Time Patrol

by Poul Anderson

  Cerialis had one contretemps. After going to inspect the winter quarters being constructed for the legions at Novesium and Bonna, he was on his way back down the Rhine with his fleet. From their coverts, German scouts saw a sloppiness born of overconfidence. They gathered a pair of strong bands and, on a clouded night, attacked. Those who invaded the Roman camp cut the tent ropes and slaughtered the men within. Their companions threw grapnels on several vessels and dragged them off. The great prize was the praetorian trireme, where Cerialis should have been sleeping. As it chanced, he was elsewhere—with an Ubian woman, rumor said—and emerged groggy, nearly naked, to take charge.

  It was only a hit-run action. No doubt its main result was that the Romans smartened in a hurry. The Germans towed the captured trireme up the River Lippe and gave it to Veleda.

  Small though it was, that setback to the Imperial cause might later have been taken for an omen. Cerialis advanced deeper into the tribal homelands. None could withstand him. But neither could he come to final grips with his foes. Rome could spare him no more troops. Supplies grew scant and irregular. All the while, marching down upon him was the Northern winter.

  10

  A.D. 60.

  Over the highlands east of the Rhine valley trekked a caravan of thousands. For the most part the hills were thickly wooded, the ways through them little better than game trails. Horses, oxen, men strained to move wagons along; wheels groaned, brush crackled, breath rasped. Mainly folk trudged afoot, dumb with weariness and hunger.

  From a height two or three miles off, Everard and Floris watched the exodus as it crossed a grassy open stretch. Hand-held opticals brought it into arm's-length view. They could have used auditory pickups as well, but the sight was hard enough to take.

  Straight-shouldered yet, a white-headed man rode at the front. Mail and spearheads gleamed where his household guards walked behind. That was the only brightness, and no merriment stirred beneath the helmets. After them, some boys herded what few scrawny cattle, sheep, and pigs were left. Here and there in the line, a cart bore a wicker cage of chickens or geese. Hardtack bread and the rare piece of cured meat went more closely watched than the bundled-up clothes, tools, and other chattels—even the crude wooden idol on its wain where gold glinted meaningless. What use had any gods been to the Ampsivarii?

  Everard pointed. "That old guy in the lead," he said. "Their chief, Boiocalus, do you think?"

  "As Tacitus wrote the name," Floris replied. "Yes, surely he. Not many in this milieu reach an age like his." Sadly: "I imagine he regrets that he did."

  "And that he spent most of his life in Roman service. Yeah."

  A young woman, a girl really, shuffled by, cradling a baby in her arms. It wailed at a breast bared for it, from which no more milk would flow. A middle-aged man, perhaps her father, using a spear for a staff, kept his free arm ready to help her when she staggered. Her husband no doubt lay slain, tens or hundreds of miles behind them.

  Everard shifted in the saddle. "Let's go," he said roughly. "It's a ways to the meeting place, isn't it? Why'd you route us by here?"

  "I thought we should have a close look at this," Floris explained. "Yes, it will haunt me too. But the Tencteri have experienced it directly. We need to know well what it is, if we hope to understand their reaction to it, and Veleda's, and theirs to her."

  "I s'pose." Everard clucked to his horse, pulled on the tether of his spare, which at present carried his modest baggage, and picked a way downhill. "Though compassion is mighty scarce in this century. The nearest society that ever encouraged it much is in Palestine, and that one will get scattered to the winds."

  Thereby sowing Judaism throughout the Empire, of which the harvest will be Christianity. No wonder that strife and death in the North would become the barest footnote to history.

  "Kin loyalty is overwhelmingly strong," Floris reminded, "and in the face of Rome, a feeling is in embryo among the western Germans, of a basic kinship reaching past tribal borders."

  Uh-huh, Everard remembered, and you suspect Veleda has a lot to do with it. That's why we're tracking her back through time—to try and discover what she signifies.

  They reentered forest. Summer-green arches reached high before them, above a path walled with underbrush. Sunlight struck between leaves to spatter on moss and shadow. Squirrels ran fiery along boughs. Birdsong and fragrance wove through a mighty stillness. Already nature had swallowed up the agony of the Ampsivarii.

