The tower approached the gate. Fighters climbed into it, brandishing weapons, hurling missiles, poising to spring down from above. The legate spoke. Romans on the wall brought poles and beams to the entry point. Under cover of shields and their slingers, they shoved, battered, hacked. They beat the tower to a standstill and began smashing it apart. Meanwhile their companions sallied from both sides and attacked the surrounding enemy.
Civilis led his veterans in aid. Roman engineers extended a crane arm over the top of the wall. Iron jaws at the end of a chain swung through an arc, closed on a man, plucked him off his feet. Gleeful, the engineers shifted counterweights. The arm swiveled around, the jaws opened, the captive fell to earth inside the camp. A squad awaited him.
"Prisoners!" Lupercus shouted. "I want prisoners!"
The crane reached forth again, and yet again. That was a device slow and clumsy, but also new and weird, demoralizing. Lupercus never knew how much it did toward throwing dismay into the foe. Most likely nobody could say. The destruction of the tower and the assault by trained, coordinated infantry were amply bad.
Good troops would have stood their ground, enveloped the outnumbered men of the sortie, and cut them to pieces. In the packs of the barbarians, nobody had clear command save over his immediate followers, nor any way of knowing what went on anywhere else. Those who encountered deadliness got no reinforcement. They were weary after their long night, many had lost blood, neither comrades nor gods came to their help. The heart went from them and they ran. Avalanche-like, the rest of the horde tumbled after.
"Shouldn't we pursue, sir?" wondered the orderly.
"That would be fatal." A part of Lupercus wondered why he explained, why he didn't simply tell the boy to shut up. "They aren't in real panic. Look, they're coming to a halt by the river. Their chiefs will rally them and Civilis will bring them more or less to their senses. However, I don't expect he'll allow any further such attempts. He'll settle down to blockade us."
And try to seduce his countrymen among us, the legate's mind added. But at least now I can get some sleep. How tired he was. His skull felt full of sand, his tongue like a strip of leather.
First he had duties. He went downstairs and along the pomoerium lane to the spot where the crane had dumped its prey. A pair lay killed, whether because they resisted too hard or the squad grew overexcited. One moaned and writhed feebly on the dust. His legs never stirred, he must have a broken back, best cut his throat. Three slumped bound under the eyes of their guards. The seventh, also with wrists tied and ankles hobbled, stood straight. The outfit of a Batavian auxiliary covered his broad frame.
Lupercus stopped before him. "Well, soldier, what have you to say for yourself?" he asked quietly.
Beard was growing around the lips and the Latin they uttered bore a guttural accent, but it came firmly. "You've got us. That's all you've got, though."
A legionary half lifted his sword. Lupercus waved it aside. "Mind your manners," he advised. "I'll have some questions for you fellows. Cooperate, and you won't suffer the worst that can happen to traitors."
"I'll not betray my lord, whatever you do," said the Batavian. His own exhaustion made the defiance toneless. "Woen, Donar, Tiw be witness."
Mercury, Hercules, Mars. Their main gods, or so we Romans identify them. No matter. I think he means it, and torture won't break him. We have to try, of course. Maybe his comrades will be less resolute. Not that I really believe any of them knows anything useful. What a waste all around.
Hm, one thing, A faint eagerness prickled the legate's skin. He might well be willing to say this. "Tell me, anyhow, what possessed you? It was crazy, rushing us. Civilis must have torn his hair out."
"He wanted to stop it," the prisoner admitted. "But the warriors got out of hand, and he—we—could only try to make them effective." A canine grin. "Maybe now they've learned their lesson and will go about the business right."
"But what set the attack off?"
Suddenly the voice throbbed, the eyes kindled. "They were wrong about the tactics, yah, but the word was true. It is true. It came through the Bructeri who joined us. Veleda has spoken."
"Uh, Veleda?"
"The sibyl. She's called on every tribe to rise. Rome is doomed, the goddess tells her, and ours shall be the victory." The Batavian squared his shoulders. "Do what you like to me, Roman. You're a dead man, you with your whole stinking Empire."
2
In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a minor export-import business fronted for the Amsterdam office of the Time Patrol. Its warehouse, with attached office, was in the Indische Buurt, where exotic-looking people drew scant attention.
Manse Everard's timecycle appeared in the secret part of the building early one May morning. He had to wait a minute or so at the exit when the door indicated that somebody was passing by on the other side who shouldn't see that it wasn't merely a wainscot—doubtless an ordinary employee of the company. Then it opened to his key. The arrangement seemed a bit clumsy to him, but he supposed it suited local conditions.
He found his way to the manager, who was also chief of Patrol operations throughout this corner of Europe. Those were usually routine, or as routine as is possible when you deal with traffic up and down the lanes of history. This wasn't milieu headquarters, after all. It hadn't even appeared to be overseeing an especially important sector, till now.
"We weren't expecting you yet, sir," said Willem Ten Brink, surprised. "Shall I call Agent Floris?"
"No, thanks," Everard replied. "I'll meet her later as arranged. Just thought I'd first look around the city a little. Haven't been here since, uh, 1952, when I spent a few days on a vacation trip. I liked it."
