Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Larry Niven

  “Find out whatever is happening and nip it in the bud. One thing on our side is the fact that these tribesmen take a long time to assemble. Not just their people. Even some barbarian chiefs know now that you’ve got to get a commissariat together for a serious war far from home. That puts a delay on them.

  “We’ve wasted a lot of time already, but I’d say hit them now, at once, with everything we’re got. You’ve got the Ninth Legion. And we’re not Picts and Scots. We can march in strength at short notice. Break the back of the thing with one quick stroke. Kill and return.

  “Whatever happens,” he went on, “don’t let the Caledonians make a massed charge from close by. A long-distance charge across the rocks and heather you can break up with javelins and artillery, perhaps—and we have put a lot of emphasis on making sure the scorpions and other light artillery can be worked quickly. But get a horde of the screaming red-haired devils leaping at you from a quarter-mile away—and they like to hide in ditches and wait for you—and you’re in real trouble. More than one Roman formation has come to grief at the wrong end of a Caledonian charge. Men and women, shrieking, half-naked, foam on their mouths. Between you and me—” he lowered his voice, as though we might be overheard in that windy, empty place “—enough of them, and they might give a full legion a hard time.”

  “And the flying lights?”

  “Maybe they’ve stuck swans’ wings on chariots. I don’t know. But I’m sure they’re not ready to attack yet. Otherwise we’d see them now. They aren’t good at patience. But if we find the tribes mustering and break up an attack before it’s delivered, then it’s a Triumph for you.”

  From the way he said “Triumph” I knew he meant it in the particular as well as the general sense. That could lead to other things. He probably thought that I, like so many of my rank, felt a bit more purple would look well on my cloak and toga; and perhaps he wasn’t wrong.

  “And if we don’t find the tribes mustering?”

  “We come home. We’ve given these loafers of ours a good exercise and we’ve shown the Picts the reach of civilization.”

  So we talked. I repeat this talk because I remembered its arguments many times in later days. I inspected the men as we prepared, and met some of the scouts as they came in. Gaunt, keen-eyed frontier wolves they were, battered and scarred by weather almost as much as by battle, they made me think uneasily on what the philosophers had written, of how luxury and soft living could corrupt, of how Rome was allegedly going soft at the heart. Still, we were its hard edge yet. I thought of the pleasant villas and smiling vales of the south, even here in Britain, of the farms of Tuscany, and reflected that civilized men must be guarded by less civilized ones.

  Still, I felt no guilt about relaxing with my officers in the bathhouse that night. We would not, we knew, enjoy them again for some time.

  Normally, despite the prefect’s bravado, it took a legion time to prepare for a march. Six thousand fighting men and their auxiliaries are not easily uprooted. But the Ninth had only just arrived. It was rested but not settled down, and anticipating any possible siege the granaries and warehouses behind the wall were kept filled (crucifixion was a deterrent to pilfering). It could be quickly resupplied from them.

  So once again, a few days later, it was our usual predawn start. A whole legion this time, the aquilifer with the Eagle and the significers in their leopard skins bearing the legion’s battle honors at the front of the column. (Though not quite at the front of the force—we had scouts ahead of us. Unlike Varus.)

  The wall appeared even more imposing looking back at it from the north, without the straggle of civilian dwellings along its southern side: a grim, hard rampart of civilization. New as it was, it seemed to have been standing since time began. And Mithras knows, a legion marching with its Aquila and its standards going before was a sight to see!

  The country looked superficially the same as the hills and heather moors to the south, but felt different. There was, if you allowed it to get to you, a feeling of nakedness, knowing that we were outside the wall, beyond the Roman World. Even that column of armored men looked small in the vast purple heather country, under that sky. It had been different in Gaul, where there was no such obvious rampart, though perhaps crossing the Rhine would have felt like this. For a moment the sight of the wall marching east and west to the distant hilltops and out of sight filled me with pride, as when, a boy on my first visit to Rome, I had seen the great buildings of the capitol. And again I felt, as I had then, a sudden stab of feeling like despair and death, a feeling the poetry of Virgil echoed for me: “Man can do no more!” The god of the Jews was gaining converts in Rome now, I had heard, and I thought I knew why. We had need of a god to save the world, more powerful than our little godlings of sanitation and so forth, our pantheon of deceased emperors…I set my head to the north, and I think I betrayed nothing in my face.

