CHAPTER TWELVE
Villa Lunae,
Province of Pannonia Superior
December 20th, 165 CE
I suspect my nickname here is Nervous Nellie, Artorius thought, glancing up at the gray clouds and the smell of damp chill.
Looks like rain . . . again.
The storage shed for the gunpowder was out in a hillside pasture northwest of the main villa complex; the nearest house was a tenant cottage half a mile away. It was laid out like a comb, with a covered wooden corridor in front, and individual storage chambers dug back into the hillside and roofed over, each with six feet of solid dirt between it and its neighbor and four steps down to the wooden shelves where the kegs were kept. With underfloor drainage pipes.
There wasn’t a piece of iron in the whole construction, now that the metal-edged shovels of the digging crews were out of the picture.
Sparks . . . he thought. Sparks are seriously contraindicated, by God!
What really gave him the willies was that the only source of artificial light here was open flame. When you combined that with the tendency of gunpowder to shed near-invisible mists of finely divided particles . . .
“Hades eat you, don’t throw those things around!” he barked. “Stack them gently!”
And backed it up with a medium-hard boot to the backside. The problem was that the villa’s slaves were used to having people yell at them; eventually the yelling man went away, and the work continued in their own way and pace. Sometimes you had to use kinetic aids to really get their attention. And nobody here had any idea of what the word “explosive” really meant.
The man gripped the little barrel harder and ducked his head, and went into the tunnel. The light was fading . . .
“All right, everyone finish up and pack up!” he said.
Then he turned and gaped for an instant. Over at the filling table a worker was pouring measured quantities of sieved powder—the grinding and sieving operation was a long way from here too—from clay containers through funnels into the little barrels. At the call he stooped to pick up some sort of bundle at his feet . . .
“No!” Artorius screamed. “Cover the jug first—”
The man halted, gaping, with the lit oil lamp in his hand. Artorius checked a lunge toward him and went down to one knee instead, and ducked his face into the crook of his left arm.
WHUMP!
A flash of red light and a pillow of hard, hard air struck. The experience of being knocked back by an explosion was eerily familiar; so was the savage pain in his arm. It took him moments to break the hold of shock, and to realize he wasn’t lying waiting for the medevac.
Artorius flogged himself back onto his feet. His left forearm was bleeding, and a patch of the skin was red and cracked, and he bit a yell back into a hiss between clenched teeth.
That’s why I’m not blind, he thought grimly.
The worker who’d lit his oil lamp without securing the lid on the container of powder was lying on his belly halfway between the shattered wood of the table and Artorius. His face was relaxing from an expression of shocked surprise into slackness, and his back looked . . .
Chewed. Chewed and smoking.
Several large fragments of the amphora stood out of the blackened flesh along with splinters, welling red blood and shattered pink-white fragments of spine and ribs.
Sarukê was galloping toward him; so was Filipa, with a snatched-up first-aid kit. The Sarmatian drew rein and leapt out of the saddle running. Artorius was glad of that shoulder to lean on; his legs felt a familiar weakness. Though all the fingers moved, and he didn’t think any bones were broken.
“Disinfectant and ointment,” he said to Filipa in English; she was gulping and carefully not looking at the fresh corpse tumbled not far away.
He raised his voice for the foreman’s benefit as he switched to Latin: “Get everyone here!”
There was nothing like visual aids . . . and a stink of scorched flesh . . . to get across exactly what explosive meant.
Consider it a learning experience. Death is a greater professor than me!
* * *
Two weeks later he reflected that this might be a warm part of Pannonia, comparatively speaking, and they might be at the peak of the Roman Warm Period, but the climate could still be perishingly cold when you were well into the darkness of late December. Cold, wet, more cold, more cold rain, more slush, and then snow.
All good for the crops next year, all unpleasant now.
Artorius sank into the chair, feeling for once fully relaxed, and took up the scroll with careful pleasure. It was old, and the papyrus was a bit brittle and more brown at the edges. The left forearm still hurt, but he’d had plenty of experience with ignoring that from healing wounds.
A long day’s work in the cold, yes, he thought.
But the snow that beat against the small panes of the window behind him had held off for the day and a good deal of it had been spent near the forges. Carroballistae had iron frames, not wood. Between the veterans who’d spent their lives working and repairing the weapons and the smiths here, they were managing.
