Debt of Ages

by Steve White

  “Augustus,” Tylar interjected, “do you recall what made you decide to stay in Bourges, that spring of 470, and wait for the reinforcements from Soissons?”

  The Restorer looked blank for a heartbeat, then blinked. “Of course! I hadn’t thought of it in years, but seeing Bedwyr reminded me. Yes, a few words I had with him as we were preparing to advance into Berry. He didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know—his words just crystallized certain doubts I had had all along.” Suddenly, his eyes widened and he rounded on Artorius. “Are you telling me, spirit, that those few words made the difference between the real world and this nightmare spirit world of yours? That the merest instant of wavering on my part separated the empire from oblivion… ?” He came abruptly to a halt, silenced by what he had seen on Artorius’ face. For he, and he alone, knew with a knowledge beyond the need for thought what the expressions of that face meant.

  “Augustus,” Artorius said slowly, “I’ve asked you to accept much this night. Now I must ask you to believe one more thing that defies belief. Since my… departure from the world, I have been vouchsafed a vision of the future—the future of my world and also of yours.” The Restorer crossed himself, while Artorius gathered himself to say that which he knew he himself would once have found unacceptable. “You have achieved all that I once dreamed of—no, more than I ever dared dream of. I swear that my ambitions stopped with making the British High Kingship secure…”

  “Yes, I swear,” whispered the Restorer.

  “… but I can’t deny that in my private moments, in my thoughts that I never shared with Gwenhwyvaer or anyone, I saw myself as the world-restorer that all my teachers had held up as the ideal. Well, you are that ideal. And now I know that what you have done—what I would have done but for one blunder—will blight the future beyond redemption, dooming it to…”

  “No!” The Restorer drew back, and his sword came up again. “Now I know you for what you are, spirit: a demon, sent to sow the seeds of doubt! But you confound yourself out of your own lying mouth, for you admit that what I’ve done saved the empire…”

  “Yes,” Artorius said flatly. “You saved it, as I would have in your place. And now you’ve seen it at its core. Are you certain that it really ought to be saved?”

  “More madness,” the Restorer said, but unsteadily, not with a roar of full-blooded outrage. “Oh, aye, I’ve seen the corruption, and the waste, and the way the emperor has been made into a gilded idol served by a fat-gutted priesthood of officials and eunuchs… I’ve seen it all, and tried to change it, only to find that its like the scaffolding that can’t be changed without bringing the whole house crashing down.” His voice took on something like a beseeching note. “And it must stand! If what you say is true, you saw everything I saw up to the Battle of Bourges. You saw what the barbarians leave of a town they sack. You saw…”

  “Augustus, I of all people know what you were trying to accomplish. I—you—grew to manhood knowing only empire or chaos. But since my life sundered from yours I’ve learned that there are other ways. I’ve also learned a very wise saying: ‘Be careful what you wish for—you may get it.’ ” Artorius drew a deep breath. “In my world, the fall of the empire was so complete that men lost sight of the truth of my life. But that only let them read whatever meaning into my story they wanted or needed. And because I had failed, they didn’t have to face the reality of what my victory would have meant… what yours will mean, as you’ve come to suspect in the innermost secret places of your heart. Instead, they made me the embodiment of all their aspirations for the unattainable. So I lived on in memory, not as I really was but as men needed to believe I had been. God knows I was unworthy of what my name came to mean… but I like to think the legend they made of me helped light their way through the dark years after Rome’s fall.”

  A long time passed before the Restorer spoke. “So, spirit, we both live on—I in history, for I gave Rome back to the world, and you as a fable in a world that will have to do without Rome…”

  “Aye, Pan-Tarkan” Artorius cut in, shifting to the British tongue and to the title of the hereditary commander of that originally Sarmatian cavalry unit which now included the Britons on whose tongues it sounded something like Pendragon. “And my empire of woodsmoke and fairy-light, unlike yours of stone and laws, will let that world grow into something Rome could never have allowed.”