  We were in Britannia Barbara, part of the encircling, ever-threatening Barbaricum, where anything might happen.

  But nothing did, for the rest of that day. We passed the Pictish villages, with their cold hearths, some dead livestock around and a few hungry dogs and wildcats scavenging. I was interested to see that the Caledonian wildcats, great fanged things, easily kept the dogs at bay. Crassus said it was odd the Picts had abandoned their livestock. Our scouts looked for tracks, but too much rain had fallen for anything to be made out apart from their general route further into the north and the hills. We had the scouts, both on foot and mounted, and the auxiliaries, spread out far and wide. We saw and heard nothing human.

  We didn’t have to entrench ourselves that night. There was hard-standing for a camp a long day’s march north of the Wall. (Though calculating a day’s march was fiendishly difficult in that country, where the sun seemed to shine almost all night in summer and was gone as soon as it had arisen in winter. As a worshipper of Sol Invictus I had wondered sometimes why that happened. Now I know!) There was a ditch and walls ready for our use if we supplied the stakes for the palisades and our soldiers used their entrenching tools to repair the erosion. There were a few sheep grazing inside it, and in that uncanny emptiness and silence we were glad to see them as tokens of the world we knew. The cooks soon had them on spits.

  It grew dark. The night sentries were posted. A nearly full-strength legion and its auxiliaries, six thousand fighting men, plus a well-trained and armed servant for every four men and a straggle of camp followers who could also heft arms if necessary, need not normally fear attack—rather anything in the rest of the world should fear them—but if the Caledoni attacked in force, who knew? And I thought again of Varus.

  With Crassus, the other senior officers, and the pilus primus I inspected the lines. Scouts from outlying pickets came and went. We had brought extra scorpions and set them up around the camp.

  The Picts attacked at dusk. There was a shower of arrows and confused shouting and screaming from an outlying picket. The men were standing to and ready. Three cohorts went for them and drove them into a prepared killing ground. They charged—they always charge—straight into our scorpions and as they floundered in the ditch we poured bolts and arrows into them.

  I did not, I thought, have Varus’s problem. It was no overwhelming force that attacked us, but an ill-armed, ill-commanded rabble from several different tribes. When I had some of the survivors brought before me and questioned, they seemed confused and terrified. They claimed we had attacked them, and carried off their people. They had attacked an entrenched legion because they were desperate. They must, I thought, be desperate indeed. It made no sense. Still, a couple of crucifixions would do them no harm and the rest would earn something in the slave market. Then the prefect pointed.

  For a moment I thought it was a fiery serpent. Then I realized it was but a line of torches carried by men: but a long line. The Caledoni had crept upon us in the dark in force while a few of their number created a diversion.

  I gave thanks that we were prepared, and by no means taken by surpr
ise. But no battle against a wolfish people like the Caledoni, fighting at a time and place of their choosing, is a certain thing. And as a strategos should not, I fretted myself at that moment with fears about events I could no longer control. What if this was but a greater diversion, while other barbarians attacked the wall?

  I looked impassive enough, as I rode forward through the camp with my staff officers and gallopers. Drums were rattling with the trumpets now, and as missiles and bolts began to fly I saw the shields going up as a testudo was formed. I gave thanks again for those centurions who needed no more than a word of command. The testudo would give protection from the arrows, spears, and the lighter missiles.

  Then Roman and Caledoni stopped together.

