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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Municipium Aelium Carnuntum,

Capital of Pannonia Superior

November 5th, 166 CE

That morning, Artorius had looked up at the stern of the river galley with satisfaction.

The little ship was pulled up right now, which was done when it was under repair or when the Danube froze, which it did some years in January or February. Or just when the ship wasn’t needed, to keep the hull from getting heavy and waterlogged.

Not much like the reconstructions, he thought. Well, we were working from limited evidence. Wood rots, most of the time. The exceptions we dug up don’t have to be typical and it turns out they weren’t.

The Fleet Prefect—a modest equestrian rank, this post just wasn’t considered important enough for someone of senatorial lineage—in charge of the Pannonian stretch of the Danube flotilla was near him, with his cloak wrapped around his body. It was a cool overcast morning, promising drizzling rain later moving in from the northwest up toward Vindobona, and the man . . . 

Nonus Helvidius Drusus, he reminded himself. From Apulia, originally.

 . . . was nodding slowly. He was about Artorius’ age, thin and dark and missing the little finger and part of the next on his left hand.

“This turns the ship better than steering oars, esteemed Tribune?” he asked.

“Yes, honored Prefect, it does. Faster, and with less effort. And it’s more sheltered from enemy action.”

“I see that. Much harder to get at when it’s in the water.”

The prefect’s main subordinates were present too: a pair of navarchii, squadron commanders, and each ship had a triarius as captain. The terms were Greek originally, because that was where the Roman land animal had first picked up its nautical skills.

Romans are like jackdaws that way, Artorius thought. The gladius is Spanish, chain mail is Celtic . . . If they see it works, they’ll pick it up and run with it. For which, thank all the deities operational in this era. The Romans borrow, steal and appropriate Gods wholesale, too.

A legionary centurion was there too, a lateral transfer who commanded the marines, who were technically auxiliaries. Everyone on a Roman naval ship was a free man and part of the military and would fight at need—Ben-Hur had gotten that drastically wrong.

Pity. Both movies were great otherwise, though the 2016 one was better . . . Row well and live! Mind, we historians are biased about historical flicks.

But the marines were specialists in boarding and landing actions. One thing that caught his eye was that the sea soldiers all had their tunics dyed a dull blue-green that wouldn’t show much against the water, and the ship and its sail were the same color.

The legions didn’t have a standard color for their clothing, unless it was the drab gray-brown of undyed wool, or bleach-white for special occasions like getting a decoration. Scarlet was for officers. The belt and sword and hobnailed boots were what marked you as a soldier.

The slipway the ship rested in was one of twenty along a stretch of the south bank of the Danube; the river ran nearly west to east here, after a northwest-southeast stretch a bit upstream, where Vindobona lay. Each was a shallow U-shape of stone, with wooden rollers set into it and flanked on both sides by chest-high masonry walls, which in turn supported heavy timbers that upheld the tile-clad roof above. One thing this part of the world was not short of was really, really big trees. A windlass stood at the inland end, ready to haul the ship up; gravity, poles and pig grease took care of getting it back in the water.

That made it convenient as a place for major repairs and reconstructions too. He’d kept those to a minimum, because he had a nasty feeling that time was a factor. The stern of the vessel curled up in an extension of the keel, which made a convenient place to put the rudder, needing only reinforcement and bracing inside.

“This round pole has inset iron rods, and it’s bound by iron hoops shrunk on. It runs up through the keel timber to the deck, where a staff through it is used to turn the rudder. Three and a half parts in ten of the rudder are forward of the turning post.”

That made it a balanced rudder, a Victorian innovation; the force of the water moving past it aided in swinging it.

“It’s thickest on the forward edge, with a curved surface at the front tapering to the rear.”

The rudder itself was made of adzed oak planks pegged together. Somewhat to his surprise, the river galleys themselves turned out to be built with oak framing and edge-to-edge softwood planks nailed on; caravel construction, technically speaking. There was an outrigger for the rowers, fifteen to a side, and the deck was fully planked under their backsides.

A scaled-down Liburnian, basically, he thought.

“It’s as deep as the keel, but no more so,” he added. “And if you release this pin, you can pull the whole thing up.”

That was important because these were shallow-water craft, and needed to be able to beach themselves; they didn’t draw over three feet even fully laden, so the marines could jump overboard into water no more than thigh deep.

“Now, let’s go to the deck.”

