“That sounds like a fairy tale, Dr. L’Esperance, and very naïve of you.”
“You forget, I am not talking about possibilities. I’m talking about what has already happened in your future.”
“Once again, I must ask you to prove it.”
“Very well, Dr. Roberts. I see you cannot believe me otherwise. Will you ask your administrative assistant, Milly to step into the lab?”
“Why?”
“A demonstration.”
“I’m growing tired of this.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Dr. L’Esperance said, “but if you trust me, I will not deceive you.”
Eleanor, more fed up than curious, hit the communicator. She did not need to speak into it. Milly knew which lighted signal meant the lab. In a few moments, there was a knock on the door. Eleanor hit the release from where she sat, and Milly entered, briefly glancing at Dr. L’Esperance.
Eleanor, who usually had very little to say to Milly anyway, left the talking to Dr. L’Esperance.
“What is your name, please?” Dr. L’Esperance asked her.
“Milly Nederland.”
Eleanor raised her eyes. She had not known Milly’s surname.
“Full name, please.”
“Milly Maastricht Nederland.
“Will you please tell Dr. Roberts about your mission in this agency and our connection?”
Milly queried Dr. L’Esperance with a brief look, but Dr. L’Esperance nodded, with a sly smile. Milly smiled as well. Milly was almost as tall as Dr. L’Esperance. Like Dr. L’Esperance, there was a faintly European-sounding cadence and pronunciation to her speech, but Eleanor was at a loss to guess what their native languages might be, or even if they were the same.
“I am a Retriever, and occasionally, as on this mission, I serve as a Base Scout. I am here to collect data that is utilized by forward units in the mission.”
“How long have you been employed here?”
“Real time or elapsed time?”
“Both.”
“In elapsed time, I’ve been working here for two years. In real time, I’ve been away for about a minute and a half.”
“In what year were you born?”
“2983 A.D.”
Dr. L’Esperance beamed satisfaction and turned to Dr. Roberts, who looked agape at Milly.
“Thank you, Milly.” Dr. L’Esperance said, and Milly nodded, and left the lab. Turning to Eleanor, she said quietly, “How do you know your neighbor is not from a future time? How do you know a person serving you a meal or selling you a garment is not a Retriever, or a Scout, or what we call, The Lost?”
Eleanor folded her arms on the counter before her and put her head down.
“Oh, God.”
Then the door handle clicked, and General English walked into the room. He was not alone.
CHAPTER 18
Colonel John Moore’s narrative:
The druids retreated to the forest beyond the surrounding hills at Boudicca’s order, taking with them all that was left of Celtic blessings and magic. The warriors were on their own now.
Boudicca drove her chariot to the front and spoke softly to her horses. Like the mythical Aoifa in Cailte’s story who battled, then loved the great Cuchulainn, she shared a tender relationship with these animals that took her in and out of danger so skillfully. She risked their lives as often as she had risked her own, yet they seemed forgiving of it and responded to her touch and to her voice.
Her brother Dubh, his huge body covered with the blue dye, paced with his sword, an expression of jubilant anticipation on his face. You can’t buy his kind of childish bravado. You can’t kill it, either.
They caught each other’s eye. She nodded to him, and he stopped pacing. He bowed, deeply, dutifully. She extended her arm, as if to reach for him over the bustling fragment of her huge army that divided them. Dubh muscled past the people as mere distractions, and took her thin hand in his big, dirty paw. He touched it to his blue forehead, and she briefly stroked his hair as she might have done when she was just his big sister and not the queen. What would have happened to her if she had not married Prasutagas? Whose wife would she be, and what kind of life would she make for herself? Perhaps she did not consider these questions or trouble herself about them. Perhaps she accepted being queen as her destiny. If so, she would likely believe this battle was her destiny as well.
She said goodbye to her brother, until they met again as victors or as ghosts.
