by Alan Smale
He turned his back. Tonight he had other duties.
“Aelfric. With me, if you please.”
It was time to face their captive.
“I am supposed to ravish you now,” said Marcellinus, “but I shall not.”
The young Powhatani brave gaped, shaking so hard that the necklace of seashells on his chest rattled and the crow feathers nearly fell out of his hair.
“Not you,” said Marcellinus, exasperated. “You’re here to translate. Tell her that.”
The Powhatani word slave—they called him Fuscus because he was brown—only now saw the woman sitting on the blanket on the floor of the Praetor’s tent headquarters. Fuscus eyed her warily but didn’t seem upset on her behalf. Why would he be? She wasn’t of his tribe.
He babbled at her, and she replied rather haughtily for one of her smallness and unpromising situation. Compared with the mellifluous flow of patrician Latin, their primitive Algon-Quian tongue sounded like baby talk and twigs snapping. Fuscus gestured as he spoke, and the gestures were not hard to interpret.
Her eyes narrowed. The expression she turned on Marcellinus was contemptuous.
Perhaps she had misunderstood. Algon-Quian had an ungodly wide range of dialects. Marcellinus turned to the word slave. “She understands? She is my prisoner. I should brutalize—use?—use her, then give her to my men. Custom demands it. But I shall not do that. I show her mercy. Yes?” Here he knew he was on safe ground; “mercy” was one of the first words Fuscus had learned. He repeated it often.
The woman spit out a couple of words, steel in her sneer. Marcellinus sighed. “Now you’re supposed to tell me what she said.”
Fuscus cleared his throat nervously. “She say, ‘Disgust.’ And that Roman are like wild dog.” Alert to Marcellinus’s irritation, he took a step back. “She say it, sir. Not me.”
“Ask her what she was doing in the road in front of my army,” the Praetor said.
Such was the height of the 33rd Legion’s superstition that it had taken just one lone woman to bring them to a halt. Faced with twenty braves, or a thousand, his soldiers would have charged and hacked them into bloody meat. But at the sight of a solitary woman standing calmly in their path with flames leaping up from a fire behind her, they’d slowed to a ragged stand-easy and looked back over their shoulders for orders. Marcellinus would have to thicken their spines somehow before they reached the lands of the mound builders and their—Norse-alleged—city of gold.
“She from west farther, sir. Over hills-and-hills. Hear tell of Roman, come to see. She chieftain, daughter of chieftain. She ask you, go home where you come.”
“I see,” said Marcellinus.
The woman struggled to her feet. The two guards who stood in the doorway of the Praetorium tent looked at Marcellinus hopefully, but he shook his head at them, allowing her impertinence.
The woman gestured.
“She ask what you want.”
Marcellinus looked at her. “We want your land. Your country. Your gold and spices. Whatever you have is now ours.”
She glanced blankly at Fuscus and spoke. Fuscus translated, “She say you cannot take the ground. Cannot take sky. It here always.”
Marcellinus stepped closer. Well nourished compared with these people, he towered over her. The woman’s eyes widened, but she stood as tall as she could. Given that the Romans in their metal armor and red-plumed helmets must have appeared utterly alien to her, her courage was considerable.
Her forehead was flat and her hair muddy, but her cheekbones were set higher than those of the coastal tribes and her bronze skin seemed better cared for. Most telling of all, she stood straight and calm, with a dignity their local captives lacked. She was the dusk, the evening star; she was Nova Hesperia, the giant unopened continent of it. And he, Marcellinus, was a bully and past his prime. Worse, he knew it.
He made his decision. “What is her name?”
“She calls her Sisika,” said the brave.
“Well, if Sisika really is ‘daughter of chieftain,’ the tribes to the west will know her. Yes?”
“Yes,” Fuscus said.
“Then say this to her: ‘Sisika, I set you free. You will run ahead of my army and tell all the tribes of the Iroqua, tell whoever else might lie in our path that the Romans are coming.’ ” He struck his steel chest plate with his fist, making an impressive clang. “She will tell the tribes we are mighty and shall not be stopped. We will pass through their lands and onward to the west.”