They climbed up what was essentially a big stepladder; the little ship . . . or large boat . . . didn’t have a high freeboard either. The officers gathered around as he demonstrated how the tiller turned the rudder, with a T-handle at the front for two men. They all took turns pushing it themselves and looking over the side at the stern to watch it pivoting below.

“Ah, it can take a steeper angle to the water than a steering oar,” one of them said. “Clever!”

“And it’s bigger,” another said. “So it displaces more water too, and all from exactly at the rear. More than two steering oars, if you have them. More . . . more push.”

Bless you, my children, Artorius thought to himself, and went on aloud:

“The next change is to the sail.”

That was a secondary device for these oar-powered craft, but they did use it when they could to keep the rowers fresh. Sail and mast could be taken down and lashed at head height to a fore-and-aft rack. This one was up, and he’d substituted a simple gaff sail for the square one . . . though a gaff sail actually was four cornered. At his nod the crew hoisted the spar up, and then demonstrated lowering it and reefing the sail to the lower spar.

“Why is this better?” one of the captains said. “Though I can see it does make it easier to reef,” he added. “Faster to take the whole thing down when you need to, too, with that hinge-and-collar setup.”

“You can point much higher into the wind with this rig,” Artorius said. “You can do that a little now, by warping the spar of the square sail around. This does that much better and more easily.”

He pointed out the pulley arrangements.

“All you have to do is put the helm over and the sail will swing of itself until the rope on the end of the lower spar stops it; you set the angle with the rope. That way you can’t be caught with the wind plastering the sail against the mast when you try to tack.”

The technical sailing term was taken aback, which didn’t quite have a Latin equivalent.

As far as I know, that is.

“And it’s easier to raise and reef the sail. A square sail is better if the wind is from there”—he pointed back, pivoting from left to right in a cone sternward, showing the wind coming from abaft either beam or right behind them—“to there. This fore-and-aft rig is better at all other times, and it always takes fewer hands to work. In a tight spot, the wind’s never where you want it.”

That had all the sailors nodding.

He’d enjoyed handling a little sailboat himself while living on the East Coast, taking the family out for a day on the water now and then. Despite he and Mary both having been born high and dry, as they put it in the Panhandle. That had been one of the few compensations—besides the libraries, bookstores, concerts, and restaurants—for living in Boston. Put all of it together and it almost made up for the sense of being insanely overcrowded twenty-four seven.

Most of what he was saying now was simplified versions of things he’d gotten in history courses at West Point, though.

“Now I’ve shown you how this ship can maneuver better, let’s see how she fights.”

He signaled to the capstan at the head of the slipway, and the crew hit the chocks and took up the slack on the cable at the rear. The ship slid down with a rumble and squeal, and bobbed into the water after throwing up a moderate wave to either side of the prow. The spectators all put an experienced hand to something secure while they were in motion, then walked further forward as the ship settled and the thirty rowers sitting on their benches ran out the oars.

In the bows, above and a bit back from the mostly symbolic ram and unhindered by the now cut-down bow, crouched a ballista. These river patrol boats all carried one, but they were a light type of bolt caster. This was based on his carroballistae for the land forces.

“Now, you’ve all seen the new field ballistae for the Legions, that are cocked by the same teams that draw them into the field. I’m afraid we can’t do that here—six horses would crowd the deck, though you might not get some people to realize it.”

That got a few chuckles; it helped that he wasn’t an obvious landlubber. The Roman navy was very much an afterthought to the army and they resented it, in a muted nothing-to-be-done way.

“Instead what we’ve got here is a toothed-bar lever system.”

That was as close as he could get to saying rack-and-pinion jack in Latin.

The catapult was mounted on a turntable. Two slanting bronze shields flanked the throwing trough, with the upright bronze tubes that held the ox sinews that worked the throwing arms piercing them. At the rear of the turntable, and linked to the catapult with a cable nearly as thick as a man’s wrist, was what looked to him like an old-style lever-operated car jack.

But set on its side and doubled so that it worked from both sides. There were two six-foot poles working on pivots at their inner ends, and rower’s benches with foot braces.

Artorius nodded, and two crewmen stepped up, sat and grasped the handles.

“Each time the men on the levers pull like the oar stroke, the swinging iron tooth on the end of the shaft engages one of these slanted notches. When they pull the oar, they pull the bar back a set distance every time. Then this spring-loaded pin here engages to hold the bar against the pull of the cable, which attaches to this hard wooden block, which has the cords on the side to the throwing arms. Then they stroke again, the pin slides out because that side is sloping, they bring the bar back another notch, the pin pushes up because of this spring, and engages to hold it, and so on until the weapon is cocked. Then the cable is disconnected from the block and the catapult is ready to fire.”