Cailte was near them, preparing for the battle, granted at last the right to be more to the queen than her evening’s entertainment. He was the most valuable player in her personal vanguard. She nodded to him, and he bowed to her. She smiled, encouragingly, sincerely, and he looked humbled and appreciative for the first time.
The blue woad decorated Cailte’s naked body in markings fierce and magical, a look both striking and scary. To the Celt, the body designs offered more protection than armor, certainly more freedom of movement, which was all they ever cared about, and the magic gave them inspiration.
The Romans, however, were professionals. They had a different kind of inspiration. Military service was a career, an honor of nobility. It gave one special rights as a citizen. The very word populus meant “body of warriors.”
They wore their body armor in flexible horizontal strips. Their distinctive helmets covered their cheeks. Their long shields covered their bodies. The shields were bound along the edges in metal, but the body was the shield was several layers of thin wood glued together, and the front covered by red leather and decorated in bronze with thunderbolts, the emblems of Jupiter.
Each man carried two seven-foot-long javelins, and swords that were shorter than the long, broad swords of the Celts, who assumed that swords, like artwork and body painting, had as much to do with a sign of virility as anything else.
An eerie moment of calm hovered over the valley of human bodies, as if both armies were collectively drawing a last deep breath. Then the other shoe dropped and time resumed, inching its weary way from past, to present, to future.
Boudicca gave her command.
A roar of voices lifted to the hills and a people descended. Their collective footfall thunderous, they charged in an angry, shrieking, blue swarm toward the enemy.
The Romans stood fast and firm, and watched, I’m sure with at least some sense of horror, as the Celts swarmed through the gap, the chariots, the first volley of spears, the cavalry, and then hundreds of thousands of infantry, men and women both, screaming, screaming, screaming vengeance as they ran toward them.
Boudicca, who could control her chariot, turn, and stop, circled and drove ahead, circled and drove ahead until the charge had been led and there was no taking it back. When the full force of her army had fed itself off her energy, and when the danger became too great for her horses, she pulled back. She climbed the slope to organize a flanking maneuver. She pulled a stream of screaming warriors with her, wherever she drove, as if she had them tied by invisible ribbons to her chariot wheels.
They were sixty meters away from the Romans, fifty meters, forty meters. Then thousands, I mean thousands of Roman javelins were fired into the air, followed moments later by a second volley of thousands of javelins. Then the textbook Roman blocks of soldier formations moved forward, as one body, one united, mechanical, killing monster, and the Celts were squeezed into the gap. The Celts seemed as savage animals to the Roman soldiers, but no more so than their own bullying centurions, so their destiny was sealed, too. The common foot soldiers had no choice but to kill, and they were very good at their work.
The Celts were caught in the funnel made by the valley and their own massive numbers. They could not move forward, and they could not go back.
The Romans drew their short swords from their scabbards, closed ranks behind long, curved shields, and sliced into the wedge of Celts. Because they were now bodies upon bodies, the Celts had no room to use their long swords. Their arms were pinned, and the Romans stamped over their
bodies in hob-nailed boots, thrusting, stabbing, marching over their victims’ faces as they fell, then thrusting their swords into the ones behind. The soldiers became a faceless wall of shields, a wall of deliberate pain, automated and merciless.
The screams of vengeance became screams of terror and suffering. Unholy slaughter, through a dispassionate textbook maneuver. Bodies fallen were trampled by thousands of foot soldiers and quickly mashed to unrecognizable muck. The smell of the human gore, the sight of disfigurement, and suddenly all the senses became painfully acute.
If you are a warrior in such a place and at this moment, you are transformed beyond your training, beyond your personality. The adrenaline in you makes you strangely focused, and the sensitivity to sounds of screams and groans and cries, the smell of death and blood, the blessed gift of sight with which you were born tortures you. You are betrayed by your own senses that have brought you this far. All your instincts twist inside you. So focused to the detail of murder, you cannot switch off your senses, though you desperately want to be numb. The numbness comes afterwards.
