar weapons in a terrible civil war fought in America.”
That generation of Vandenbergs fought on both sides, come to think of it. Let the dead past bury its dead . . . And that’s now about as dead as a past can be, since “now” it never existed at all except in my head and in Fil’s and Jem’s and Paula’s and Mark’s. Or possibly but untestably in another timeline, as Mark would say.
He’d made the guns as close a duplicate as he could of the twelve-pounder Napoleon gun-howitzer of the Civil War era, as giving the best combination of mobility and firepower. Basically just a tapering bronze tube with a barrel of 4.62 inches caliber and a little under six feet long, weighing in at a bit over half a ton.
A good crew, and they all were now after months of hard practice drill, could get off two or three rounds a minute. Every elderly dung heap in three provinces had been torn down for the saltpeter, and orders and plans for leaching grounds had gone out Empire-wide. Getting powder production going had been a struggle, but as with most of the innovations once you reached a certain point, things started to pyramid.
And having the Emperor on your side certainly helps. Thank God and Professor Fuchs for those measuring gauges, too, he added to himself. We’d never have gotten the insides of the bores acceptable without them to measure the cutting bars, even if we have to keep rechecking and adjusting every dozen turns. And we’ve tested these guns enough that I don’t think any of them are going to blow up unexpectedly. Granted, about half of them did blow up during the testing, at least to start with . . .
The testing had been done by loading a double charge of powder down the barrel, lighting a slow match set in the touchhole and then sprinting and diving into a slit trench. Followed by examining them very carefully for stress cracks or distortions.
Oddly enough, it was Mark who had saved them a lot of time and possibly lives when he remembered that it was better to cast the guns muzzle up and then saw off the two feet or so of spongy bronze at the top weakened by air bubbles rising through the molten metal.
That was another gift of Martin Padway. Though for some reason he hadn’t known the actual formula for gunpowder, odd in an archaeologist, even a fictional one.
Or maybe not, that book was written a century ago . . . well, nearly, 1938. Damn, but the English language is not intended for time travel, and Latin’s even worse.
Training the crews hadn’t been too hard, except for the ones who couldn’t take the noise. He’d used carroballistae men as cadre, and they were all proud as peacocks now, and would have tattooed thunderbolts on their foreheads if he’d let them. Three batteries of six guns each, nine men to a gun and a few more for the ammunition wagons, and a flexible-minded young centurion for each battery; one slightly more experienced from Valentia Edetanorum—what he thought of as the Spanish city of Valencia—in overall command.
Now if only the Marcomanni are obliging enough to charge into the muzzles . . . probably not that stupid, though . . . but sometimes you can force an enemy to do something they know is stupid because all the alternatives you present are worse.
The legate who’d sent the two new Italica legions to the Danube and brought the Legio Claudia from its lower-Danube home guided his horse closer, his entourage falling back behind him; he was from Asia Minor himself and named Marcus Claudius Fronto, a bearded olive-skinned hawk-faced man of forty, tanned dark by ferocious eastern suns.
The Legio IV Italica he’d left at Durostorum wasn’t really ready for this campaign, and the Emperor had sent it to the lower Danube to complete its training and get some practical experience, in exchange for the veteran unit whose home was there.
Fronto had also been a legion commander on the lower Danube for a while, then on the Rhine, and effectively in overall command of the Parthian war for several years, given that the co-emperor Varus was something of a nonentity, though fortunately an unambitious one.
Romans wore their decorations in the field; Artorius had a small replica of the corona graminea on his chest. It was all alone, but it was also the equivalent of the Medal of Honor squared.
The ones across Fronto’s muscled cast-bronze legate’s breastplate were impressive in their own right. The corona muralis had pride of place, which meant he’d been the first man to scale an enemy-held city wall. Seeing that award was rare, because men who survived doing that were even rarer. And the corona vallaris, the corona aurea and four hastae pura, which were miniature gold spears. His formal rank was Legatus Augusti pro praetore, which meant he was qualified to govern a province or lead a force of more than one legion.
Oddly enough, I’ve campaigned in territory quite close to what’s now western Parthia. Not in this century, though! I wonder if it looks much different . . . or smells better. Heat’s probably just as bad, and the sandstorms would be all too familiar.
“I have seen these new tormentii at practice, sir,” Fronto said to the Emperor, with an affable nod to Artorius. He was second-in-command of the field force, which meant effectively its general under the Emperor’s . . .
General supervision, Artorius thought.
The word tormentii meant literally something like torturer in Latin and was the term for “throwing engines” in general, but they’d picked it up as a specific term for cannon.
