by John Barnes
“Siege guns like the ones that were supposed to be introduced here are mainly aimed at walls and towers,” I said. “They take so much effort to move and re-aim that you can’t use them very much against troops in the field. So what they’re good for is taking a city, where you have a wall or a fortified part to batter apart. And naturally people don’t just stand there and die while the battering happens, so the casualty rate isn’t necessarily very high.
“But a field gun is intended to be wheeled onto a battlefield and pointed and fired wherever it’s needed. That’s why those things have wheeled carriages and limbers—the things the mules are pulling them by. So a field gun is fired against troops in the open field—and it kills a lot of them.”
“I wonder if that hole in the shield and the musket rest is Caldwell’s trick, or Caesar’s?” Chrysamen said, as another legion went by. “And will the armor stand up to the shot, anyway?”
“If they’re far enough away,” I said. “But I have a feeling we’ll know way too much about it before this is over.”
“It was my invention, by the way,” Caesar said, behind us. He was smiling again, that tight-lipped look that I was coming to realize meant he felt very alive and full of energy. “It took me quite a while to figure out how men could fire muskets from behind a shield wall—and I had to modify a lot of things to make this practical.”
He was perched on a bicycle of his own, and now he slapped the seat, and said, “My other great invention is the idea of springs under the seat. My men can ride a lot farther than anyone else’s.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him, and besides, why shouldn’t he be proud? He had indeed thought of it himself.
“I assume you all can ride these, since the device came from an ATN timeline,” he went on, oblivious to us. “I’m having four of them brought to you; naturally, most of your things will be in the baggage wagons.” Then he jumped on his cycle and pedaled away; I noted how straight and stiff he sat as he rode, and figured the springs were getting some extra workout. I also was surprised at just how dignified he seemed to be.
A dozen young legates formed a squadron dashing along behind him on their cycles, and then, in the dim predawn gray light, he faded into the huge crowd of armed men, all in process of assembly.
Half an hour later, we were sitting on our bicycles—all “girls’ models” since everyone in this timeline wore a skirt—with a whole party of miscellaneous slaves of Caesar’s. They were a lively bunch, and educational in their way; they all seemed to be competing for the position of Caesar’s favorite bed partner, and I didn’t notice that the men were any less competitive than the women. There was a vast array of skills among them—cooks, musicians, poets, painters, a couple of very attractive young redheads of each gender whose skills were probably not displayed in public much—bodyguards, dancers, actors, everything you could think of that went into making life comfortable. There were half a dozen strong young men whose major duty was putting up the several large tents that served as field quarters for Caesar’s party.
And whose minor duty, as far as I could tell, was to look great in a jockstrap and a coat of oil.
I’m not a prude, per se; Caesar was a powerful man in a culture that kept slaves, and I wasn’t terribly shocked that he liked to be comfortable, or that he tended to mess around in his own household. What was bothering me was that Porter was getting ears full of all this. Girls a lot younger than she were vying with each other over who “dearest Gaius” had dragged into bed how often. If it had been just Chrysamen and Paula, the three of us might have found it all amusing, but I was dying of embarrassment on Porter’s behalf.
I guess it showed, because Porter suddenly whispered to me, in English, “Oh, grow up, Mark, these are Romans; of course they have sex all the time.”
“You’re confusing the late Empire with the late Republic,” I stammered. “Caesar is a bit unusual for his day, and a lot of people thought this was all made up by his political enemies.”
People were beginning to stare at us because we were speaking a language they couldn’t understand, so we clammed up at that point. But I figured as long as Porter wanted to pretend she could be sophisticated and cool about it, it wasn’t my place to get bent out of shape on her behalf.
I even began to find some of the razzing the cooks were getting amusing.