“Ah, just levers!” one of the nautarchs said, a man with a reddish beard and a Greek accent in his Latin. “Like oars, but pushing against the tension in the ox sinews, rather than against the water.”

It was as simple a machine as you could imagine; a lever on a pivot with another on the business end, a catch mechanism, and sloping notches. All the parts were big, too, no little gears that had to mesh perfectly.

Getting it so something wouldn’t snap under the strain, and everything engaged smoothly . . . Dr. Fuchs’s measuring gauges in combination with hand files had worked, more or less, with lots of time and a couple of nasty accidents that had left one man dead and several crippled. He’d assuaged his conscience by getting pensions for them, and the widow and orphans. Going to the funeral and visiting the wounded had been a bit lacerating, but everyone involved seemed to appreciate it.

And each set they produced was unique, only roughly similar, which put someone raised with interchangeable parts on edge.

No snapping a spare in if something breaks, the whole thing has to go back to the shops. And it took us weeks to figure out how to make the parts not break all the time. Improvements needed! For the next iteration . . . 

“The mechanism multiplies the force, at the expense of speed. Go,” he added to the crewmen.

Heave-grunt-clack, as the rowers—they had been rowers, until recently—threw themselves backward, feet braced against the timber, thick muscles rippling in their arms and shoulders. It was about the same effort as their usual jobs at full stroke, and they worked with the smooth united ease of long practice.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

Heave-grunt-clack.

God, I wish I could just make cannon, he thought. Working on that but it’s damned hard. We needed something right now.

The cable from the jack had a hook on its end, and that ran through an eyelet sunk into the back of a hardwood block at the rear of the throwing trough, which also had the cords from the throwing arms attached. There was a squeal from the twisted ox sinews in their bronze tubes, and the arms moved backward. It went on until they were very nearly parallel to the throwing trough, and there was a solid click as the trigger mechanism engaged.

“Load solid shot,” Artorius said; that was granite chipped into a fairly smooth ball.

The crew chief spun the—also laboriously hand-cut—elevating screw, peered through the simple ring-and-post sights . . . 

“Stand back,” Artorius said, as the crew flipped the hook from the big jack out of the block’s eye, someone pressed on the retaining pin and another shoved the grooved iron rattling forward again to be ready for cocking the catapult for the next shot.

He was gratified when everyone did stand back—respect for his devices was now universal. You could lift a car weighing several tons with a simple one-handed jack, and this was the same thing but considerably more powerful. It wasn’t as fast as six horses and pulleys and a long rope, but it worked and it was a lot more compact.

“Shoot,” he added, and the crew chief pulled a lanyard.

Tunnggg-WHACK.

And less than two seconds later, a sharp multiple crackling.

“Di Immortales!”

The Praefectus classis Pannonicae swore softly as the twenty-five-pound stone ball blurred away and struck a substantial rowboat anchored halfway across the Danube, about a hundred and fifty yards to the north and amid a collection of derelict barges and boats bought cheap and placed there for this demonstration. Broken planks leapt skyward along with a gout of water, and wreckage drifted away.

“Of course, this engine can also throw the thunderballs, which you have seen.”

They had, and the news that they too could wield the thunder perked them all up. He judged they’d been glumly resigned to the Army getting a monopoly on that.

“Either the type stuffed with lead bullets set around the thunderpowder”—the phrase he used, plumbum offa, literally meant chunks of lead, but it was also the one generally used for shaped lead shot from slings—“or one with only the thunderpowder. That one is more deadly close-to, and better at shattering structures such as a ship, but less so at a distance from the crepitus.”

Which meant roughly crash, rattle, clack, and had been taken up to mean explosion.

“Or it can shoot this.”

While he spoke the big jack had done its work again; Artorius checked covertly that none of the teeth on either side showed any signs of strain or yielding, and that the retaining pin on its brass lever spring was still moving correctly. Anything this large made of iron had to be hammer-welded from smaller pieces and it was hard to tell when the heavy stress was suddenly going to find a weak spot in the join.

He nodded to the crew, who lifted a round ball of rough-fired pottery into the trough, then lit its fuse with one of the new flint-and-steel lighters with reservoir and wick. Which items were wildly popular because they were so much easier to use than an ordinary flint-and-steel, and were fetching so much on the black market that heavy punishments had been necessary to check them “vanishing.”