And then a—careful—bath, a good dinner with the four who were his friends now, as well as assistants and students . . . and now some delightful reading, and then sleep.
Hopefully, dreamless. Not getting the nightmares nearly as often anymore, especially the ones about Mary and the kids. Some of those were . . . really bad.
There was a wine cup on the table beside him, whose round marble top was upheld by three elongated bronze fauns, and a narrow-necked clay jug on a stand, filled with double-distilled superwine. That wasn’t for drinking, or as a disinfectant this time. A circular linen wick went into the liquid through a plug, and burned above with a bright blue flame, better light by far than the oil lamps and diffused by a modified glass jug acting as a chimney.
And it still smells a little of peaches, he thought whimsically. Which goes well with old paper, and beeswax from the furniture, and that old-stone-building scent. And that doctor was really impressed that all the wounds healed without any infection. Sextus said he wrote to his friends about it, too.
Across the library a fire crackled pleasantly on the andirons in a very new fireplace, behind a screen of repurposed fretted bronze; above the mantle were the figures of a pair of Lares, carved in low relief on a slab of marble and picked out with paint. The protective domestic spirits were crowned with leaves, dancing and holding a cornucopia and wine jug and flanked by small columns, with a snake painted beneath them.
He raised his wine cup in salute to the little Gods of the Hearth, and took up the scroll. Occasionally he murmured a phrase aloud, hesitantly; it was old, and in Classical Athenian Greek, but worth the effort.
The whisper of a sandal on the marble tiles made him look up. It was Lady Julia; he rose and inclined his head. A maidservant, her personal lady’s maid, stood quietly behind her; he noted idly how much her face resembled her mistress’s, though she was a few years older. It was the sort of bone structure that aged well.
“I will withdraw, if you would prefer, domina,” he said.
She shook her head and sat on something that looked like a folding stool fantastically elaborated that swept up on either side to waist height; only the fanciest Roman chairs had both backs and arms, for some reason.
Around them shadows danced, on shelves for scrolls and a few codex books, which had been an innovation when this building rose on the shores of the lake and were still much less common than the older form. There was a faint musty bookish scent, part familiar but not quite like anything he’d smelled before, and she came with a waft of verbena. He sank into his own seat once more.
I don’t even notice the smell of olive oil on human skin any more, unless I specifically think about something connected with . . . personal scents.
Julia was dressed for indoors, in winter; two long tunics, both of fairly thick wool and the undermost with long sewn sleeves, knee socks—with a separate big toe so she could wear sandals, and also of woven and sewn cloth since nobody here had heard of knitting until the Americans arrived—and a shawl draped across her arms. Her hair was put up and confined by ribbons as befitted a Roman matron, for whom it came down only in intimate situations.
“I understand you are to be congratulated . . . Lucius Triarius Artorius.”
He’d chosen that gens name—the middle of the three, the nomen that originally indicated your clan to Romans, though that didn’t necessarily mean much by now below the uppermost aristo level—with malice aforethought. All five of them were saddled with it now; it also meant old soldier in Latin. He thought she’d guessed that little bit of linguistic play too; she was definitely rather smarter than her brother, or perhaps just more subtle and observant.
“Yes, the libelli for all of us have arrived.”
That was a brief, witnessed official document; a bit prosaic compared to the folded and sealed bronze copy given time-expired auxiliary soldiers, but fully legal. Eventually a copy would wend its way to Rome, into a rarely consulted archive.
Except by the rats who eat the documents, I suppose; you could call that consulting the records.
“It’s good to be a citizen . . . again,” he added, and raised his cup: “Your brother is as good as his word, lady.”
“Yes, Sextus will always do the right thing . . . eventually,” she said dryly.
He turned a whole rich man’s villa over to you . . . far from your native city and isolated with your joint dragon of a mother, Artorius thought. He will do the right thing, but sometimes rather obliquely. Still, I owe him and he’s not a bad sort at all, for a Roman aristo. Witness the way he gets on with Josephus.
She inclined her head toward the fireplace. That had a pleasant blaze of seasoned beechwood, which burned long and hot with few sparks.
The Americans had copied a late eighteenth-century model . . . invented by an American named Rumsford, and invented in Europe because he was a Loyalist and in exile after the War of Independence. It had a cunningly angled shallow hearth, air space behind, and a slanted plate of iron—cast in the originals, welded wrought iron here—at the rear of the blaze to absorb and cast the heat outward more efficiently.