"Well, I hope you enjoy yourself. Things have changed, you know. Do you wish a guide, a car, any kind of assistance? No? What about facilities for your conference?"
"No need, I think. Her message said she could best explain matters, at least to start with, at her place." Despite the other man's obvious disappointment, Everard let forth no hint of what the matters were. They were plenty delicate without leaking information to anybody who didn't require it and didn't work outside his birth era. Besides, Everard wasn't quite sure what did threaten.
Equipped with a map, a walletful of gulden, and a few practical cues, he strolled off. At a tobacconist's he bought refills for his pipe and a strippenkart for the public transit system. He hadn't had Dutch instilled, but everybody he encountered possessed excellent English. Footloose, he drifted.
Thirty-four years was a long absence. (Longer than that on his personal world line, of course. He had meanwhile joined the Patrol and become an Unattached agent and snaked around through the ages, across most of the planet. Now the London of Elizabeth the First or the Pasargadae of Cyrus the Great stood him nearer than did the streets he would walk today. Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?) He half dreaded what he might find.
The following hours relieved him. Amsterdam had not become the sewer that some people nowadays called it. From the Dam to the Central Station, it pullulated with scruffy youth, but he saw no one making trouble. In alleys directly off the Damrak you could idle a delightful while in a sidewalk café or a small bar with a huge beer selection. The sleaze shops were at fairly wide intervals, tucked in among ordinary businesses and extraordinary bookstores. When he took a canal tour and the guide insouciantly pointed out the red-light district, what Everard saw was more of the centuried houses that dignified the entire old part of town. He'd been warned about pickpockets but had no need to take precautions against muggers. He'd breathed worse smog in New York and dodged more dog droppings around Gramercy Park than in any residential section here. For lunch he found a friendly little place where they cooked a mean dish of eel. The Stedelijke Museum was a letdown—as regarded modern art, he admitted being an unreconstructed philistine—but he lost himself in the Rijks, forgetting all else, till closing time.
By then he
was soon due at Floris's. The hour had been his suggestion, in their preliminary phone conversation. She hadn't demurred. A field agent, Specialist second class, ranked fairly high, but still didn't normally argue with an Unattached. It wasn't too eccentric a time of day anyhow, when you could hop straight to it from whenever you were. Probably she'd skipped uptime shortly after breakfast.
For his part, this relaxed interlude hadn't dulled alertness. On the contrary. Also, by giving him some slight acquaintance with her hometown, the background whence she sprang, it started him on a knowledge of her. He needed that. They might be working very closely together.
His route afoot from the Museumplein took him along the Singelgracht and down through part of Vondelpark. Water gleamed, leaves and grass glowed with sunlight. A boy paddled a hired canoe, his girl in the bow before his eyes; a gray-haired couple walked hand in hand under trees with more years than themselves; a band of bicyclists swept by him in a storm of shouts and laughter. He harked back to the Oude Kerk, the Rembrandts, yes, the Van Goghs he hadn't yet seen, all the life that pulsed in the city today and in past and future, everything that begot and nourished it. And he knew their whole reality for a spectral flickering, diffraction rings across abstract, unstable space-time, a manifold brightness that at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been.
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn empires, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a wrack behind—
No! He must never let himself brood so. It would merely shake him in his duty, which was to get on with whatever pragmatic, prosaic operations were necessary to safeguard this existence. He lengthened his stride.
The apartment building he sought was one of a row on a quiet street, handsome relics from around 1910. A directory in the entry told him that Janne Floris lived on the fourth floor. It gave her profession vaguely as bestuurder, administrator; for purposes of maintaining a local persona, she was on the payroll of Ten Brink's company.
Otherwise Everard knew only that she did field research in the Roman Iron Age, that period when the archaeology of northern Europe began fitfully merging with recorded history. He'd been tempted to call up her service record, which he had authority to do within limits. That was surely no easy milieu for a woman of any kind, let alone a scientist from its future. He'd decided against it, at any rate till they'd talked. Better that his first impression be direct. Also, the business might turn out not to be a real crisis. Maybe investigation would show nothing worse than some kind of mistake or misunderstanding, with no corrective action required.
He found her door and pushed the bell. She opened it. For a moment they stood mute.
Was she taken aback too? Had she expected the Unattached agent to be something more impressive than a big, homely guy with a battle-dented nose and still, after all he'd been through, "Midwesterner" written upon him? He'd certainly not awaited as goodly a sight as this tall blonde in her elegantly understated gown.
"How do you do," he managed in English. "I am—"
She smiled, broad mouth baring large teeth. Snub-nosed, heavy-browed, her features weren't conventionally pretty, apart from eyes of changeable turquoise, but he admired them, and her figure could have belonged to an athletic Juno. "Agent Everard," she finished for him. "An honor, sir." The tone was warm without being subservient and she shook hands as if with an equal. "Welcome."
Passing close as he entered, he saw that she wasn't really young. That clear complexion had known much weather; fine lines crinkled around eyes and lips. Well, she couldn't have accomplished what she must have to earn her rank in any few years of lifespan, and longevity treatment didn't expunge every trace.