Which lighter I have succeeded in christening the Ronson. Or at least the Ronsonius, pronounced Ronsonio’. Hello, granddad!

Josephus was financing an expansion of the workshop in Vindobona that made them, and sending samples to other members of his family, who’d pay him a royalty for those they sold over half the Empire, all in partnership with the Americans. The Romans didn’t have a patent system . . . 

Not yet.

 . . . but that would place his relatives in a position to make major moolah for a while.

Romans understood the concept of mass production and division of labor, along the lines of Adam Smith’s famous description of a pin works, more or less—they did it for some things like terra sigillata pottery. Which were made in standard forms, fired in giant kilns thirty or forty thousand at a time and shipped out to mass markets often hundreds of miles away. Impoverished huts in the wilds of northern Britannia had held fragments of them for archaeologists to discover in the twentieth century.

That just wasn’t practical for most trades, where things were done by individual bespoke orders.

It would be practical for the Ronsonius . . . and eventually, for a lot of other things.

Two more men pushed at poles set in the turntable at the crew chief’s hand signals for the traverse. The fuse was made up of soaked cloth wrapped around the pottery shape. It flared up with a chemical stink, and:

“Shoot!”

This time the projectile struck a much-repaired old barge that had spent its working life carrying things like bricks, logs, building stones, cattle, grain and pigs or their carcasses up and down or across the Danube.

The Romans had all seen incendiaries used . . . but not, he thought, like this one.

WHOOOF!

There had been endless disputes among historians and archaeologists about the secrets of Greek fire, the weapon the Byzantines had used to incinerate a number of Arab fleets heading for Constantinople . . . which was still simply the medium-sized Greek city of Byzantium here, and hopefully always would be. He’d had Mark Findlemann and Paula comb through the references Fuchs had on the external drives, and combined it with some hints he remembered from his Academy days—

Naptha and quicklime and pine resins, oh my! And speaking of Paula and Mark, does he realize she’s making a play for him? Not yet, I think. There’s a reason the others call him Mr. Oblivious. That would be a good match, all things considered. I don’t think he’d be happy with a local, and that goes double for her.

The ceramic shell hit the edge of the barge, and the liquid within sprayed out in a fan from the point of impact. It caught immediately, and flared up with a savage actinic light. Red answered, as the timbers caught, and smoke billowed upward. Within seconds the whole central section of the wooden barge was in flames as spatters flew about the interior.

“Notice that it burns floating on the water,” Artorius pointed out helpfully. “It can’t be put out by splashing with water, only by being completely submerged or covered in sand or earth . . . much sand or earth. And it clings like glue. If it strikes a man, it burns inextinguishably down to the bone.”

There was a long moment of shocked silence.

“I call it ignis Romanus.”

Which meant Roman Fire.

Euge!” the naval prefect said after a moment, and then they were all cheering and waving their fists in the air.

One of the nautarchs, the one with the red beard, asked: “What is the range on this catapult of yours, most excellent Tribune Artorius?”

“Two hundred to two hundred and fifty paces, depending on the wind and what you’re shooting,” he answered.

As one, every head swiveled north. That was Roman double paces, a yard and three-quarters by American reckoning; it was still considerably more than the width of the Danube here, or nearly everywhere from here east to the gorge of the Iron Gates. Which was about four hundred miles distance as the crow flew, more by water or road.

Euge!” the prefect said again.

“We must reequip all our ships with this!” one of the squadron commanders said.

“Mine first!” the other replied, in tones much like a three-year-old seeing a chance of a sibling getting a candy before he did.

Artorius lifted a hand. “Next, we will demonstrate what this ship can do now sailing and fighting.”

He reached into a sturdy wickerwork basket lashed to the rail, lifting a waterproof lid of hard waxed leather, and produced two balls. Each just the size to be gripped in an average man’s fist, one of bronze and the other of pottery, and each with a crimped fuse dangling from the top.

“Out there, we can also demonstrate what can be done with these malogranatum. One with notched iron wire inside, one with only the thunderpowder.”

Someone chuckled. “They do look a little like pomegranates!” he said.

Artorius nodded; that was the original word from which grenade derived.

“And thrown into a ship before you board, or when they lay alongside and try to board you, they are very malo indeed,” he said.

That got a general guffaw; malo meant bad or evil.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can make puns in Latin about blowing people up or burning them alive with napalm, he thought wryly. Hurrah for me, Linguist of Death.

One of the captains exclaimed: “We’ve got to send word of all this to Misenium!”