The thought had taken the bricklayers aback, but they’d had no difficulty doing it, with a little initial fumbling due to the fact that a chimney wasn’t simply a long brick box but needed a flue liner and other touches. The limiting factor was the amount of bricks on hand, especially after the first few in the kitchens gave them experience, but the estate’s brick kiln was working every day now, instead of now and then. Workers who weren’t beating out grain with flails were digging clay and cutting wood.
Type A again, he thought.
Julia smiled slightly as she held out a hand to enjoy the warmth.
“My mother felt it was undignified to ask you to have such as this installed in her rooms. It not being part of the mos maiorum, the customs of our ancestors, you understand . . . though I pointed out to her that our Roman ancestors lived in a country where it was never cold enough to kill an olive tree. And our Gallic ones were savages who nailed their enemies’ heads over the doors of their thatched huts and kenneled with pigs and cattle.”
They’d become much easier with each other since her brother’s visit; and oddly, since the attempted assassination.
Now she turned up her nose and sniffed; Artorius chuckled, because that was old Lady Claudia to the inch. Julia went on:
“Now she visits me more often, to sit before my place of fire. And my daughter plays and sits before it even more often. The winters in this house were hard on her.”
Artorius smiled at the thought. The little girl was active and seemed healthy, but she was also rather thin in a gawky shooting-up way.
“In our land, it is a winter custom to sit before the fireplace”—ignis locus was what the Latin speakers had instantly and spontaneously decided to call fireplaces, logically enough—“and tell our children stories.”
His parents had done that, and his grandparents even more often, in the old ranch house. He had himself, the last little while.
Braziers just weren’t the same.
“That sounds very pleasant. Perhaps I could bring little Claudia here, and you might weave some of the tales of your homeland for her?”
It wouldn’t do for him to visit her rooms for that, of course.
He had a sudden vision of her naked on a sheepskin rug before a fire, smiling and making a come-hither gesture with a forefinger, and blinked in surprise before he pushed it aside.
“That would be a pleasure, Lady Julia,” he said gravely.
Josephus had seen the first fireplace working on a visit during an early cold snap, and bought two of the slave bricklayers on the spot for a quarter again the usual price. He’d taken them back to Sirmium with him and promised them emancipation as soon as they’d trained six more, starting them with installing four fireplaces in his house.
They were now freedmen with a flourishing business financed by their ex-master and current patron, and by the freedman manager of Sextus’ brickworks, which was profitable for all parties concerned as the fashion swept the largest city of Pannonia Inferior as fast as weather permitted.
And Josephus had had them visit Vindobona and install two in the rented house the Americans had stayed in right after their arrival. The camp prefect of the Tenth had seen it on a casual visit with his grain supplier on a cold day, and immediately set about equipping the legionary fortress with them, starting with the hospital and his own quarters . . . and the farmhouse he planned to retire to.
“Much more heat than a brazier, and no smoke making you cough and dulling everything with dingy vapors. And much less hungry for fuel than a hypocaust!” Julia went on enthusiastically.
Hypocausts were the system the Romans used for heating parts of a wealthy man’s building, or the public baths; channels under the floor and in the walls to carry hot air . . . and smoke . . . from a fire. It worked well, but it was so extravagant that only a few rooms here near the bath suite had it, even in a house like this, one of them the formal dinner chamber. And the baths themselves did, of course, or they’d have been unusable in the cold season. Even the one in the pars rustica for the slaves did.
“Ours was a cold land in winter, for the most part,” Artorius said.
He thought he saw an ironic twinkle in her hazel eyes, but wasn’t sure.
“On my family estate—”
He imagined his grandmother snorting at that description of the hardscrabble Vandenberg cow-calf operation, one that occasionally gambled on some wheat sown and reaped by contractors. Which paid off slightly more than half the time.
“—the summers were very hot, hotter than here, but the winters were much colder too. We Americans have used the ignis locus for a long time.”
Julia nodded. “And how do your veterans suit, the ones secured by my brother?”
Well, found by Josephus, secured by Sextus, and helped along by the prospect of three denarii a day plus room and board and lots of girls impressed by their glamor, or at least by their pay, Artorius thought.
Not all time-expired Roman soldiers spent their discharge bonus wisely or had a worry-free civilian life.
She went on: “They seemed very . . . very martial, when I saw them.”