The Powhatani quacked and popped at Sisika, relaying Marcellinus’s message. He continued: “If the tribes allow us passage, we will spare them. But if they resist, if any more of my men die in these cowardly sneak attacks, we will kill every man, woman, and child, every deer and bird, and the land will be silent and broken after our passing. She must tell them this or their blood will be on her head.” Marcellinus jabbed a finger toward her, and she flinched. “On you, Sisika. We will wipe them from the earth because of you.”
As Fuscus finished his translation, Marcellinus held the woman’s gaze, stern and unblinking. She stared back. Her deep brown eyes were very disconcerting.
She babbled while Marcellinus waited. One of his soldiers languidly drew his pugio, a short dagger, and poked the Powhatani from behind. The word slave yelped and said, “Sisika will do this, tell tribes Praetor words.”
She had certainly said more than that. “And …?”
“And, but, land of Iroqua, very savage, very hurt. Men of harsh.”
“And?”
“And once past Iroqua, west, is then great city, people of Hawk and Thunderbird. These will fall on you and … burn, cut off your hair, laugh.”
The city the Norsemen had told them of, perhaps. Marcellinus’s interest quickened. Now he was getting somewhere. “This Great City has gold?” He showed Sisika the ring on his finger, the plate on his table, the small statues of his lares, his household gods. “Gold?”
Sisika reached for one of the statues, and Marcellinus had to slap her hand away. Her eyes flared, and for a frozen moment he thought she might actually hit him back, guaranteeing her instant execution. Instead she turned to Fuscus and spoke.
“She ask who these toy persons are.”
“They are not toys. Ask her about the gold.”
Fuscus tried again, pointing anew to the various objects, but the answer was clear in her demeanor. She didn’t understand gold’s significance. She had never seen it before.
Fuscus looked nervous. “She say no gold.”
“And how far to the city?”
“Far and far. She not know.”
Of course she didn’t. How could she?
“All right,” said Marcellinus. “Enough. Get them out of here. Wait outside with them until I come.”
He turned as his guards manhandled the captives out of his tent. “Well, so much for that. What d’you think?”
“That your soft heart will be the death of you.” Aelfric stood comfortably at the rear of the Praetorium tent, arms folded.
“Likely enough,” said Marcellinus.
Aelfric shrugged. “Not bad, to send the woman on ahead, though the Iroqua will probably cut her down before she gets twenty miles.”
“She made it here. She can make it back.”
“Perhaps.”
Marcellinus walked to the tent door. “Did Sigurdsson return yet?”
“None of the scouts did. I’ll bring ’em to you right away when they do.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t fret,” said his tribune dismissively, walking past him out of the tent. “Our Norsemen can rip the arse out of any ‘men of harsh’ this sorry land might throw at ’em.”
Strictly speaking, they weren’t yet Roma’s Norsemen. The Imperator Titus Augustus had shut down the Viking raids on the coasts of Britannia thirty years ago, gobbling up Scand for the Imperium and acquiring every Dane and Geat and Sami clear up to Ultima Thule. But these days a nation had to live loyally within the Pax Romana for two h
undred years before its people were granted full citizenship.
By the calendar of the Christ-Risen that Aelfric’s people and most of the Norse used, it was A.D. 1218. It was a full 1,971 years since the founding of Roma, Ab Urbe Condita, and it would be the year 2100 by the Roman reckoning before every new Scand child would enter the world a Roman citizen.
The Norse didn’t care a fig about the delay, though. A pragmatic race, they had already carved themselves out a critical role. Roma needed its navy now as never before, and the well-traveled Norsemen were just the people to help them run it.
After a decade of stagnation and even retreat under the rulers who had followed Titus, the new Imperator Hadrianus III had grasped the nettle. Right out of the gate the man had thought big. He had vowed at his coronation that under his leadership the power of Roma would encircle the globe. Only twenty-nine years of age at his accession, he had figured that if he set the wheels moving quickly enough and remained popular enough to die of old age, he might leave as his legacy a world where the sun never set on the Roman Imperium.