  Like a spiderweb he saw snaring brightness in a hazel, pity reached between them and Everard. He must fare a goodly ways before it stretched so far that it broke. No use telling himself that they all died obscurely eighteen hundred years before he was born. They were here, now, as real as the refugees he had seen no great distance east of this ground, fleeing west, 1945. But these would find no succor.

  Tacitus apparently got the general outline of the story right. The Ampsivarii were driven from their homes by the Chauci. A land grab; people were becoming too many for their available technology to support them on ancestral acres; overpopulation is relative, as old as the famine and war it raises, and as immortally reborn. The defeated sought the lower Rhine. They knew a considerable territory lay vacant there, cleared of its former inhabitants by the Romans, who meant to reserve it for purposes of military supply and settlement of discharged soldiers. Already two Frisian tribes had tried to take it over. They were ordered out and, when they stalled, expelled by an attack that killed many and sent many more to the slave markets. But the Ampsivarii were loyal federates. Boiocalus had suffered imprisonment when he would not go along with Arminius's revolt forty years ago. Afterward he served under Tiberius and Germanicus, until he retired from the army to become the leader of his folk. Surely Rome would grant him and his exiles a place to lay their heads.

  Rome would not. Privately, hoping to avoid trouble, the legate offered Boiocalus property for himself and his family. The chieftain refused the bribe: "We may lack a land to live in; we cannot lack one to die in." He brought his tribe upstream to the Tencteri. Before a massed gathering he called on them, the Bructeri, and any others who found the nearness of the Empire oppressive to join him in war.

  While they argued about it in their disorganized quasi-democratic fashion, the legate took his legions across the Rhine into the same country. He threatened extermination unless the newcomers were evicted. Northward out of Upper Germany marched a second army, to stand at the backs of the Bructeri. In the jaws of the vise, the Tencteri bade their guests begone.

  I better not feel too self-righteous. The United States will commit a worse betrayal in Vietnam, with less excuse.

  The trail debouched on something vaguely like a road, narrow, rutted, maintained solely by the feet, hoofs, and wheels that used it. Everard and Floris wound over its ups and downs for hours. Spying from invisibly high above and with the help of her robot bugs, cut-and-try work, patiently fitting together scraps of possibly useful observation, she had planned their course. It was a little dangerous for a man and woman to travel thus unescorted, though the Tencteri didn't go in much for banditry. However, they had to be seen arriving in ordinary wise. They could use stun pistols in self-defense if they were assailed and if there weren't a bunch of witnesses whose tale might significantly affect the society.

  In the event, they had no trouble. More and more travelers came onto the road, bound the same way. All were men; almost all seemed preoccupied or anxious and talked little. An exception was a large fellow with a beer belly, who introduced himself as Gundicar. He rode beside the unusual couple and chatted away, incurably cheerful. In the nineteenth or twentieth century, Everard thought, he'd have been a well-to-do grocer or baker and daily patron of the local Brauhaus. "And how came you hither unscathed, you twain?"

  The Patrolman gave him a prepared story. "Hardly that, my friend. I am of the Reudigni, north of the River Elbe; you have heard of us? . . . Trading southward. . . . The war between the Hermunduri and Chatti. . . . We were swept off, I believe I
alone of my band escaped alive, my goods gone save for this bit of gear. . . . A woman left widowed, bereft of kin, happy to join me. . . . Wending homeward along the Rhine and the seaboard, hoping for fewer woes. . . . Having heard of the wise-woman from the east, and that she would speak to you Tencteri. . . ."

  "Ach, in truth these are fearsome times." Gundicar sighed. "Huge fires grieving the Ubii across the river, too." He brightened. "I think that's the wrath of the gods for their licking Roman boots. Maybe soon an ill doom will fall on yon whole bunch."

  "Then you'd fain have fought when the legions thrust into your land?"