In fact they looked like a collection of villainous aging pirate thugs, with scar-seamed faces and bodies to rival the ex-gladiatorial bodyguards, with whom they got on well. Still strong in middle age but with the occasional hitch in their movements which told of old broken bones that twinged in the cold. He’d found them all competent, even if some were a bit too fond of the jug, but they’d all been suitably impressed by what they called Jupiter’s Thunderballs, or just Jupiter’s Balls.
A few friendly wrestling matches—using US Ranger–style combatives—had won him a degree of personal respect. He was taking sword-and-shield lessons from them too, as well as their new bodyguards, just as he and Filipa were from Sarukê in mounted bladework.
All his teachers thought he was doing reasonably well and had native talent, though they also thought he should have started much earlier and that it would take a long while to make him solidly competent.
In my copious spare time. At least I don’t complain about it the way the others do—except Jeremey, to be fair, and Filipa only now and then.
“They’ll do nicely,” he said aloud. “Another three . . . or four or five . . . months and the teams for the new-style ballistae will be ready; we’re aiming at six of them.”
And nothing in them that a local workshop couldn’t do with a model to work from, just bronze and iron, wood and ox sinew. Though the elevation and traverse screws have to be hand-filed, which is just . . . frustrating. And the built-in pulleys, that’s taking time. How I wish the Romans had metalworking lathes! A project for another year.
“Though I’d prefer to have more time. Making the ammunition goes slowly.”
Charcoal was no problem, sulfur not too difficult if you could pay, but saltpeter was the bottleneck and it was the largest ingredient. It was like trying to scale up production of some medicine people took in teaspoon doses to industrial levels. He’d taken to just buying the scrapings from under manure heaps all over the district: then it had to be refined . . . and people wondered what the Hades he was doing with it, too. Rumors had started to spread.
It’s a good thing we don’t plan to keep this secret indefinitely.
He flexed his left hand, feeling the healing scar under the newly changed bandage there on his forearm. That had been a flash rather than a real explosion by the time it got to him . . . but close enough. When it wasn’t wet, loose black powder not in a sealed container smoked off dust that hung invisibly in the air; and then the slightest spark . . .
What did Filipa say? Yes, that I was supposed to be blowing up the enemy, not myself. There’s a reason powder mills used to be put way out in the boonies with berms around everything. Even du Pont did that. It’s distracting, too.
“If the Marcomanni remain on their own side of the river, there will be plenty of time. But I am afraid they will not,” Julia said gravely. “You labor for the State and for our safety.”
She certainly had that Roman emotional control down pat, what they called gravitas. If that war did happen, if the barbarians came over the Danube and she couldn’t get to someplace with good walls and lots of Roman soldiers in time . . . well, they did use that saying here: anything that could happen to anyone could happen to you. She’d already had graphic proof that a pair of Marcomanni could get this far.
“No, I also fear you are correct, lady. Hence this is work of importance to which I must devote my time, when I would rather—”
He waved a hand to indicate the library, and sipped at his wine; it was the sweet style that was a specialty of the Villa Lunae, and since he was only planning on one cup, it was unwatered. There was a pleasant silence for a few moments, before she asked:
“What is it that you were reading when I interrupted?” she asked. “I heard you, and usually you legere tacite, without making any sound at all. Like a scholar indeed.”
Most people here at least muttered the words as they read or wrote; he thought it might have something to do with the way they usually ran all the written words together without a space between them in the cursive form. Reading silently was a rare skill, and associated with great learning.
He leaned forward and passed her the scroll. She read the title: Iphigeneia en Aulidi.
“We have . . . we had . . . no complete copy of this in America,” he said. “Only something incomplete, and corrupted by scribal errors. And now all the libraries there may well have burned, leaving nothing. As a favor, would you read it for me? My understanding of Greek is greater than my command of it, particularly the old Athenian dialect: and with Euripides, the sound and the sense complement each other closely.”
She gave him a long considering look, and then smiled in friendly fashion. Nearly all men of her class could speak and read and write Greek; it was a less common skill for women, but not very rare and she had it.
“Very true. I will begin where you left off, then:
“Aye, but that is where
The danger comes;
And ambition, sweet though it seems
Brings sorrow with its near approach . . . ”
He closed his eyes and let the majestic words flow over him . . . and he was probably hearing it spoken closer to the original than any modern ever had.