  The stars had changed again. Great lights moved in the sky, forming strange designs. Across a drifting cloud there appeared the picture of a Roman soldier in full armor. It was projected, I know now, by an ordinary sword-light, but the effect on all may be imagined. The gods themselves, both sides thought, had intervened. We Romans accepted this with pleasure and surprise, but also as something no more than our right, and certainly not as something to break discipline over. I knew Mithras was a good god for soldiers and was gratified. The Caledoni, as might be expected, too terror-stricken to run, stood wailing.

  The testudo moved upon them, then dissolved into men with flickering swords. Rank upon rank, the legionaries advanced like the vast single-minded engine they were. They cheered and at the command surged forward. But it was a disciplined surge. The javelins of the front ranks flew in a dark mass, their swords flickered stabbing like the tongues of vipers. Crassus had not had them blacken the blades for night work, thinking the enemy ought to see the steel, and Crassus had been right.

  As the Picts went down squealing, I thought: “This will buy peace south of the wall, peace for Eboracum and Londinium. I have vindicated Hadrian’s decision to build the wall.” Hadrian was reported dead but his successor might appreciate my contribution to the imperial numen.

  Then the Jotoki ships began to descend. With their double torsion, scorpion bolts can penetrate iron armor, if not the molecularly bonded ceramics the Jotoki used. The Jotoki were forbearing. They burned the bolts in flight with sword-lights until we had no ammunition left, then began to talk to us. They fired a plasma jet to emphasize their words.

  The Jotoki had done this, or something like this, before. They picked up a fair number of our womenfolk, and civilians, specialists, and other auxiliaries from the wall, and some Pictish villagers.

  They say there are Roman soldiers garrisoning forts in China, who found their way there after their detachments were cut off by the Persians. It is easy to change masters when you have no choice in the matter.

  Perpetua held up a hand. Marcus Augustus paused the film.

  “This makes no sense,” she said. “I have been searching the records in our ship’s library. It’s had all the major encyclopedias read into it. We know the Ninth Legion, the Hispania, marched north of the wall—it was newly built then—into Caledonia and was never seen again. But we know nothing of Jotoki raids along Hadrian’s Wall.”

  “What should we expect a primitive Earth historian to say?” asked Ginger. “That giant starfish came from the sky and picked them up? He’d be kept in a little room at the top of the castle. House, I mean.”

  “True enough. Perhaps it does make a kind of sense. Hadrian’s Wall was suddenly extended and fortified about the time the Ninth Legion is said to have marched north. Then, after quite a short time, it was abandoned, and another work, the Antonine Wall, was built further north again. That was abandoned, too, after quite a short time, and the Romans fell back on Hadrian’s Wall.

  “The Romans put a huge effort into fortifying it and manning it—for about three hundred years. I gather scholars still disagree as to why. Maybe somebody did say something. And what of all the magic surrounding Arthur? Merlin and the flying dragons? And the Celtic myths? Flying, enchantments, magic weapons? Chesterton wrote in his history: ‘Suddenly the soldier of civilization is no longer fighting Goths but Goblins.’ After wars and invasions and race migrations, centuries of near-illiteracy, changes of languages, in a couple of non-technological millennia, what else might you expect to remain by way of memory of a Jotoki recruitment effort?”

  “Millennia,” said Marcus to Perpetua. “Two and a half thousand Earth years, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “About nine hundred have passed for us, as far as we can tell. We traveled fast.”

  “Then you didn’t come directly here?” Ginger broke in. Marcus glanced at him but did not deign to reply.

  “That is why your language has changed so little,” said Perpetua quickly. “That and the fact you had no tongues of human invaders to overlay it. On Earth, six hundred years after your ancestors left, there were still fragments of the Western Empire extant in France. Latin was long the language of government and scholarship—where there was government and scholarship—and of the Church in Europe. The ruler in Ravenna still styled himself ‘King of Rome, Emperor of the West,’ and the Eastern Empire still had centuries of life ahead. You are almost contemporaries of Boethius.”

  “We are still Romans! However far we have traveled! In the Mithraeum the Mysteries are still enacted. We honor our various gods. There are Jews in our ranks still, and fish-worshippers, but we have kept faith with Rome.”