  "Well, now, that would have been unwise, we were unready, and hay harvest well-nigh upon us, you know. But I am not ashamed to say I howled in mourning for those poor homeless. May the Mother be kind to them! I'm hoping the spaewife Edh gives us word of a morrow when we may indeed right such wrongs. Good plunder in that Colonia burn, eh?"

  Floris took over most of the conversation. Woman in a frontier society normally enjoys respect, if not complete equality. She runs everything when her man is gone from the lonely steading; should the feud-foe, the Vikings, the Indians then appear, it is she who commands the defense. Still more than the Greeks or the Hebrews did the Germanic peoples believe in the sibyl, the prophetess, the female—almost shamanistic among them—to whom a god gave powers and told of the future. Edh's reputation had run long ahead of her, and Gundicar gossiped with everybody.

  "No, it's unknown whence she came at the first. She fared hither from among the Cherusci, and I've heard that ere then she abode for a time with the Langobardi. . . . I think this Nerha goddess of hers is of the Wanes, not the Anses . . . unless it's another name for Mother Fricka. And yet . . . they say Nerha is as terrible in her rage as Tiw himself. . . . There's something about a star and the sea, but I know nothing of that, we're inlanders here. . . . She reached us soon after the Romans withdrew. The king guests her. He bade men come and hearken. That must have been at her wish. He would hardly gainsay it. . . ."

  Floris led him on. What he told would much help her plan the next step in the search. Edh herself, the Patrol agents had better avoid meeting. Until they had more knowledge of her and whatever the forces were that she was unleashing, they would be crazy to interfere.

  Late in the afternoon they arrived at a cleared vale, fields and pastures, the king's main estate. He was basically a landholder, not above joining his tenants, hirelings, and slaves in the farm work. He presided over councils and the great seasonal sacrifices, he took command in war, but law and tradition bound him as fast as anyone else; his often riotous folk would overrule or overthrow him if that was their mood, and any scion of the royal house had a claim to the post that was as good as the fighting men he could muster to support it. No wonder these Germans can't overcome Rome, Everard reflected. They never will, either. When their descendants—Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Saxons, and the rest—take over, it'll be by default, because the Empire has crumbled from within. And besides, it'll have taken them over before then—spiritually, by converting them to Christianity, so that the new Western civilization comes to birth where the old Classical one did, on the Mediterranean shore, not along the Rhine or the gray North Sea.

  It was a flitting thought at the back of his mind, repeating what he well knew, gone again as his attention focused ahead.

  The king and his household dwelt in a long, thatch-roofed timber hall. Sheds, barns, a pair of hovels where the lowly slept, and other outbuildings formed, with it, a square. A way behind it loomed a grove of ancient trees, the halidom, where the gods received their offerings and gave their omens. Most arrivals pitched camp in front, filling a meadow. Nearby, calves and swine roasted over big fires, while servants dished up horns or wooden cups of beer for all. Lavish hospitality was essential to maintaining a lord's reputation, on which his life might well depend.

  Everard and Floris established themselves inconspicuously offside and mingled with the crowd. Passing a gap between the buildings, they got a look into the courtyard. Rudely cobbled, at present it was occupied by the horses of the important visitors, who would stay in the royal house. Amidst them stood four white oxen and the wagon they had surely drawn. It was an extraordinary vehicle, beautifully carpentered, elaborately carved. Behind a driver's seat, windowless sides rose to a shake roof. "A van," Everard murmured. "Got to be Veleda's—Edh's. I wonder, does she sleep in it on the road?"

  "Doubtless," Floris said. "To preserve dignity and mystery. I suspect an image of the goddess is in there too."

  "M-m, Gundicar mentioned several men who travel with her. She may not need an armed guard, if the tribes respect her as much as I gather, but it's impressive, and besides, somebody has to do the chores. Though I suppose being her attendants makes them heap big medicine, and they're putting up in the sachem's lodge along with his braves and the local chiefs. She too, do you think?"

  "Certainly not. She, to lie on a bench among a lot of snoring men? Either she will use her car or the king has arranged some kind of private room for her."