  “Aye, it’s in my heart that you’ve the right of it,” the Restorer said in the same tongue, barely above a whisper. “But what was I to do? What am I to do? For whatever the future may hold, there are many this night who are sleeping under their whole roofs in the knowledge that they can reap a whole harvest tomorrow. What of diem?”

  “Leave mem in the peace you’ve given them, Pan-Tarkan. Let them raise their children behind your shield. But for the sake of those children, and their children for more generations than you can know, I ask you to do one thing. In the name of all that we share—a sharing beyond ordinary ken—I ask this of you.” He made a smooth transition back to Latin. “Reinstate Acacius as Patriarch of Constantinople.”

  “What?! But it was only three years ago that I sent him packing! I’d never hear the end of it from Sidonius, from all my Western supporters…”

  “That’s precisely the point, Augustus,” Tylar cut in. ‘The West must go its own way. This will make it want to do so. And Ecdicius will lead it.”

  “Ecdicius!” The Restorer’s eyes shone. “I have no son, but he makes me feel…” He stopped. “But you say he’s to lead the West into rebellion ?”

  “He won’t see it that way, Augustus. He’ll be barred from succeeding you by conspirators. He’ll simply be doing the only possible thing—as you did for all those years following the Battle of Bourges.”

  “Yes.” The Restorer nodded slowly. “Yes. Well, spirit,” he addressed Artorius with the famous grin, “if I can’t trust you, who can I trust? But it can’t be at once. What about the current Patriarch, who I appointed to replace him?”

  “The world knows that the old man was just a transitional appointment, Augustus. He’ll not live to see another summer. Wait until he’s gone and then call Acacius back.”

  “Well, I suppose I can come up with some kind of reasonable pretext to do it. And I suppose you’ll want me to give him the same kind of support I would a Patriarch of my own choice?”

  -“Just so, Augustus.” Artorius’ grin was like a mirror of the others. “It shouldn’t be too hard. We both know how much you really care about doctrinal disputes!” He gestured at the unconscious Scholarians. “When we leave, summon more guards and tell them that your cry for help frightened off the intruders who fought these. I fear the palace will be turned upside down for a few days’ searching.”

  “Very well.” The Restorer looked at him long and hard, one more time, and then said, simply, “Farewell.” Then he turned to Tylar and Sarnac. “Tertullian and Bedwyr! I never knew what became of you two. No one could find you at the time of the Battle of Bourges. But yes, Bedwyr, I do remember talking to you shortly before that…” He seemed about to say more, but Tylar forestalled him.

  “Don’t brood overmuch about what has passed before this night, Augustus. Just remember that your place in history, and in the hearts of the people for whom you won a time of peace, is secure. And now we must go. In fact, we must leave Constantinople. But our companion Andronicus will remain in the city.” He indicated Andreas, who had been gaping. “He will be in contact with you from time to time over the next few years—after which we may well see you again.”

  “Will you be going far?” the Restorer asked. “I can give you a pass to use the imperial post.”

  “It is better if we travel in our own way, Augustus, though we must indeed journey far. All the way to Britain, in fact.”

  “Britain!” The imperial face wore a look as far-off as that misty island. “Its been so many years… Will you, perhaps, see the Regent?”

  “It is entirely possible that we will s
ee the lady Gwenhwyvaer, Augustus,” Tylar said smoothly. “Is there any message you would like us to convey?”

  “Tell her…” The glow went out of the Restorer’s eyes, and he gave Artorius an odd look. “Tell her only that… I wish it had been better with us.”

  Artorius returned the look gravely. Tiraena regarded them both with an expression Sarnac could not read.

  Chapter Seven

  “Are you sure Andreas will be all right?”

  “Oh, quite.” Tylar responded to Sarnac’s anxious question in an abstracted manner, standing in the field beside the old Roman road beside the derelict shrine of Hermes and guiding his ship in by mental command. “He’ll stay at Koreels house and get regular reports on developments over the next six years. It won’t be a tedious wait for him; Koreel has a stasis chamber which will allow him to skip the intervening periods. By the time we see him again, in 491, only a month or so of subjective time will have passed for him—and, hopefully, even less for us. Ah!”