There are positive points about this.
* * *
The news that a Marcomannic host had crossed the Danube, burning and killing, came by an exhausted messenger on a lathered horse almost exactly five months later.
The Americans and Josephus set out in a party more than seventy strong, including the six catapult crews and their machines, each drawn by six horses in the new harness, each of the two-wheeled carroballistae clipped to its two-wheeled ammunition limber by the trails. Everything shiny new, down to the gear their crews wore. Nineteenth-century-style buckboard wagons pulled by mules hauled gear and food, tents and tools that included a little portable anvil and forge, to keep the new horseshoes in order.
Two days later on a bright spring morning a little south of Vindobona the equipment looked a bit more worn, and so did the people—he’d been pushing everyone hard, over twenty miles a day. The air was pleasant, and the sky clear save for a few fleecy-white clouds, with that slightly bleached Fragonard look European skies often had to American eyes. The last rain had been three days ago, though the air was full of the scents of damp turned earth and fresh growth as well as horse and mule and hard-worked sweating humans, and the birds were loud in the roadside trees. The leaves there had that new-minted, crisp-cut look leaves did right after they got to full size too.
Well, I don’t think I have to worry about the crews deserting, he thought, looking around the open farming country; scraggly and weedy by his standards, prosperous by local ones. Hmmm. Wheat’s coming along well. And not much livestock, and a lot less people than there should be.
Slightly to his surprise, countryfolk here tended to live either in single farmhouses or tiny hamlets; the Villa Lunae had around two hundred in its familia rustica and was about as nucleated as rural settlements got in this area. He suspected the Roman peace had something to do with that, though people said big villages were common a little further south and east.
A lot of the houses and hamlets here they’d passed since they started out at dawn looked stripped and deserted; yesterday they’d passed a good many rural types heading out and driving their cattle and sheep and goats . . . and pigs, when they could . . . before them, with everything moveable piled onto their little oxcarts or on their backs.
There had even been a few pushing wheelbarrows.
Last night he’d bought a sounder of pigs to roast from one party delighted to turn the surly, dangerous beasts into nice portable cash, and gotten news as well for no more than letting them have a meal from their own former porkers. The BBQ sauce had been a hit, as usual, from the smell it gave off while it was cooking and on through the eating. He’d yet to meet a Roman who didn’t like it after the first bite made them hop and swear, from Sextus Hirrius Trogus and his mother and sister and niece and on down to his kitchen maids and scullery boys; so far that seemed to be a pan-Imperial predilection. And letting people taste it was low-cost advertising for the tomatoes and chilis.
The refugees said the Marcomanni crossed northwest of Vindobona and that the legion was going to sortie to meet them. We’ll hit the river there today, if we don’t run into Legio X Gemina first—most of them are definitely out of Vindobona. Hopefully they’ll be in a mood to take any help they can get, understrength as they are.
The catapult crews marched along proudly beside their machines down the Roman road, here gravel on a deep foundation of packed rocks between stone-block edging, amid rolling farming country cleared save for the occasional woodlot on a rise. The closer you got to a city or town here, the more intensive the cultivation.
About half the crews had been recruited from the free tenants on the Villa Lunae latifundium, and the rest were new-minted freedmen because they’d volunteered. Arming slaves was violently illegal, though not unknown in really serious emergencies, so they’d gotten their manumissions ten minutes before they officially joined up.
Arming freedmen was problematic too though not as much so. As was a private citizen arming anyone beyond a few bodyguards; the Roman government at all levels was touchy about its monopoly of armed force. Sextus Hirrius Trogus’ written permission—he was an aedile, a senior magistrate in Sirmium—might or might not do some good, or might just get him in trouble too.
To his credit, he didn’t hesitate to put his name to the . . . paper, now. Anyway, we’ll probably either be live heroes or dead goats, in a day or two, he thought grimly.
And touched his left hand for an instant to the spot over the healed knife wound. Not his first scar, but it had been the first in quite a few years.
Hell, the Marcomanni have already tried to kill me. I seem to have a trophism for getting into situations where lethal intent runs free.
If the freedmen did well the wives and children of those who had them would be freed too. And they were all getting three sestertii a day plus their keep . . . and after all, this province was their home too. He’d leaned on the fact that they’d be defending their homes and kin in the departure speech.