At last the command came to mount up, and the whole vast column of bicycles that had been painstakingly assembled on the Via Flaminia got into motion. Because the knotted rope as chain, and the wooden pin gears, did not permit a derailleur or a hub shift, the cranks had to be a little outsize, so against the just-turning-light skyline in front of us, the legions seemed to bob up and down in great waves, their round cycle helmets and the shoulder pieces of their gear giving them a strangely uniform look in silhouette, like a vast horde of beetles doing the Wave. The weather was improving a tiny bit—the rain wasn’t freezing, and there was less of it—and we got off smoothly.
An hour later I was beginning to admire the hell out of Roman training. My bottom was promising to be sore soon, if it wasn’t already, and my thighs were killing me. Chrys, beside me, seemed a bit more comfortable, but I think her cycle fit her better. Porter looked like she’d die rather than complain, and like the choice was coming up pretty quickly.
Paula was chugging along strongly, apparently enjoying the ride; she was more athlete than any of us, actually, and back home she was the sort of person who enters marathons at the last minute because she’s not doing anything that weekend.
It was a pretty long ride. Forum Sempronii, the next big town, was about fifteen miles away by road, almost all of it uphill—a day’s march for the legions in the old days, but now just a three-hour ride, with a break of about five minutes every hour.
The second break was prolonged quite a bit for most of us; we saw a group of cyclists leading strings of horses start out in advance of us.
“What’s that?” Porter asked.
About all I know about horses is that you put oats in one end and the feet move, and that the maintenance is a lot more complicated than it is for a motorcycle, which is saying something. They made us learn to ride and to care for horses (and camels, llamas, mules, donkeys, water buffalo, and several things you don’t find in our timeline) at the ATN training camp, and I spent just as little time on it as I could get away with.
But Chrys and Paula both loved riding, even though they’d never gotten Porter very interested in it, and so it was Chrys who answered, “Human beings are actually some of the most efficient distance-running animals there are. The reason people ride horses is because the horse does all the work, not because the horse does it better. And the bicycle drastically improves human performance. I was noticing before that they keep switching off horses on the baggage wagons—they pretty much have to—and that most of the time most of the horses are completely unloaded. So my guess is that we’re getting ready for battle, and the horses—oh, and look, there’s a string of mules—have to be sent on ahead, or given a head start if you want to call it that, and then the cavalrymen will ride up on bicycles to join them.”
“There’s something strange in the balance of power,” I said, “when people are working that hard for horses.”
“Human chauvinist,” Paula said.
“Species traitor,” I retorted. “Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s sort of in keeping with the Caesar we know; systematic and thorough. This way he arrives with a whole army ready to fight.”
“Is there going to be a battle, do you think?” Porter asked.
“Forum Sempronii is a lot smaller than Fanum Fortunae,” I said. “It’s really just a garrison town and a way stop for traffic. If they have any sense, they won’t fight at all; the garrison might even have been pulled back toward Rome. I’m surprised they haven’t just sent a message out to surrender; surely they’ve known Caesar was coming.”
An hour later, as we rolled into Forum Sempronii, the mystery became clearer. The city
government had taken one look at the situation, and being all pro-Senate, had fled toward Rome, taking the whole garrison and the militia as well, leaving no one in charge to surrender or even to keep law and order. Caesar’s scouts had found a certain amount of petty looting and rioting going on, which they had suppressed (the bodies of several looters were still dangling in the town’s forum), and a large crowd of people in the forum looking for something to do, which they had taken charge of. The citizens of Forum Sempronii, who had been frightened out of their wits, were given the basic course in Caesar’s approach: be cool and nobody gets hurt. Within hours he had appointed a new city government, distributed the property of those who had deserted to Rome, and made most of the people still there into passionate Caesar fans. It was a hell of a performance; watching him, I thought that if there were an election, I might have voted for him myself.
11
There wasn’t room enough in Forum Sempronii to put everyone up for the night, but luckily we were either privileged advisors or pet slaves, depending on how you looked at it, so we got a small room in a confiscated villa. The scuttlebutt was that the next day would be much the longest ride, and considering the way my thighs and ass felt, I was dreading it. We all traded around back rubs, put warm ointment where we thought it would count, and worked out ways to put some additional padding on the seats, though, as Paula pointed out, that meant being a little more wobbly and what we saved in butt bruises would be paid back in harder work on our thighs.