Candidly, Marcellinus thought the man was cracked. Roma had reined in its expansion in the first place because of the high cost of defeating the Khazars and the eastern sultanates. And now Hadrianus was trying to expand the Imperium even farther into the east at precisely the moment when the Mongols and Turkic tribes were swooping westward into Kara Khitai and southward toward the Chin Dynasty. Leave the buggers to it; that was what Marcellinus thought. Let the nomadic Mongol Khan swallow all that and try to administer it. Roma should hold its current line in the sultanates around the Ganges, which Temujinus—or Chinggis, or however he wanted to be addressed these days—had shown no ambitions toward. Eventually the Mongol Khanate would overreach itself and crumble, and that would be Roma’s moment to march eastward again. In the meantime, the real estate from Hispania to the Himalaya and from the barren northern ice to the fetid jungles of Aethiopia Interior should surely be enough Imperium for anyone.
But of course it wasn’t, and so here they were, pushing on beyond the sunset into Nova Hesperia, New Land of the Evening. Because clearly if your territorial ambitions were stalled in one direction, it was only logical to spearhead an attack in the other. As if controlling two frontiers at the same time hadn’t been a nightmare for the Imperium ever since the first Nero had tried to conquer the barbarians beyond the Danube while simultaneously holding the Parthians at bay.
“Imperators,” as Marcellinus might say over dinner, “have no sense of history.”
And “Soldiers,” as First Tribune Corbulo would regularly chide him in response, “have no grasp of economics.”
Corbulo would remind Marcellinus that if popularity cost money, keeping your army loyal cost even more. Bread, circuses, and bribes: big money. And if you were an Imperator spending coin faster than you were collecting it in taxes, you needed somewhere to invade so you could steal more.
Which brought Marcellinus full circle, back to the Norse.
His officers awaited him in the open air outside his Praetorium, armor off and cloaks on against the growing breeze of dusk: Corbulo, sitting off to one side looking bored; Aelfric, tapping his foot; Tribune Marcus Tullius, solid, earnest, sunburned, and blond, still brooding over his lost men; Gnaeus Fabius, the magistrate and junior tribune Hadrianus had assigned to the 33rd Legion at the last minute either to get him out from underfoot or to spy on Marcellinus (most likely both); and Leogild, his Visigoth quartermaster. Nearby, Marcellinus’s guards stood bunched around Sisika and Fuscus.
Sisika’s eyes were wide. When they had frog-marched her into the Praetorium the castra had been little more than an outline, a large square ditch and embankment surrounding virgin meadowland. In the intervening hours the camp had sprung up all around them to become a living community of wooden buildings and goatskin tents as familiar to Marcellinus as his hometown and as foreign to Sisika as the surface of the moon.
Fuscus, who witnessed this transformation every night, had adopted an even more noticeable air of condescension toward her. It was a dynamic Marcellinus often saw among slaves and captives, this petty jockeying among the have-nothings for small scraps of perceived status. He smacked the word slave over the head and pointed down the lane toward the slave quarters, and Fuscus cringed obsequiously and set off at a trot.
To his guards, the Praetor said: “Safe conduct for this one, out of the camp. No interference. Understood?”
Leogild assessed her up and down. Sisika’s hair was still matted and her knees skinned, but her light brown skin was clear and uncreased, almost glowing in the evening light. She was easily the most attractive native they’d come across since landing on the shores of Nova Hesperia. He cleared his throat. “Couldn’t the men have a go with her first? Send her on her way proper like?”
“That is hardly what ‘safe conduct’ means,” said Marcellinus.
“They’ll be disappointed,” the Visigoth said.
“They can have the next hundred women we snare. This one has a job to do. I’m sending her out with an ultimatum to the villages ahead: get out of our way or perish.” He turned back to his guards. “Two of you, escort her to the Northgate. Nobody meddles with her.”
Sisika looked back at him with those disconcerting brown eyes. His soldiers unhappily watched her go.
Corbulo eyed her legs as she walked by. “We make agreements with barbarians now?”
“This is a new land,” said the Praetor. “We try things, and we see what works. Worst case, we’ve only lost one woman.”
“Whatever will get us to the gold more quickly,” said Gnaeus Fabius.
Too many expectations of gold. “And home more quickly,” said Marcellinus.