Each had on a thigh-length sleeveless mail shirt with doubling flaps on the shoulder over a padded leather subarmalis jerkin, the type most auxiliaries wore, a short sword and dagger at their belts, a flat oval shield over their backs, and a plain bronze bowl helmet with a neck guard and hinged cheek guards. The veterans he’d recruited had the same, and they were riding on the left front horse of every team, not marching—for a number of reasons, starting with practicality and working on through middle-aged knees.
They were also getting three times the pay.
He’d winced a little at the price of the gear, which Josephus and Sarukê had rustled up through various sets of connections, especially when put on top of the compensation he owed Sextus for the slaves. It gave him a slightly different perspective on the parsimony of quartermasters he’d cursed in his own military career, and drove home that armies were expensive.
Having them paint the shields olive-green with a white American star had assuaged the feeling only a little.
By the standards of most people he’d met since he got here, he was rich; even a big landowner like Sextus thought he was moderately affluent . . . though Sextus didn’t know about the bags of synthetic gemstones. But back in the warlord era at the end of the Roman Republic, someone had written that to be considered really rich, you had to be able to raise and pay a complete legion for a year from your own resources, without straining.
He’d have had to successfully sell most of the synthetic jewels to do that, and Josephus had only been able to move half a dozen of those to date.
Bless him for that, though. “Wealth is always relative.” That’s still just as true in 166 CE as it was in 2032, he thought. I was rich in the twenty-first on a professor’s salary . . . compared to a peasant in Burkina Faso.
An hour before noon, they saw a column of smoke off to the left. He reined in and flung up a clenched left fist; the column all came to a halt in good order . . . which was a welcome development.
Should have done more on march discipline, but that would have been very conspicuous on the roads.
“Sarukê,” he said, and pointed. “Scout that.”
“Lord!” she said, and put her heels to her horse.
Filipa went with her, and came back ten minutes later, looking distinctly green.
“Sarukê says you’ll want to see this,” she said. “No danger.”
Then she added, with feeling: “No physical danger. I don’t want to see anything like that ever again. Not if I live to be a hundred.”
Filipa clammed up tight after that.
But that lets me know roughly what to expect, he thought, as he ordered the column to swing off toward the evidence of arson.
“Pedicabo me!” he swore less than ten minutes later.
The first hint had been a man in a shabby peasant’s tunic lying by the side of the rutted lane, with half his face sheared off by something like an axe and two ravens quarreling over the remaining eyeball. The big birds hopped off resentfully and glared at the passing humans and beasts; a cloud of flies buzzed up from the great fan of black blood on the dirt where he’d died. The wound had dried thoroughly, but the flesh hadn’t shrunken much and there was only the beginning of a stale-meat whiff, so it couldn’t have been more than a day this time of year.
They’ve all toughened up at least a bit, he thought. But it’s an ongoing process.
Jeremey was back on the Villa Lunae—ostensibly because the greatly expanded corn and potato planting needed to be overseen, and the sunflowers and so forth, and the new horse-drawn three-row cultivators and riding plows for the spring crops. Privately, Artorius had given him instructions on what to do if Germanii were seen in the neighborhood, and thought it was fairly good odds he’d do it rather than just heading south on a fast horse with the cashbox.
Paula and Mark were here, and both looked disturbed as the wagon they were driving rumbled past the corpse. Nobody else paid it much mind, and the veterans and ex-gladiator bodyguards none at all besides a casual glance. This wasn’t a culture where you could live your life without seeing a dead body, unlike the way twenty-first-century America was for most of its inhabitants.
Here people didn’t go away to hospitals to die; it happened at home, or near it. With the whole family watching, and usually in pain. And plenty of farming accidents were just as gruesome as this, in a trade that involved moving heavy weights and swinging large sharp tools and managing large, strong, heavy animals with minds of their own.
For that matter, Artorius himself had seen a man trip and fall under the spinning teeth of a big field-grade rototiller himself, before he’d been nine. A brief scream and a big spray of blood and . . . bits.
The steading under the pillar of smoke had been a fairly prosperous one in rich-peasant terms, which was probably why the raiders had headed for it. They passed a small vineyard and a little orchard of mixed fruits, a well with a tall, pivoted sweep to raise the bucket, and closer to the center several thatched sheds and outbuildings, a circular mud-brick granary, and a couple of small cottages for the help.