Porter was tireder than the rest of us—she’d never much liked athletics of any kind and was in crummy shape—but she had the resilience of youth and bounced back a lot faster. As the rest of us were getting ready for bed, she sat and picked at the lyre.
“Hoping to revive the instrument in our timeline?” I asked.
“Just maybe, Mark, just maybe. It’s got some interesting possibilities. With this alternate tuning, check out this bit from Praetorius.” She played a little baroque passage, picking it carefully. “Just happened to be a piano piece I knew well. You see what I mean? Interesting sound, but the instrument is technically demanding.” She set it aside. “Now try this one—it’s the flute part for a Handel sonata, the part I never get to play when I play harpsichord with that nice old French guy. I think with the softer, rounder tone, it sounds pretty neat on this thing.”
I had to admit that it was beautiful, but Porter is a world-class musician, and I pretty much have to admit that everything she plays is beautiful.
“You’re still going to wish you’d taken some extra sleep in the morning,” Chrysamen grumbled—which wasn’t like her, but I think she was tiredest of all of us.
“Sure,” Porter said, putting her instruments away and heading for bed. She was so pleasant and cooperative, especially compared to the way she had been a couple of years ago, that I wondered if she were feeling well.
Sure enough, the next day’s ride was truly a ride from hell, or maybe to hell.
The problem was this. The Apennine Range runs down the spine of Italy like the plates on a dinosaur, and there are large parts of it, even today, that are a hassle to go over on the ground. Back in World War II, when the Allies and the Germans were slugging it out on the peninsula, both sides left a fifty-mile gap in their lines between east and west, just to accommodate the Apennines, and neither side could find a way through the other’s fifty-mile gap. And that was with jeeps, bulldozers, and trucks available.
So you had to go through one of the few passes. Since Caesar had been at Ariminum, after he crossed the Rubicon he could either go directly down the Via Flaminia to Rome, or he could backtrack a long way north into Cisalpine Gaul on the Via Aemilia, all the way to Bononia (which was where Bologna is on the modern map), and then come back down through Clusium on the Via Cassia. And off of the viae—die paved military roads—travel was just plain impossible in the Apennines in the winter.
Thus Caesar had picked the shorter way; the moment he had struck down to Fanum Fortunae was clear. Dispatch riders on cycles would be reaching Rome soon, if they hadn’t already, with the news (which would come as no surprise—it would not have been like Caesar to leave his own territory exposed and take the long way around, just for a surprise that was sure to collapse soon afterward).
Now, the problem with all that is that it’s tough to march or attack uphill; the old thing about getting the high ground. So it was vital that Caesar reach and cross the divide—the high pass between the eastern and western watersheds of Italy—before Pompey did.
Unfortunately, at least for our little group, that divide was right around the city of Spoletium—just under a hundred miles away by the Via Flaminia. And since we were riding with the legions, somehow or other we were going to have to manage to ride these silly contraptions a hundred miles the next day. So early bed after a big meal seemed very much in order.
The ride wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared. Even though the Via Flaminia had been built for marching troops rather than bicycles, it was well banked and had plenty of switchbacks; parts of it are used for highways even today, because it takes the easiest route through that part of the mountains. Moreover, though we were up just as early, we’d all slept well, and though it was just as cold, it was a bright, sunny day. And with the exercise, we didn’t feel cold for long.
Still, by midafternoon we were only halfway there, and I for one would have said it had already been a long day. We did the last ten miles with soldiers leading each contingent using candle-lamps mounted on their bicycles.
Spoletium was another military-base city, which had been built there to guard the road and provide services to the soldiers who did the guarding, and then had grown because the road was the logical way for freight to travel, and the people who moved the freight needed somewhere to stop for a meal or for the night. We ate because they ordered us to, and then fell into our beds.