It was quite the walk Sisika had to make down the Cardo, hemmed in close by a long silent gauntlet of leering soldiers, but Marcellinus noted that she walked with her chin up and showed little fear. Maybe she really was “daughter of chieftain.”
“Cut off your hair, eh?” murmured Aelfric, referring to the woman’s earlier statement. “A dire threat. I’ll wager you didn’t see that one coming.”
Marcellinus swallowed. Aelfric had not seen the dead soldiers scalped by the Iroqua just hours earlier. “Perhaps they could arrange me a manicure as well,” he said.
Fifty yards shy of the Northgate, Sisika came level with the wooden shrine housing the golden eagle standard of the Legion. Her mouth dropped open, and she turned to stare at it. The Aquila, wings upraised, lightning bolts around its feet, glowered back at her with its beady raptor gaze. The aquiliferi honor guard stepped forward instantly, hands on sword hilts; orders or no orders, if Sisika had disrespected the Aquila, its guards would have cut her down where she stood. But Sisika knelt, bowing so deeply that her forehead touched the road.
Tribune Corbulo stood to watch. “She’s left it a little late to curry favor.”
Marcellinus had seen real eagles here, wheeling high in the dusk skies. And Sisika had mentioned them. “Maybe the Aquila is sacred to her, too. She honors the bird, not us.”
Sisika stood and walked on through the Northgate. If she ran, she waited until she was out of sight.
Marcellinus wished he hadn’t asked her name.
Corbulo tutted. “A wasted opportunity to raise morale, Gaius. It’ll be trouble, and we need no more of that.”
“One woman,” said the Praetor.
“Still bad tactics with the troops as fractious as they are.”
“Discipline’s a problem,” added Gnaeus Fabius, who rarely passed up an opportunity to state the obvious, or suck up to Corbulo.
“An even worse problem if the redskins keep picking us off.” Marcellinus looked around him. “I did not request a discussion on this topic, gentlemen.”
“God knows what we’d all have caught off her,” Aelfric said loudly, glancing around at the other tribunes. “I doubt these people ever bathe. A good commander safeguards his men’s health as well as his own.”
“And the men bless you for
it, sir,” Leogild said to Marcellinus, straight-faced.
Marcellinus grimaced. “Don’t we have a convenient festival coming up? Where do we stand on wine?”
“We’ll be out of corn and cheese first,” said the quartermaster. “Wine’s not yet an issue.”
The other officers looked at one another. None of them had any clearer idea of the date than Marcellinus did. His adjutants would be keeping track, but they weren’t here. And Marcellinus had raised the issue of supplies again, and that was something none of them wanted to think about.
“Let’s call it Easter,” said Aelfric. “That’s a movable feast anyway.”
“Tomorrow, not today,” warned Corbulo. “Let them walk off this disappointment first.”
“Of course,” said Marcellinus, who’d had no intention of inciting his legionaries with extra liquor this night. “All right. Get out there and make it known that she was a chieftain’s daughter whom I sent out to calm the way ahead and that I’m not setting any new precedents with this. And then remind them that tomorrow’s Easter.”
“Most of them won’t know what that is,” said Fabius.
“Or care,” said Marcus Tullius, scratching under his helmet.
“Tell ’em it’s the Christ-Risen feast of double wine rations,” said Aelfric. “They’ll understand that.”
“Dismissed,” said Marcellinus, and Leogild and most of his tribunes—Corbulo, Fabius, Tullius—saluted and set off through the camp in various directions to brief their centurions.
Naturally, Aelfric dallied. “So, Praetor. Even when you were younger. Would you have spoiled her?” He raised his hands. “Nothing implied. I’m just making conversation.”
Marcellinus looked at him. It was an impertinent question, but that was Aelfric’s way. Britons were very direct. “You don’t have daughters, do you, Aelfric?”
“No.”
“Ask me again when you do.”
Much like the Britons, the Norse were a smart people who understood the advantages of being important to the Imperium and the terrible costs of being an irritant. But every race contained its bad apples, and so the Imperator Hadrianus had issued an edict allowing no quarter to Norse pirates, those renegade few who refused to come to heel.