I was a warrior. In another time, firing off a missile would have caused far more destruction, but for me, far less pain.
I stayed to the far line, and climbed the valley slope. I hid in the trees. I could not see Boudicca now, I could not distinguish one person from another; they were all one turbulent, grotesque waving sea of bodies. I wasn’t sure of where to go, even of where the lines of battle were now because they had become so blurred, so I just kept to the trees. I knew that after the Romans finished their primary maneuver to break the Celts, they would send hunting parties out for the rest of us on the fringe. I had a little time. I had to use it well.
The legionnaires moved now to plug the gap. Straggling Celts in the rear broke and ran. The Romans, however, did not allow for tactical retreat by the enemy. That was not in their policy. They pursued the runners, and even went so far as to take their killing to the distant edge of the open plain where the noncombatants watched with horror. They who sat high upon carts with the remnants of a traveling camp, suddenly shuddered and stumbled with alarm, but before they knew it, the Romans were upon them. The old, and the children, were butchered. Their horses and animals were butchered.
Did the woman leave? Tailtu? I could not go back to see. I could not help her now. My mission was to survive. Just survive, Dr. Ford had said, we’ll take care of the analysis when you get back.
How are you going to make sense of this, Ford? You put this on a graph, you academic bastard, I’ll make you eat it.
I don’t think she left. I couldn’t make her leave. She was dead. Move on. I did not want to know, and I could not help imagining.
I kept running, balancing along the steep hillside, clawing my way.
Despite their magnificent maneuvering and tactics, defeating the Celts was no short work for the Romans. There were almost ten times as many Celts as Romans here today. They had their work cut out for them, but they were professionals. This was just another day at the office to them. This was what they were here to do.
It took all day. All day. One whole day of murder. Tens of thousands of deaths, one at a time. One by one.
All things end, don’t they? Even this. Finally, no more shouts echoed in the valley, only moans as distant and intangible as hope, which, like the moans, grew weaker as the hours passed. No more charging of armies moving as one creature, only the scattered, broken, and intensely individual martyrdom of souls. The bodies in the valley made a lumpy, slick and sloppy road for the Romans to walk upon, which they did, the cleanup squad, impaling the odd man or woman here and there who still stubbornly lived. The Romans welcomed them into the Empire.
As the sun set beyond the hills, the Romans broke into different details of men. Some were sent to the woods to kill stray escaped Celts, some were sent to round up specimens for the slave market, and some put to work on the crucifixion squad, raising crossbars on the hilltops that surrounded the bloody valley floor.
Two Roman soldiers suddenly tore out from the brush beside me and I turned sharply on my sore leg, uttered a modern-day obscenity, and dug in my heels to get away from them. Even with their armor they were faster than me. They worked together to cut me off like a dog rounding up sheep. It was no use. This wasn’t going to work. Instead, I pulled up short and stopped before they could decapitate me.
They caught me. I threw down my sword, partly to avoid having to kill, partly to avoid appearing as a warrior. If I appeared to them as a trainable servant, they might keep me alive. I dropped to my knees before them.
“Misericordiam.” I said, my hands clasped in a pleading gesture before me as I begged for mercy. My knowledge of Latin would make me a good slave prospect. Like my Dad always said, with the right skills you can get the right job.
They looked at each other while I obediently paid homage to their blood and gore-covered legs. They thought the same thing; that I might be of use. One of them banged me upside the head with the hilt of his sword, just to show me who was boss, but they kept me alive. I was worth something. I had job security. For now, they put me to work on the crucifixion detail.
The soldiers had me working the forest, cutting the crucifixion poles in the last light of day. Several other captives worked with me, all under the supervision of a Roman construction battalion. We dragged the posts to the cleared hillsides surrounding the valley where the crosses would be raised like a string of Burma Shave signs to announce the Romans’ victory, and to warn the peasants of the countryside to beware what happens when they forget who their masters are.