  The picture resumed.

  You to whom I leave this story will know much of the ships that travel between worlds. I need not tell you of our awe and amazement, our initial disbelief, our wild thoughts that we were dead and in a Hades unlike any we had imagined, as we were taken aboard the great warship that the Jotoki named the Hard Bargainer, and its consort, the Shrewd Merchant, while about us flew as escort the Five Arms of the Wise Trade Councillor. These things you may imagine. But Roman or Caledonian, we were warriors, and we behaved as warriors. The centurions maintained discipline among our legionaries and civilians. The Caledonians wailed and howled in the manner of barbarians, but when they saw it availed them nothing they became tractable.

  It was great good fortune that our political officers already knew the Caledonian chiefs and we could speak together. Thinking I had knowledge in the matter the Caledonian chiefs agreed, grudgingly enough, to place themselves under my direction. They, being barbarians, were of course far more overawed than we. But we saw that we were all human and that bound us together. The gold the Jotoki gave us helped, and the glass and beads and mirrors for the women, both Roman and Caledonian.

  Meanwhile, we were heading away from Terra, our world, at a speed which the Jotoki told us was close to the speed of light itself, to do battle. The Jotoki had shown us representations of our enemies: great beasts like lions or Indian tigers, but armed as the Jotoki themselves were armed, with weapons of flame, and traveling like the Jotoki through the skies.

  We had little love for the Jotoki then, though they fed us and clothed us and spoke to us in our own language (though at first only through images, not daring to confront us in the flesh). But then we realized that something the Jotoki told us many times was true:

  Better we fight these felines far away than have them fall upon Terra.

  The Jotoki told us first they were taking us to a new world to train us with new weapons and tactics to fight creatures which menaced them and which, if unchecked, would conquer our own world and Rome itself. After the campaign they would, if they were able, return us to our homes. We obviously had no choice but to believe them and obey.

  Before we were placed in the chambers of deep sleep the Jotoki began to teach us of the heavens. They explained that they were traders and had taught other races before us. Once, said Jegarvindertsa, who talked to me most, they had tried to spread civilization among the stars.

  “‘Civilization is our business.’ Those were the old governor’s words, when we marched north to the wall,” I recalled.

  “You defend civilization now,” said Jegarvin
dertsa. “This is but Rome writ large. It has been said there is only one civilization, and all civilized beings are a part of one another, almost as we Jotoki are compound entities. Are you afraid?”

  “When I campaigned in Gaul and Caledonia we had short swords and javelins, and our armor was iron and leather. Now…why should I be afraid?” I had seen and tried some of the Jotoki weapons then, and certain of our centurions and other instructors had begun practicing with them.

  “Yes, your weapons and armor are very different. But so are your enemies.”

  I knew those enemies now. The Jotoki had shown me holographic eidolons of them. We fought for the gold the Jotoki gave us, and we fought because they had really given us no choice. We could hardly march home! But we were also more than mercenaries and slaves. How small and provincial our skirmishes against Germans and Gauls and Picts seemed now!

  “Let’s get at them!”

  “You and your people have learnt a lot in a short time,” said Jegarvindertsa. “If we had found you earlier things might have been very different. As it is, we still might turn the tide. But we have a long way to go. We are close to the speed of light, but still you must pass time in sleep. As you sleep you will learn more.”

  I thought then, with my newly acquired way of looking at things, that the Jotoki use of the word “tide” showed they had once been wide-ranging sailors on their own world before they went into space. It was not long since we Romans had come to know of tides. Caesar himself had not understood, during the first Roman expedition to Britannia, the difficulties and opportunities a tidal beach on Oceanus Atlanticus presented. Well, that was not surprising.

  Did we sleep long or short? There was a period of black nothingness, and then the chambers that enclosed us were opened, and the Jotoki assembled us on the great deck of the ship. As the men were mustered, Jegarvindertsa led me to the pilot’s tower.

  There was a jump and a flickering in the image. Centuries had corrupted some of the data.