  “Hopefully?” Tiraenas worried query was cut short by the breeze from the descending spacecraft. Dawn was breaking over the Sea of Marmara, and even without their light-gathering optics they could see the grass being pressed flat over a wide expanse of meadow.

  “Well,” Tylar remarked offhandedly, “one can never be absolutely sure about these things, however carefully one tries to plan them.” A portal appeared, with the ship’s interior visible beyond it. They hurried aboard. The portal vanished, a sudden breeze caused the grasses to sway, and the abandoned shrine of Hermes was left to its decay.

  They proceeded at moderate altitude and leisurely velocity—no need to spread rumors of Judgement Day with a sonic boom—on a west-northwest heading, keeping pace with the dawn. The land unfurled beneath them, growing more and more corrugated as they passed over the Balkan Mountains and what would, for a little while in their reality, be called Yugoslavia. Then they were over the titanic masses of the Dinaric Alps. On they went, over mightier and mightier snow-capped ranges that held nary a ski chalet, until somewhere below were the headwaters of the Rhine. Then they were over the middle reaches of that river on both of whose banks Rome’s writ now ran, for the Restorer had incorporated the Franks and fulfilled the dream of the first Augustus by advancing the imperial frontier to the Elbe.

  Sarnac knew better than to look for engineering works visible from this altitude. There was an occasional glimpse of a line too straight to be anything but a Roman road, but there was nothing like the artificial environment that clothed his Earth. For all he could see, this might as well have been the year 485 a.d. of his own history, with West Rome nine years fallen. But he fancied that he could sense something of the quickening imperial life in the regions below him, over which dawn continuously broke as they flew west.

  “How did he do it?” he asked Tylar. “Oh sure, he put down the barbarians. But that wasn’t what was fundamentally wrong with the empire.”

  “Don’t underestimate the importance of stopping the constant depredations,” the time traveler told him. “But you’re right; what’s really been causing civilization in the West to collapse into feudalism is a tax system that shortsightedly treated the Western cities as revenue sources, killing a fragile yearling by trying to use it as a beast of burden. Under such circumstances, the cities died and their inhabitants attached themselves to some powerful landlord or other, who could protect them from the states taxgatherers. In our reality, the process continued, with the Roman landowning class being replaced by a Teutonic one. The Restorers fiscal reforms have been far more important than the battles the chroniclers will record.”

  Tylar gazed at the sunrise for a moment and then continued. “Also, there’s the matter of timing. The Huns have withdrawn to the steppes, where their clans bicker over the sorry remnants of Attila’s empire. And the Avars won’t arrive in Europe for another generation or two. So Europe is getting a respite from central Asian invaders while the imperial structure is still just barely salvageable. That’s why this period is so uniquely crucial—why the fabric of reality is so very weak.”

  They swept on over the Flemish lowlands and out over the channel. The sun had caught up with them, and far below gleamed the white cliffs of Dover.

  “Silence! In the name of God and of the Augustus, I will have order here!”

  The shouting and fist-brandishing halted, and in the sudden silence the two groups of men on opposite sides of the long table turned to the woman at its head. She had risen from her high seat to shout them down, and now she stood glaring at them, silently defying anyone to disobey her. None did.

  Gwenhwyvaer, wife (albeit long-separated) of Artorius Augustus and his regent here in Britain, was still magnificent in her fiftieth year. She still stood regally erect to the full stature that had, in her youth, reminded old men of her great-grandfather Magnus Maximus. The red-gold blaze of her hair had been damped down by the invasion of gray. But her eyes were still the same vivid blue which now flashed dangerously at the Britons to her right and the Saxons to her left. Seeing her, these men saw the visible presence of the empire.