Which was the HQ of the Roman navy as a whole, and of the Mediterranean fleets, located not far from what he thought of as Naples and which was right now still a mostly Greek city called Neapolis.

“Oh, no we don’t,” another snorted. “Those idle Egyptian vigiles—

He’d called them police (or night watchmen, or firemen, which were all the same word) with malice aforethought. In this era the main Roman fleets in the Middle Sea had nothing much to do but antipirate patrols, and piracy was rare . . . as long as the patrols were vigilant. And a lot of them were recruited in Egypt. It was the fleets of the Rhine and Danube and English Channel—aka the Oceanus Britannicus—that did most of the actual fighting on the water these days, against barbarian pirates and raiders. Some of them came from as far away as Norway and Sweden, though the Romans called them all “Saxons.”

By which they meant basically German bandit in a boat.

“—wouldn’t believe it if we just wrote them. Deodamnatus, would you believe it if someone wrote you a letter? We’ve got to send for some of them so they can come and see it with their own eyes!”

“We can convert one ship per day, now that the Dacicus is done,” Artorius began, slapping a hand against the flagship’s mast. “We’re already working on the Victoria, and the Fides will be next—”

* * *

“You’re probably all wondering why I’ve called you here today,” Artorius said, later that evening.

Josephus looked puzzled as the Americans snickered. Sarukê sighed, bent and whispered something in Filipa’s ear that made her giggle, and then looked a question at Artorius. He nodded and she sauntered out; probably to do something involving horses or weapons or get in a little hunting, which she adored and to hell with cold and wet.

Or at this time of day, to recite Sarmatian epic poetry to herself, something else she liked. She knew thousands of lines of it and there wasn’t anyone else in town who could understand a word. For that matter, not a word of that ancient North Iranian tradition had survived the next few centuries, as far as he knew; not the poetry, not the legends, not the songs or jokes . . . nothing. Probably there were bits of it that went back to a time before the Rig Veda, when Sarukê’s ancestors were inventing the war chariot east of the Urals in what a different age would have called Chelyabinsk Oblast.

All that would be lost when the Huns came west, the end of a tradition already more than two thousand years old.

Which is sad, in a way, he thought. Maybe in the history we’re trying to make, someone will write it all down. Maybe Filipa will! And maybe the Huns will stay where they started and if there’s an Attila he’ll spend his life tending sheep.

“Sorry, a jest from our land,” he said to Josephus. “Seriously, I’ve got a problem . . . and I’ve got no time for it, which is why you four had to ride all day in the rain, and our friend Josephus has kindly agreed to take some time off from his own business.”

“That is not a problem, my friend,” Josephus said. “Keeping the barbarians out of the Empire . . . and particularly my home province here . . . is my business too, after all. My wife and children live here, and some of my other kin. And I’ve got a lot more property to protect than I did last year, thanks to you five!”

Dang, but we were lucky to meet him! Artorius thought, something he did quite often. None of that what have you done for me just lately with Josephus.

He went on aloud:

“The Emperor is arriving here in three days, to consult with the provincial governor—and me—about the plans for next year; he’s staying over the winter here, which is a big deal.”

“Plans?” Filipa asked.

“Plans for the campaigning season next spring. I’ve been getting ready for that, not least by refitting the Danube fleet . . . that should be well underway by the time he gets here . . . and this.”

He waved a hand around. The room was a fairly big one, in the second story of the praetorium of the fleet, the headquarters building that was about fifty years old. It had a fireplace; every permanent building of its type in Pannonia probably now had at least one, as the military units competed with each other to have the very latest thing.

That was easier for the military; in the Roman Empire, if you had a big building project, you went first to the soldiers. Both for the planning and the execution by skilled workmen, anything from a road or aqueduct to a giant domed temple.

It flickered pleasantly on a dark rainy night, and the scent of burning pine overrode most of the less pleasant odors of a river port and made it comfortable . . . at least by second-century standards, which meant you didn’t have to blow on your fingers or hold a fire-warmed brick wrapped in cloth. The walls were simply plastered, and he’d had them crisscrossed with soft wooden battens that could support pinned-on maps, carefully done up from the ones in the library Fuchs had sent along. Naptha lamps hanging from the ceiling with tulip-shaped blown-glass chimneys like an old-style kerosene lamp and burnished metal reflectors cast more light than anything the locals had used.

“Good work on the maps, by the way, Mark,” he said.

The ex-graduate student grinned sheepishly. “I just sort of found the guys who could do it, mostly they’re artists,” he said. “And checked that the proportions are right. They weren’t the first time, but we kept working on it and I managed to convince them that accurate meant more than pretty. Eventually. Long live dividers and protractors!”