“They’ll be useful anywhere there’s a fight bigger than a large skirmish,” the general said. “But they’d have been even more useful against the Parthians, sir. We must have plenty of them the next time we have to fight them—which we will, of course.”
Marcus Aurelius made an enquiring sound, and the man went on:
“They rely on their horse archers in the big open spaces there; that’s what destroyed Crassus’ army, back in the divine Julius’ time.”
The Emperor nodded; he’d read about that . . . read nearly everything historical the Romans had, in conscientious self-training. Roman soldiers still winced at the memory.
“We’ve learned countertactics since then of course, but they’re still a hard problem, very hard to bring to battle if they don’t feel like it. You have to head for something immovable they value highly; but they harass and do hit-and-run on a large scale all the time. With their armored cataphracts hovering about with their barge poles ready to run up your arse, so you have to be cautious and stay in close formations. With enough of these new tormentii, though, they wouldn’t dare come to within bow range in any numbers. Not in daylight!”
“And cavalry are very difficult to coordinate in darkness,” Artorius observed, and Fronto beamed at him. “In any substantial numbers, that is.”
“Just so, Tribune! They couldn’t peck at us and run and peck again, they’d have to either get out of the way or try to charge home and come to close quarters. And then at close range, just about long bowshot . . . odd to say close about that . . . then the new carroballistae with thunderballs would slaughter most of them before what was left impaled themselves on our iron.”
“Where I was born we had a saying: Caught between the demons and the deep blue sea, Legate.”
Fronto laughed; he seemed a cheerful sort, and it was always better for morale to be attacking.
“These tormentii would be even more useful against the Iazyges and Roxolani on the steppes north of the Danube east of here for the same reason,” he added. “And they’re nomads with no cities to defend, so they’re even harder to bring to battle than Parthians. You can set grass fires to destroy their pasture for a while, but that’s awkward.”
The Iazyges and Roxolani were the Sarmatian tribes who’d moved down from the Pontic area and occupied what Artorius knew as eastern Hungary and eastern Romania. They flanked the Transdanubian Roman province of Dacia on either side, which was a monumental pain and which the Romans appreciated better now that they had accurate maps of the region . . . and were reminded of that strategic awkwardness every time they looked at the new maps. Which augured ill for those troublesome nomads, once the Marcomanni and Quadi were dealt with.
Wait a minute, that reminds me, I do remember Fronto’s name. The Iazyges killed him about . . . three or four years from now, while he was commanding in Dacia. Those tribes pitched in on the Marcomanni side, in the original history.
Artorius shivered a little inwardly. That was about the sum total of what the books said about Fronto, who was known only from two inscriptions and a few passing mentions . . . and here was the living, breathing man, with a black curly beard and hair thinning at the front, sitting a little uneasily in the new-style saddle and visibly reminding himself to press down on the stirrups now and then.
As far as looks went, he reminded Artorius of a Turk who’d run a shawarma stand near a base he’d been stationed at in Germany right after he was commissioned. The part of wasn’t-going-to-be-Turkey his family came from was Greek speaking now, but apparently physical appearances hadn’t changed as much as language and religion.
He’s already doing things he wouldn’t have done . . . the first time through. Maybe he’ll live a lot longer.
Or maybe he’d slip getting out of bed tomorrow and break his neck, or take an arrow in the eye from a German guerilla north of the river. There was no way to tell, now. Just because he knew a future didn’t mean he knew the future, the one that was coming at him one inescapable second at a time. That future was like all the others; it didn’t exist until you got there.
The only certain thing is that we’re all going to die someday, somehow.
“Unfortunately, night attacks are more practical here,” Artorius observed, putting aside the oddly disturbing feeling of talking to a man he knew would . . . would have . . . died soon.
Time travel does odd things to your mind, too. Thank God it only happened to me once! If it was routine I’d go bughouse.
“Yes, I heard the reports of the night attack on Carnuntum,” Fronto said.
An American would have said read the reports.
“Good work there, Tribune.”
“Thank you, Legate,” Artorius said. “I was at the right place at the right time.”
“And did the right thing, in the right place at the right time,” the Emperor remarked.
A cohort of infantry from the new Legio II Italica came next, tramping in unison. They were in marching order—each man’s name, legion, cohort, century and his commanding centurion was written neatly on the leather cover that protected the shields slung over their backs, in formal capitalis monumentalis. Their helmets hung on their chests with the cheek pieces splayed open or folded in, and their pila and furcae were over their shoulders; each carried an oak stake pointed at both ends, a pilum muralis, for topping the wall of a marching camp as well.