In the living room he glanced around. It was furnished plainly and comfortably, like his, though her things weren't battered or faded and she displayed no souvenirs. Maybe she didn't care to explain them away to mundane visitors—and lovers? On the walls he recognized a copy of a Cuyp landscape and an astronomical photograph of the Veil Nebula. Among books in a floor-to-ceiling case he spied stuff by Dickens, Mark Twain, Thomas Mann, Tolkien. A shame that Dutch titles conveyed nothing to him.
"Please sit down," Floris urged. "Smoke if you wish. I have made coffee, or tea can be ready in a few minutes."
"Thanks, coffee will be fine." Everard took an armchair. She brought pot, cups, cream, sugar from the kitchen, put them on a low table, and settled on the couch opposite him.
"Do you prefer we use English or Temporal?" she asked.
He liked her approach, straightforward yet not brusque. "English for now," he decided. The Patrol speech had a grammar capable of handling chronokinesis, variable time, and the associated paradoxes, but when it came to human things was as weak as artificial languages generally are. (An Esperantist who hits his thumb with a hammer will not likely yell, "Excremento!") "I'm after a sketchy, preliminary understanding of what this is about."
"Why, I thought you would arrive prepared. What I have here that is not at the office is—oh, pictures, small objects, the kind of things one brings back from missions, things that have no particular value to science or anyone else but hold memories. Doesn't one?" Everard nodded. "Well, I thought if I took them from their drawer they might help give you a better feel for the milieu, or remind me of observations I made that you may find useful."
He sipped. The coffee was the way he preferred it, hot and strong. "Good thinking. We'll look them over later. But whenever it's practicable, I'd rather start by hearing about a case in direct, first-hand terms. The precise details, the scholarly analysis, the broad picture, those mean more to me afterward." In other words, I'm not an intellectual, I'm a farm boy who became first an engineer and then a cop.
"But I have not been on the scene either," she said.
"I know. None of the corps have yet, have they? However, you've been informed of the problem in some circumstantiality, and I'm sure you've given it much thought in the light of your experience, your particular expertise. That makes you the closest thing to an observer we've got."
Everard leaned forward. "Okay," he went on, "what I can tell you is this. The Middle Command asked me if I'd investigate. They'd received a report of inconsistencies in a chronicle of Tacitus's, and it has them worried. The events concerned evidently center on the Low Countries in the first century A.D. That happens to be your field, and you and I are more or less contemporaries"—a generation between our births, is it?—"so we should be able to cooperate more or less efficiently. That's why I'm the Unattached agent they contacted." Everard gestured at David Copperfield. He'd show her the two of them had something more in common. "Barkis is willin'. I called Ten Brink and then you almost immediately, and followed close behind. Maybe I should first have studied my Tacitus. I'd read him, of course, but quite a while ago on my world line and it's gotten vague. I did glance over the material again, but just a glance, and he gets sort of convoluted, doesn't he? Go ahead and fill me in from the ground up. If you repeat something I already know, what harm?"
Floris smiled. "You have a most disarming manner, sir," she murmured. "Is it on purpose?" Momentarily he wondered if she was being flirtatious; but she tautened and proceeded, businesslike, well-nigh academic:
"You are certainly aware that both the Annals and the Histories came down to later centuries incomplete. Of the Histories, the oldest copy that survived contained only four books of the original twelve, and part of the fifth. That part broke off in the middle of describing what we have become troubled about. Naturally, when time travel is developed, an expedition will in due course go to his era and recover the lost sections. They are much desired. Tacitus is not the most reliable chronicler who ever wrote, but he is a notable stylist, a moralist—and for some occurrences, the single written source of any importance."
Everard nodded. "Yeah. Explorers read the historians for clues to what they sho
uld look for and look out for, before they set off to chart what really happened." He coughed. "Why am I telling you your business? Pardon me. Mind if I light a pipe?"
"Not at all," Floris said absently before she continued. "Yes, the complete Histories, as well as the Germania, have been among my principal guides. I found countless details are different from what he wrote, but that is to be expected. In broad outline, and usually in particulars, his account of the great rebellion and its aftermath is trustworthy."
She paused, then, stubbornly honest: "I have not done my research alone, you realize. Far from it. Others are busy in hundreds of years before and after my special period, in areas from Russia to Ireland. And there are those, the truly indispensable ones, who sit at home to assemble, correlate, and analyze our reports. But it chances that I operate in and around what are now the Netherlands and the nearby parts of Belgium and Germany, during the time when the Celtic influence was dying away—after the Roman conquest of Gaul—and the Germanic peoples were beginning to develop truly distinctive cultures. It is not much we have learned, either, set beside everything we do not know. We are too few."
Too few indeed, Everard thought. With half a million years or more to guard, the Patrol's forever undermanned, stretched thin, compromising, improvising. We get some help from civilian scientists, but most of them work out of civilizations millennia uptime; their interests are often too alien. And yet we've got to uncover the hidden truths of history, to have an inkling of what the moments are when it could too easily be changed. . . . From a god's-eye viewpoint, Janne Floris, you're probably worth more to the cause of preserving the reality that brought us into being than I am.
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