  The visible presence of the empire! What a colossal irony! Ambrosius, I hope you’re watching now from whatever corner of Hell is reserved for censorious prigs— you, who always saw me as a separatist enemy of the Borne you worshipped, and hated me for it. Gwenhwyvaer’s features stiffened as usual at the thought of the general who had been Artorius’ regent until his death; but then they relaxed just a bit, and a slight smile crept out. And yet, you old bastard, the greatest irony of all is that now that I sit in this seat I almost wish I had you back. Not quite … but almost.

  She shook her head to clear it of old memories. Ambrosius’ victories over the rebelling Saxon foederatii had laid the groundwork for Artorius to restore the High Kingship that Ambrosius himself had refused to accept. But marrying a descendant of Maximus had given the young High King legitimacy, in this land with its matrilinear traditions that the Romans called “Celtic” but which dated back to forgotten peoples before the coming of the Celts. So, to the Britons at least, she represented not just the Augustus of Rome but the High King as well. As for the Saxons… well, they had only recently settled into the role of imperial subjects, and the British High Kingship meant nothing to them. But the name of Artorius did. And they knew her for an ally.

  More irony, she thought. By trying to smooth the Saxons’ assimilation into Britain, I’ve alienated my own natural supporters, the British diehards. She turned to those diehards’ leader.

  “Cador, I see that I was wise to order all weapons turned over to my guards at the start of these conferences. I know it’s folly to expect young hotheads to hold their tempers— but you? At your age?”

  “Forgive me, Lady,” Cador of the Dumnonii mumbled. “But I’m not too old to stand up for what we fought for under Ambrosius and your husband the High King… er, the Augustus. Nor will I be, as long as I’m above the ground!”

  “Nor are some of us too young!” Cador’s son Constantine was a younger replica of his father in his dark fieriness. “We’ve heard from our sires and grandsires the tale of how the Saxons broke their faith and ravaged this land for years. And now that Artorius stands triumphant, first here in Britain and then in the Empire beyond…” All at once his hurt showed and he seemed as young as he was. “Is this what we Britons fought and bled for? Bad enough that these pigs continue to wallow in the eastern lands that they’d already seized. Are we now to let more of them in?”

  “And give them lands all too close to Dumnonia?” his father put in, glaring across the table at the two relatively new arrivals who led the Saxon delegation.

  “Pigs, is it?” Aelle of the South Saxons spoke in Latin even more heavily accented than usual, and his lined face grew florid behind its luxuriant growth of gray-blond mustache. “Our folk had held those eastern lands, as loyal allies of Rome, for generations. Why do you think the old Romans named that land the ‘Saxon Shore’? But then your own High King Vortigern br
ought in the Jutish freebooter Hengist and his cutthroats! If you knew anything about our lands beyond the North and Narrow Seas, you’d know that a younger son of a jarl who wants to go raiding can always gather a crew of men outside any family—the kind of scum who can be found in any nation!”

  “All Saxons are scum!” Cador leaned forward, gesturing his son back. “And if they held the Saxon Shore for generations, it was only to breed mongrels with our women!” He glared directly at the young man beside Aelle—very young to be an ealdorman among the Saxons, but more and more prominent in their councils since his arrival in Britain the previous year.

  Cerdic of the West Saxons smiled at him easily, then responded in fluent British. “Well, now, I’m thinking that in my case at least you’ve the wrong shore for mongrel-breeding, Cador of the Dumnonii. And the wrong men doing it! My mother was of those Saxons who’ve settled along the lower Loire, in Gaul. She always told me my father was a Briton, which was why she’d given me a name of his people. That was after Artorius had broken her people—and yet she and hers were among those families which, through his intervention, weren’t moved off their land afterwards to serve Childeric the pig-king of the Franks! Ah, Lady,” he addressed Gwenhwyvaer, “I could find it in me to pray to your cross-god if he’d grant me the boon of having known that man before he moved on to Romaburg, far beyond the ken of the likes of me… and of you also, Cador, so you needn’t be so high and mighty! And,” he added with a flash in his eyes that was pure Celtic, “if it’s Saxons stealing your women that worries you, you might well ask yourself why they’re willing to be stolen!”