“It’s important,” Artorius said. “Very.”

It was. Romans had the concept of maps, and made some. The great marble-mosaic sixty-by-thirty map of the world in the Portus Vipsania in Rome, the Map of Agrippa, purported to show the whole world. But despite being able, practical land surveyors, whose grid layouts were occasionally still visible on landscapes in the twenty-first century, they had no idea of how to accurately transpose it visually to paper . . . or papyrus or parchment, or for that matter marble slabs.

Instead for practical work they used an itinerarium, rather like a strip map along the route of a journey, studded with marked distances and descriptions. That worked . . . after a fashion . . . but not when dealing with moving overland into unfamiliar territory. There they went by trial and error and rumor and verbal descriptions and Eyeball Mark I.

“I was talking to the Emperor last month, and he mentioned the Baltic in a strategic way . . . and it turned out he thought it was about a hundred and fifty miles north of here. They call it the Sinus Codanus, by the way. And they think Sweden is just an island in it.”

Josephus nodded. “I thought it might be more distant than that,” he said. “Just from talking to amber traders. Though none of them go directly all the way to the northern sea, the amber is passed from hand to hand four times or more, which helps to account for the ridiculous price. It just didn’t seem very important before this. It will if the Imperial border moves north, though.”

In reality, it was about six hundred miles as the crow flew from Carnuntum to the Baltic, more if you were traveling by land and river, which was about twice the overland distance from here to the Adriatic. Thirty days’ march on a good road, and there wasn’t anything better than deer trails up there. Marcus Aurelius had been shocked, but willing to listen, especially after Artorius had called in Josephus and others with local knowledge.

“All right, I have to deal with his visit which will involve a lot of conferences, and what I’m trying to do with the fleet here, and a bunch of other stuff.”

“All those bronze founders and ingots?” Paula asked.

“Right, cannon . . . for next year, if we’re really lucky. And not many of them even if we are, so at least ammo per tube won’t be a problem. What I want you four to do is help Josephus collate all the information we’re getting on the Marcomanni and Quadi.”

He jerked a thumb toward the river, and the night-dark forests on the other side.

“As I like to tell the Emperor’s inner circle . . . repeatedly . . . they’re barbarians but that doesn’t mean they’re all stupid.”

“Even we blondies can have brains. Sometimes,” Jeremey said dryly.

Artorius nodded. Dumb blond wasn’t just a joke here, it was a genuine stereotype and not one only aimed at women, either. Not surprisingly, an empire founded by people from central Italy thought people who looked like Italians were the bee’s knees all around—brave as northerners, smart as southerners, not too hot, not too cold. Fortunately Marcus Aurelius didn’t think that way.

Much.

“Everything we’ve done publicly, their chiefs and kings know about by now. They’re starting to feel pressure from other tribes further north—the Goths are moving down from what was our Poland, for starters, from the Vistula delta—and they’d very much like to go somewhere else. The Emperor has made clear that he intends to cross the Danube and make sure they don’t try to force the borderline again.”

“The Marcomanni got beat pretty bad in the spring,” Jeremey pointed out. “If they were crowded before, they’ve got more room now.”

Artorius nodded. “Heavy losses. That doesn’t mean they’re going to sit still and wait for us to wallop them, while we get stronger and they get weaker and the reinforcements pour in like a slow avalanche.”

“Will they have heard about the new legions?” Filipa asked.

“You betcha,” Artorius said. “The recruits are pounding double-weight wooden practice swords on wooden posts and doing route marches now, but they’ll be ready in the spring, another twenty thousand men with the auxiliaries being raised, and we’ll be getting Legio XI Claudia too. When the Romans wind up to hit someone”—he made a short punching gesture—“they hit them, by God. But the new legions and auxiliary cohorts and cavalry ala are training and some still have to walk here from Italy. Or the newest legion will walk to the lower Danube while the veteran legion from there walks here. The guys on the north bank are here now.”

Jeremey frowned. “What do you want us to look for?”

“If I knew specifically, I wouldn’t have had to drag you into this! What you need to look for is patterns. Josephus has the local contacts; he’ll get you the raw data and pursue any line of inquiry you find. You collate and analyze. You’re students of history, right? So look at this as a research project . . . one that needs to be done as fast as possible. I have a bad feeling about this, but I just can’t spare the time to look into it. I don’t have anybody but you four who have the right . . . habits of mind.”