A furca was a long pole with a crossbar fastened a foot from the top by notches and rawhide thongs. It was named after an instrument of judicial torture, though.
Soldier humor, you betcha.
You tied your dolabra or spade or turf cutter to the upper side of the furca, put the shaft of your pilum next to it on your shoulder, and from the crossbar of the carrying pole hung the rest of your gear. Everything from a mess kit and rolled cloak, spare socks and a folded blanket to a loaf of bread and hunk of cheese and little jar of olives and oil, in a leather satchel and in bags and nets hanging down your back. He supposed it was more awkward than a rucksack, but you could shed it instantly at need, or lean on the pole with the weight off during a rest stop.
There was something, something besides their being at full strength, all four hundred and eighty of them . . .
Ah, they’re younger on average, Artorius thought. Newly raised unit, two years ago. Only the officers and noncoms are long-service veterans, and it shows.
He’d been surprised at how mature most legionaries were; nearly thirty on average, about the same as the US Army in his own day, but it wasn’t surprising when you remembered that they all enlisted for twenty-five years rather than the average of eight to twelve in his time. The longer hitch balanced out the higher everyday mortality.
These looked as if they were mostly in their early twenties, with far less in the way of scars and weathering, though they were also visibly mostly outdoor workers from childhood.
And their equipment was a bit more varied than usual, probably because it had been pulled out of long-term storage to meet the sudden demand. Older and more complicated styles of the hoop-and-band lorica segmentata were nearly as numerous as the newer model. Here and there a man wore a sleeveless thigh-length mail shirt with doubling flaps over the shoulders, outfits which had probably been gathering dust in an armory for generations with periodic maintenance. It was still perfectly functional, though a bit heavier than the plate lorica and more typical of auxiliaries, though occasionally they wore the lorica segmentata too.
For the rest, the soldiers of the Second Italica looked just as you’d expect from a bunch of Italian farm boys and laborers’ sons and blacksmiths’ apprentices. Though taller than average because the Roman army’s minimum was about five foot five, and no gimps or squints or hernias or mouths empty of teeth because of the medical exam.
Add in plenty of good plain food every day for going on two years of very hard training and long, long marches in full kit, and they were visibly tough and bullock strong; arms and legs, shoulders and necks corded with hard muscle. They marched in step with a springy endurance, and sang out something rhythmic in a harsh male chorus that seemed to go:
“Exurge Mars!
Mars Ultor!
Roma et Imperator!
Sumus filli lupae Capitolinae—”
His mind translated it. More accurately than he would have two years ago, before he’d come to speak this century’s Latin as a living tongue, even though the Italian accent was fairly distinct from the slight Pannonian one he’d picked up. About as different as General Californian was from what they drawled in a small rural town in Alabama:
“Awake the War God!
Vengeance God!
For Rome and the Emperor!
Sons of the Capitoline she-wolf,
We suckled on blood from her bitch teats:
Out of our way or we’ll drink yours too!
We follow our Eagle wherever it leads
To barbarian forests or burning sands—”
“They’re shaping well, sir,” Fronto said to the Emperor. “Now they just need to be blooded a little and they’ll be . . . almost . . . the equals of veterans like the Claudia.”
Artorius smiled. “I think the Marcomanni will see to that,” he said. “And hopefully supply most of the blood.”
Fronto chuckled, though Marcus Aurelius stayed grave; he was in a blackened bronze muscled cuirass with golden decorations and purple sash and cloak, and wore it with the ease of long practice, but you could see he wasn’t really a soldier himself.
None the worse for that, Artorius thought. He’s the big-picture man. He’s got us for the hands-on side.
“Not only the Marcomanni,” the Emperor said gravely. “We have had good intelligence”—his eyes flicked to Artorius for an instant, holding both reproof for taking the risk and acknowledgment of the results—“that there is indeed a great barbarian conspiracy against Rome. War bands and chiefs or the sons of chiefs from all over the Barbaricum have flocked to join the Marcomanni and Quadi against us.”
“Which is both good and bad, sir,” Artorius said.
Fronto raised his brows and spoke:
“The bad being their numbers, and that those numbers won’t be farmers with a spear they keep over the doorway of their huts, they’ll mostly be nobles and their retainers. Better equipped and real fighters. There is a good side to that, Tribune?”
“Yes, Legate,” the American said. “Feeding them will run the local tribes’ supplies out earlier. It’s the hungry time of their year, just before harvest, and we want them desperate enough to fight us head on as soon as possible.”