They were where the smoke was coming from. From the stink, either livestock or people or both had been inside when they were set on fire. A long, low rectangular adobe farmhouse with patchy whitewash hadn’t burned, probably because it had a tile roof and the Marcomanni weren’t used to buildings that were resistant to having a torch tossed on top.
What had happened to the rest of the inhabitants was unfortunately completely obvious.
Four women—or females at least, one couldn’t have been more than ten—lay with their legs spread open and their tunics around their necks, dead either from the gang rape or spear thrusts in the gut or neck. The rest of the farmhouse household were crucified to the mud-brick wall with hardwood stakes through their wrists, or in the case of one, barely to toddler’s age, through the stomach. Barbarian whimsy had put two dogs and a chicken down at that end of the line, treated the same.
From the looks, some of the others had still been alive when foxes or something similar came to gnaw at the guts dangling from their slit bellies. That argued for knowledge and some care on the part of their killers, although the victims wouldn’t have seen anything, since their eyes had all been carefully put out with burning sticks. All the wounds were crawling with flies.
“Pedicabo me,” he swore again, and spat.
Josephus looked grim, and muttered something in a language the American didn’t speak.
Artorius recognized it anyway.
“Yit’gadal v’yit kadash sh’me’ raba.”
That meant: Magnified and sanctified be His Great name.
Artorius murmured: “Amen.”
Josephus looked at him, a little startled. Artorius nodded gravely and added:
“B’al’ma di v’ra chir’ute.”
Which translated as: Throughout the world which He has created according to His will.
“Amen,” Josephus replied quietly, then looked a question.
“I learned that for the funeral of a man I commanded . . . in America,” he said quietly. “Take your guard and ride scout, my friend. We don’t want to take chances. I’ll send Sarukê to join you in a minute.”
He and his hulking ex-gladiator reined around. They were used to working with the Sarmatian and would do a good job of it, which was one less worry.
I’ve seen some very bad shit in my day, but this takes the cake, the American thought, returning his gaze to the farmhouse. Especially for things done by hand, personally.
The smell was memorable already. Paula and Mark had been looking more and more apprehensive as they came closer to the house; once there they took one horrified glance, tumbled off the seat of their wagon and puked noisily in unison with explosive heaves. They weren’t the only ones, either: though the ex-gladiators were mostly blank faced except for one who whistled softly, and the Roman army veterans just shook their heads or swore at the Marcomanni.
One looked at the ammunition limber of his catapult and showed his teeth in what might have been a smile . . .
Sarukê was a little off to one side, her eyes moving purposefully on the surroundings and an arrow on her bowstring. She had a prisoner lying before her horse, his arms tied behind his back at wrist and elbow. An arrow through one calf helped explain how he’d gotten there; he was a squat man, a northern tribesman of no particular rank from his shabby wool trousers and shirt, nondescript and with a mousy-brown shaggy beard.
Wish I could show some of those noble-Nordic enthusiasts this, Artorius thought; he’d run into a few in his time. I also wish I hadn’t had to see this. My head just doesn’t need more interior decoration like this. Nightmares coming, with mix-and-match incorporating this, too.
“This one here, asleep, drunk I think, lord,” the Sarmatian called to him. “Others gone by sunup from way ashes of fires are. They leave him, he try run just now.”
“Gnaeus!” he barked, and the senior veteran turned to look at him. “Unit front and center here!”
The crews fell in, each behind the veteran acting as NCO. Still in the saddle, Artorius pointed to the wall and its burden:
“This is why we’re off to fight, to keep this from our homes and families,” he said, catching their eyes. “Does any man want to run rather than march with me? Speak now if you do.”
Nobody did, though a fair number were looking green and gulping. They were a lot harder grained than an equal number of random rural Americans would be, but this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened very often in their peaceful corner of the world either. It had been a long time since enemies threatened the Villa Lunae.
And if I have anything to say about it, it’ll be another long time after this.
“We are those who put our bodies between our kinsfolk and the war’s desolation,” he said firmly. “Remember that!”
He turned to the veteran. “Gnaeus, get people organized, get the bodies down, build a pyre . . . no, we’ll use the house, lay them out inside, put the coins on their eyes. And do it fast.”
The man nodded soberly and said:
“Animal for the sacrifice, sir?”