I looked up, and there he was. Cailte.
His arms lashed to each end of the raised crossbar, his feet bound to the support pole. His legs had been broken, that he might die more painfully. Like their symmetric temples and their precise language, there was something dramatic and eternal about their torture. Long after these distinct aspects of Roman life ceased to be utilized, they remained for us as symbols.
Bone protruded through skin, and streaming dark blood mingled with the blue woad. The sickly colors ran together and dripped down the shredded skin and muscle of his mangled legs, down to the soft green grass below.
He glanced downward at me.
“Once, there was a warrior-bard,” I whispered hoarsely to him, “who spoke of courage, and desire. His people were better for his stories. His enemies punished him, and his agony at their hands was a tribute to everything he ever wanted for himself, and everything he ever was, and everything he was never going to be. They never truly captured him.”
I reached my hand to him, touched his foot lightly.
“I will remember you in many days to come, Cailte. I will tell this last story for you.”
He looked at me with his gray eyes that were glassy with his pain and the experience yet to come. He looked away.
He had company on the ridge of hills that encircled and protected the bloody valley. Human bodies dangled like sheets in the sweet hilltop breeze, waiting. Death by crucifixion is not sudden. It is slow, agonizing, and the detail of the ghastliness of a human being’s death is to be witnessed in more horrific detail than even in those bodies that perished under the sword and boots of the soldiers below on the battlefield. Here on the rough crossbar, the body takes its time to shut down and decompose. The mind goes first.
It panics, it pleads loudly in a head that has already surrendered to pain.
The body reacts, its life system working to clot the blood, to stabilize the blood pressure, to slow the heart, almost as if it doesn’t know yet it is dying. It dies piece by piece.
The soul goes through no such process. It merely soars.
I took a moment, and took a deep breath.
Then I hefted the pole I had cut, and swung it at the Roman who guarded me. I caught him in his chest plate, and he stumbled back, and I immediately drove my thumb into his neck. He gasped and choked, and could not call for help while I took off limping. I could not run towards the forest wher
e I had been captured. The way was blocked by too many soldiers and too many captives raising crossbars to the sky.
Instead I stumbled down the hill into the valley and onto the battlefield, hoping to make my way to the far rim of the valley beyond and climb those hills to escape.
There were no rivers to cross, only a sea of bodies.
I reached the valley floor, and I crouched, stepping carefully over the dead.
I hoped I would be indistinguishable among them in the twilight.
I heard the sound of voices, and the intermittent stab of sword into flesh and bone. The cleanup squad, they were still out here on the battlefield, making sure the dead were dead. The Celts had a reputation of guerrilla tricks, such as pretending to be dead and then rising up to attack. Those Roman soldiers needn’t have worried. These bodies weren’t going anywhere.
I lowered myself down among them, flat upon them, and crawled. I touched their cold skin, their sticky blood congealing upon skin, their clothes, and one another. Here and there I touched a detached body part. I shut my mind off. As best I could. I tried to be dispassionate. Dispassionate like the soldiers. Dispassionate like Eleanor. She would see these fly-infested corpses as specimens. She could do it.
A lone soldier drew near, his mind shut off, too, I suppose, from the dull, repetitive work. I squashed myself flat against the back of the next fallen man I had reached. I put my chin on his shoulder and tucked my face against his, as if I were cuddling him. I could hear the Roman soldier stop, and stiffen. I closed my eyes.
I took a deep breath of the smell of decay and held it.
The soldier seemed to have held his breath as well, for he was just as still. I heard the sound of a distant voice. Then I realized the soldier was only trying to listen to this far-off voice, a command for him to come in from the battlefield, to report to another sector. He walked away, lifting his weary legs over the gore and humans, much as one would trudge through a heavy snowfall. I exhaled softly into the ear of the man upon whom I had been lying.
Myths of the Modern Man Page 17