“Who you gonna call?” Mark said, grinning. “Us, that’s who!”

“And Mark, you’re in charge of the analysis—you divvy up the data, and say who’s going to look at what, and collate their findings.”

Mark Findlemann scratched his head; the other Americans all checked reflexively to make sure that if it was head lice they hadn’t gotten any.

“Why me?” he asked bluntly.

“Because of all of us, you’re the best at seeing patterns in large heaps of information. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because you’re not neurotypical, but you do. They leap out at you, I’ve seen it before. And remember, we’re pressed for time. Something is coming to bite us on the ass. I can smell it. Work this hard.”

Mark sighed, yawned and shook himself. “All right. Let’s get to work. Paula—”

* * *

Two of the bodyguards Artorius had sent to collect the others fell in with him as he was walking back toward his quarters, their oval shields in their left hands, their right on their belts near their sword hilts.

They’d take turns being outside his door all night. Artorius sighed at the thought, but Sarukê said it was essential that he had an armed guard as close to twenty-four seven as was possible because assassins struck when the target wasn’t guarded if they could. He had to admit it was logical, and she did have years of experience in the specialist field of bodyguarding.

Her obligation was to guard his life, not cater to his wishes or whims, and she took it seriously.

One of those things that’s a pain in the ass until you need it, and then you need it very, very badly. But it’s one reason among many I never wanted to be president . . . and you couldn’t pay me enough to be emperor here. Presidents had Secret Service types handing them their toilet paper and it’s worse for Marcus Aurelius. The last four Emperors died natural deaths . . . probably . . . but a lot of their predecessors didn’t and lot of Marcus’ successors wouldn’t in the original history either, starting with his son Commodus. No wonder the Roman sense of privacy is distinctly odd!

He’d mentioned that he did have his own ex-gladiator guards to Marcus Aurelius, simply to avoid having half a century of Praetorians assigned and following him around like disconsolate scorpion-blazoned hound pups.

It’s a good thing I’m a Roman officer now and expected to lead from the front.

You more or less couldn’t be one and prioritize personal safety. Even the legionary tribunate did the follow me! thing; and centurions had a higher casualty rate than rankers. A commanding legate rarely survived a real disaster.

And now I’m a military tribune. Otherwise I’d be immured in a tower somewhere with a legion camped around me glaring outward. They’d pat down my own image in a mirror to make sure it wasn’t going to knife me.

A Roman castra at night was fairly easy to navigate, and not just because there were covered torches burning at most of the intersections. It was because they all had roughly the same layout, anywhere from Scotland to the Euphrates, with only occasional deviations to allow for local terrain. The Pannonian fleet’s was a bit smaller than most, which meant he didn’t have far to go from the principium to the small suite he’d been assigned, probably a senior centurion’s originally.

Like most people of this era, Roman soldiers hit their bunks at sundown, unless they were on night watch or out carousing on leave. The base differed from the town in that respect only in that it was much neater, and smelled a bit better; most of the scents were of the trade of war, metal and leather and—here—cut wood in the shipyards, plus tallow and oil, and the woodsmoke that was everywhere. There weren’t many lights apart from the torches, nor much sound except sentries pacing on the stone fighting platforms of the wall and the low U-shaped towers that projected out from it.

That probably saved his life; he heard the rutch of a shoe on damp pavement just as someone lunged at him.

Reaction was instant. Pivot outside the lunge of a blade—steel blackened with soot so it wouldn’t gleam—on the end of an arm, mostly by slacking the knee of his right leg and letting his weight push him. Grab the wrist, twist to lock it, spring off his braced right foot while wrenching the wrist back and smashing with his forearm at the place the also-locked elbow would be.

Thud.

And beneath that a crackle of snapping tendons and joints—elbows had no give in them in that direction. The man gave a breathless squeal that ended as Artorius whipped the bladed palm of his right hand from a position by his left shoulder across and into the man’s throat. The edge of his hand brushed something—a beard—and then thumped into the target with a force that he knew of old.

The sensation was like crushing a fibrous cardboard tube wrapped in veal, more or less. It meant the man was dead, even if he wouldn’t know it for a few seconds.

Sir, watch out!” Dablosa shouted.

Amid the clash of steel on wood and leather and sometimes on steel; he and the other bodyguard were fighting dark-clad figures too, sword and shield. Artorius had already started to pivot, but the Dacian’s cry speeded it up.

He brought the whatever-he-was who’d just tried to kill him with the turn, and threw him at the new attacker. There was a meaty chugging sound in the dimness, and a sword appeared out of the man’s side.