That would satisfy the religious sensibilities via an offering to Ceres. Cremation was the usual Roman rite anyway. Artorius silently jerked his thumb at the wounded Marcomann, and the veteran smiled thinly and nodded. Artorius went on:
“Sarukê, bring me that Marcomann. We need to make him talk,” he said.
She did, dismounting and tying her horse and dragging the man over by locking her right hand in a fistful of hair, his legs scrabbling to push him along as he moaned and whimpered.
She threw him down at Artorius’ feet as he dismounted.
“You go and join Josephus and his man until we’re through here. I don’t want any unexpected guests,” he said.
“Lord,” she said, and swung back onto her horse with a lithe skip that made nothing of her gear.
“Dablosa!”
That was the senior-most of the bodyguards under Sarukê, a stocky quick-moving Dacian of about his own age, with close-cropped reddish hair and beard. The ex-gladiators were all mounted, and none had gotten out of the saddle.
“You’ll be taking Lord Marcus—”
Which meant Mark Findlemann.
“And Lady Paula to Vindobona. Get them inside the wall, and put them up at a good inn. Assign one man to stay and guard them, and then rejoin us with the other three on the road from the northwest gate—and incidentally, if we’re alive tomorrow by sunset, all of you get a month’s bonus. You’ll earn it, too, one way or another.”
“Maybe I’ll need to pay the guards to get inside the wall, sir,” Dablosa said; the others were looking pleased. “Looks like things are rough around here right now and they’ll be jumpy.”
He shrugged. “Townsfolk, you know how it is, sir. They scare easy.”
His Latin was accented, but much more fluent than Sarukê’s. Dacia had been a province of the Empire for fifty-odd years now, since Trajan’s conquest back around the beginning of the second century. If he had family, they’d be among the ancestors of the Romanians.
Or would have been, except for us.
Artorius passed him a handful of silver coins, which ought to cover everything.
“You two get into the saddle,” he said to the Americans; they had plenty of spare mounts along. “I’ll see you tomorrow or the day after, probably.”
If we’re not dead didn’t need to be said aloud, and he thought they both picked up on it; a few hours of fast riding wouldn’t kill them though it would leave them sore.
Live and learn.
“No argument, Prof,” Paula said, unusually subdued.
Mark nodded after rinsing out his mouth from a goatskin bag of watered wine and spitting.
“Fil, get them horses, saddle them up and ride with them down to where the lane joins the road. Fast. You stay there when they and the guards head for town, keep an eye out and we’ll rejoin you, or you can come up when you see the funeral pyre lit. You don’t want to come back right away if you can avoid it. Stay alert.”
Paula and Mark were keeping their eyes carefully averted from the farmhouse. So was Filipa, looking at the clouds.
“Right, Prof,” Filipa said tightly, and shepherded them off toward the remount string.
Artorius waited until they were a little distance off up the laneway to the north, then called to the crews about their grisly tasks:
“I need someone who can speak Marcomannic!”
One of the veterans barked: “You two! With me!”
He trotted over with his helpers. Artorius wasn’t surprised they had a bilingual. They didn’t have AI translator earbuds here, and the man had spent twenty-five years with the Danube legions. Sometimes you had to be able to communicate with the people you fought, might fight, or were preparing to fight.
As he passed one of the wagons, the veteran stopped for an instant and pulled out a sledgehammer, hefting it as he walked over with a brisk stride with a hint of a hitch in it when his right foot came down. He was a stocky man in his late forties, like most of the half-dozen ex-legionnaires, and his arms bulged with stringy muscle roped with visible veins. A scar drew up his upper lip over one yellow tooth, and the tip of his nose ended in a small blob of scar tissue, probably from the same fight.
This was almost certainly not his first field interrogation, either. He showed that when he arrived, kicking over an empty barrel and telling his assistants:
“Put him over that . . . no, with the backs of his knees on it, you fools, not ass up. I want to ask him questions, not bugger him! I’m picky where I put my dick, not like this piece of barbaro-shit.”
Then he briskly swung the sledgehammer, smashing the man’s left knee to bleeding pulp with a crackling sound that put the American’s teeth on edge like fingernails on a blackboard.
After the first shrill screams, he turned to Artorius, smiling.
“What do you want to ask him, sir?”
“Where the host crossed, how many, when.”
The veteran chuckled. “The usual. Ah, that takes me back!”
Then before he dropped into the rhythmic, buzzing sounds of Proto-Germanic:
“All right, Hermann, let’s get on with it—”