I also let myself feel a certain amount of awe at the legions. The pass was actually a few miles east of Spoletium, and two of the legions riding out front had actually managed to get there during daylight, dig entrenchments by lamplight, and then settle in to guard Caesar against a surprise attack coming up from Rome.
But the next morning we could all sleep in; with forces up at the pass, and with entrenchments dug there, Caesar was as secure as he could be. According to scuttlebutt, the spies in Rome said Pompey’s army there would not be moving against us for at least another day, and we now occupied a strong position. Thus a couple of days could be spent gathering and resting our forces.
So we spent most of that day groaning and stretching out from time to time. Caesar was busy and didn’t pay much attention to us, which was fine by me; late that evening he invited us to dine with him, and Porter played some Praetorius, as well as some Bach, Handel, and Haydn. He seemed to like it a lot, and made a point of congratulating us all around.
While we were sitting over wine, he was quizzing us both very heavily over all the histories of all the timelines we knew. Another thing I got to admire and respect about Caesar—he had one of those minds that picks up theory and detail, fitting them together seamlessly, and absorbing it very rapidly. I knew of six different important battles, in six different timelines, that had been fought at then Bien Phu, and eight at Gettysburg (I had been to one at each place), and he not only wanted to know what the ground was like and how each battle had gone, but he seemed to have no trouble, after hearing it once, keeping all the different cases straight in his head and comparing them. Indeed, he rapidly developed convincing opinions about the style and methods of different generals, and could at the least persuade me that he had a good take on why the Patton-Rommel tank duel at Gettysburg, in one timeline, was so much more difficult for Patton than the equivalent battle had been for Meade in 1863 of my timeline. I began to think that if he was sincere in his interest in working for ATN, perhaps we ought to consider carrying him off.
Then again he was also a crafty, sneaky, devious, master politician, and we seemed to have mor
e than enough of those already.
A messenger came in just as we were saying good night; Caesar took the dispatch, looked at it for one long second, and said, “Well, then, it begins. Plan for a long ride tomorrow, but it will be downhill. Pompey is moving, and I know where he thinks he’s going. We’re going to hand him a surprise.”
The next morning, well before it was light, we got up and walked up the hill with Caesar’s slaves, who were giggling about Caesar having abruptly helped himself, after we left, to one of his female food servers, a Gaulish girl who didn’t look like she’d hit puberty yet and spoke Latin very badly. They were laughing; she seemed to be in tears, which they all found made it much funnier; whatever her name had been, all of them were now referring to her as “Face Down,” which was apparently as much as Caesar had talked to her. I was beginning to see why freeborn Romans despised slaves, and why many people especially seemed to dislike Caesar’s slaves.
Considering our position, maybe I should say Caesar’s other slaves, but Caesar was being fairly careful not to rub it in that officially he owned us; he wanted real partnership, and he was prepared to act like it.
Dawn found us just saddling our bicycles on top of the divide; behind us, to the west, water flowed to the Chienti; in front of us, it flowed into the Tiber—which is to say, down to Rome.
Nobody knew exactly how far we were riding that day, but it stood to reason that if Caesar was going to be fighting a hostile army, he wasn’t going to have us ride all day long. On the other hand, he had said a “long ride.”
The mystery got solved fairly quickly, but by the time it did I wasn’t much worried. It was downhill most of the way from the pass, and so for a large part of the trip everyone was coasting, which the bicycles did pretty well. Every half hour we had to pull over and let the bearings cool—no ball bearings meant that moving, as we were, at twenty miles per hour would eventually overheat the axles, most especially with only bacon grease as a lubricant. Every so often one of the bicycles would begin to smoke at the hub, and once the younger slave riding one was so negligent that by the time he pulled over the hub and two spokes were actually on fire, and with no water handy in that dry part of the mountains, the whole bike ended up going up in flames. They sent him back several miles, to walk with the prisoners.