That turned a triumphant scream of:

Dawi, wikkô!

Oh, I am getting so sick of hearing that Proto-Germanic phrase directed at me!

—into a strangled wordless scream of frustration. Whoever it was wasted a second withdrawing his sword—if you jammed a yard-long piece of iron through a human body, you were quite likely to find it harder to pull out. Artorius used the instant to jump backward while he drew his own sword and poised.

Both the bodyguards had their men down, and even in that moment Artorius made a mental note to thank Sarukê; without the pair, he’d have been as dead as fusion-bombed Vienna was in the time he’d left. The remaining Marcomanni very sensibly spun around and ran.

Dablosa cursed in Dacian. His comrade was originally Germanii himself, of a far northwestern tribe in what Artorius had called the Netherlands. They were known to their Imperial neighbors as the Chamavi; he was a medium-tall man with a collection of facial scars.

Some remote academic part of Artorius remembered that that tribe later on had been one of the confederation known as the Franks, who’d given their name to France. The man had a pointed reddish-brown beard, and would have regardless of fashion because shaving was out of the question for his mutilated face. He also carried a light throwing axe in a loop on his belt at the small of his back. In the original history that tomahawk-like weapon had been known as the francesca, and was a national marker for the Franks for centuries.

Right now, Balþawiniz dropped his sword, whipped out the tomahawk and threw in the same motion. The man with the dripping sword was ten feet away and gaining speed, a dimly seen shadow. The axe spun through the air, and then the curved edge struck between his shoulder blades with a hard thump-crack sound.

“Bold friend indeed,” Artorius said—that was what the ex-gladiator’s name meant.

A quick glance showed he and the Dacian both had rather minor wounds; somehow Artorius had gotten a nicked earlobe, which he hadn’t noticed at the time and stung badly now. Balþawiniz and Dablosa both chuckled at the wordplay, and Artorius walked over to the man lying on his face with the short haft of the throwing axe standing up between his shoulder blades. He didn’t approach immediately—that would have been reckless. Dablosa trotted off and came back quickly with a lit torch from the bundle kept under the ones at the cross streets.

“He’s dead,” Artorius said as Dablosa raised it and poised his sword.

Both the ex-gladiators nodded; the body had twitched half a dozen times just now and they could smell the stink of bowels released in death, which happened fairly often though not every time. The Dacian went to one knee and flipped him over, holding the torch high in his left hand.

“Suebi, like the others,” Balþawiniz said, picking up his sword and using it to touch the hair knot over the man’s right ear before he sheathed it.

That prompted a thought, and Artorius leaned closer, sheathing his own—still-clean—blade.

“I know him,” he said.

The family resemblance was striking, especially with the distinctive hairstyle, though this man was in his midtwenties, rather than a teenager like the killer at the Villa Lunae or in his late thirties like his uncle Prince Ballomar.

Firelight helps, Artorius thought; that first one had been at night too.

“He and his brother tried to kill me last year, at the Villa Lunae. His brother died, he ran.”

“He ran this time too,” Balþawiniz said. A grin, and: “Not fast enough to outrun my axe, though.”

Gladiators evidently had an even grimmer sense of humor than combat soldiers. Artorius nodded.

“If anyone asks, this was personal vengeance,” he said. “Family feud.”

“Well, if you killed his brother, sir, it probably was,” the proto-Frank said cheerfully.

“Among other things,” Artorius said.

The ex-gladiator put a foot under the dead man’s shoulder and lifted so he could wrench the tomahawk free; then he wiped it on the corpse’s jacket.

Dablosa cleared his throat.

“Yes?” Artorius asked.

“Sir, it’s a nice change to bodyguard for someone who knows what they’re doing in a fight,” he said. “The wirapta was right about you.”

Which is a compliment, Artorius thought.

“You two also do,” he pointed out, nodding toward their fallen opponents.

“Yes, but we’re not rich men,” Dablosa said.

He and the German expertly frisked the bodies, coming up with pouches and a few personal ornaments as well as bundling the weapons—those would fetch a few score denarii. All of that was part of the perks of their job. Hobnails sounded on pavement, moving quickly—that would be the base night watch heading for the sound of a fight, who wouldn’t enjoy having to dispose of the bodies. A tip ought to settle that.

Artorius sighed and put a wadded handkerchief to his ear.

I wonder if any letters from Julia have come, he thought. It would be nice to have a good surprise, for once.


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Framed