“True,” Fronto said. “You have to remember that the other side has supply problems too!”
“And really coordinating a huge mob like that will be impossible, not to mention that half of them have blood feuds against their neighbors . . . and unlike the local Germanii, they’ll not have any real experience with our new weapons. They will likely discount them out of blind bravado—and be all the more inclined to panic when they find out the rumors are true.”
The Emperor nodded gravely. “We have five legions, and as many auxiliaries. Even with line of communication and fortress garrisons, we should have thirty-five-thousand troops or more in one mass if we can bring the barbarians to a decisive battle. And when we beat them, survivors will carry a tale of defeat from here to the northern sea.”
“From your mouth to the ears of the Gods, sir,” Artorius said, which made Fronto chuckle again.
I’m getting a rep as a real wit, too.
They all turned their horses and trotted across the bridge themselves, ironshod hooves loud on the thick planks covering the barges. Fronto’s tribunes and clerks and their Imperial equivalent followed behind, while a turma of the Emperor’s horse guards went before, behind and to either side.
They passed the cannon and the Italica cohort, and then a train of big wagons pulled by long hitches of paired oxen pulling on a common chain, each twenty-eight beasts strong—the Americans had had them done up by local wainwrights, but based on Artorius’ memories of what he’d read about the freight wagons used in South Africa during the Boer War period, or in Australia around the same time.
“Large!” Fronto said, interested.
If you’d survived multiple campaigns, not to mention won them, you took logistics seriously. Roman wagons were fairly good—iron tires, iron bushings for the axles and wheel hubs, and they did have pivoted front wheels for some of the bigger ones—but not quite on this scale. The broad rear wheels of these were neck high on the men walking beside them, and the top of the loads more than twice that height.
Interesting, Artorius thought. The way the best designs for us are often from just before mechanization finally won. The same way sailing ships peaked a few years before steamers completely supplanted them. Competition from something new forcing people to wring everything possible out of an old design that loafed along being “good enough” until then. So we can skip right to best possible, sometimes.
“Six-ton loads,” Artorius said, and the general’s eyebrows went up; that was well over twice what the largest Roman vehicles hauled.
“Grain and beans, hardtack and cheese, salted meat and dried fruit,” Fronto said approvingly. “And spare sandals, extra pila and arrows and bandages . . . and now, thunderpowder and spare shoes for the horses, as well!”
He waved toward the northern horizon. “I doubt we’re going to be living much off the land here.”
Artorius hadn’t been looking in that direction. He did now. Pillars of smoke marked the horizon there, from the edge of sight on the west to where the sun had risen bloody tinged that morning. Burning homesteads and villages; burning grainfields, where they were dry enough. Forest fires as well, spread by the sparks. Where the grain wouldn’t burn, teams of Roman cavalry were dragging heavy brush or logs across it to spoil the harvest. And they were having a grand old time stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Flocks and herds had come back over the Danube, or been eaten by the Roman advance parties. Trains of brutalized captives in chains and under guard had stumbled by too. What couldn’t be securely used by Rome was destroyed. Or was carried north by hordes of terrified refugees, who the Marcomanni would have to feed somehow, now in the season before late summer’s harvest. And in lands where, unlike the Empire, grain hardly ever moved more than two days travel from where it was cut.
In addition to all the allies the Great Barbarian Conspiracy had brought them, who’d have arrived hungry and expecting a splendid feast from their grateful hosts. Great chiefs and kings in the Barbaricum moved around with their retainers to eat the surplus from each district, rather than having it shipped to them. The tens of thousands of newcome allies would be inclined to simply steal supplies not freely given.
Vastatio indeed, he thought, and then:
Exactly as I predicted, they’re falling back and doing all the ambushes and tricks they can. And the Praetorian Prefect from Not-Yet-Tunisia was right too.
How did you fight a successful guerilla campaign against someone ready, willing and able to simply kill everyone and leave an empty, foodless, shelterless wasteland?
The answer was simple: you couldn’t.
Guerillas have to depend on the people, ultimately. And these people are farmers, not nomads: you can’t drive off a crop that’s already planted in the dirt and grain is heavy. So eventually they’ll have to stand and fight to control the ground that feeds them, or be driven out and mostly simply starve to death. They’re just trying to delay the battle as long as they can stand it, to stretch our supply lines and pull us deep into their territory.
“We’ll see,” he said, half to himself.
Fronto chuckled again. “That’s why we have wars, Tribune. To see.”
“Yes,” Marcus Aurelius said—with a sigh, rather than a smile, but with flat sincerity.