  "How does she do it, anyway? What gives her that power?"

  "We are trying to learn what."

  The sun slipped below western treetops. Dusk began to rise in the vale. A wind slithered chilly. Now that the guests were fed, it smelled only of woodsmoke and forest deeps. Thralls stoked the fires; flames flickered aloft, growled, spat. Overhead winged nest-bound crows and darting swallows, runes changeably scrawled on a sky gone purple in the east, cold green in the west. The evening star trembled into sight.

  Horns sounded. Warriors trod from the hall, through the courtyard, onto the trampled ground outside. Their spearheads caught the dying daylight. Before them went a man in a richly patterned tunic, gold helices entwining his arms, the king. Breath hissed in the shadowed gathering until, silent, men waited. The heart knocked in Everard's breast.

  The king spoke loudly but gravely. Everard thought that, underneath, he was shaken. To them from afar, he said, had come Edh, of whose wonderworking all had heard. She wanted to prophesy for the Tencteri. In honor to her and the goddess who fared with her, he had therefore bidden the nearest dwellers tell the next, and thus across the land. In these unhappy times, whatever signs the gods sent must be carefully weighed. He warned that the words of Edh would hurt. Bear them manfully, as one bears the setting of a broken bone. Think what it meant, and what folk could or should do hereafter.

  The king stood aside. Two women—wives of his?—bore out a high, three-legged stool. Edh came forth and seated herself on it.

  Everard strained through the gloaming. How he wished he could use his optical to help this uneasy firelight! What he saw surprised him. He had half expected a ragged hag. She was well clad, in a short-sleeved long-skirted gown of plain white wool, a fur-trimmed blue cloak held with a gilt bronze brooch, thin leather shoes. Her head was bare, like a maiden's, but the long brown hair hung in braids, rather than loosely, beneath a snakeskin fillet. Tall, full-boned but thin, she moved just a little awkwardly, as if she and her body were not quite one. Big eyes glowed in a long, handsomely sculptured face. When she opened her mouth, what appeared to be a full set of teeth flashed white. Why, she's young, he thought; and: No. Mid-thirties, I'd guess. That's middle-aged here. She could be a grandmother, though actually they say she's never married.

  His gaze left her for an instant and, with a start, he recognized the man who had accompanied her and stood at her side, dark, saturnine, somberly garbed. Heidhin. Of course. Ten years younger than when I first saw him. He doesn't look it, or, rather, he already looks as old as then.

  Edh spoke. She made no gestures, kept hands on lap, and her voice, a husky contralto, stayed soft. It carried, though; and steel was in it, and winter winds.

  "Hear me and heed ye," she uttered, eyes turned beyond them toward the evenstar, "highborn or lowborn, still in your strength or stumbling graveward, doomed to death and dreeing the weird boldly or badly. I bid ye hearken. When life is lost, alone i
s left, for yourself and your sons, what is said of you. Doughty deeds shall never die, but in minds of men remain forever—night and nothingness for the names of cravens! No good the gods will give to traitors, nor aught but anger unto the slothful. Who fears to fight will lose his freedom, will cringe and crawl to get moldy crusts, his children chafing in chains and shame. Hauled into whoredom, helplessly, his women weep. These woes are his. Better a brand should burn his home while he, the hero, harvests foemen till he falls defiant and fares on skyward.

  "Hoofs in heaven heavily ring. Lightning leaps, blazing lances. All the earth resounds with anger. Seas in surges smite the shores. Now will Nerha naught more suffer. Wrathful she rides to bring down Rome, the war gods with her, the wolves and ravens."

  She recalled humiliations endured, wealth paid over, dead lying unavenged. Icily she lashed the Tencteri for yielding to invaders and forsaking the kindred who called on them. Yes, it had seemed they had no choice; but what they in truth chose was infamy. Let them slaughter as much as they would in the halidoms, it could not buy them back their honor. The weregild they would pay was sorrow unbounded. Rome would gather it in.

  But a day would yet dawn. Abide it, and be ready when that red sun rose.

  Afterward, pondering the audiovisual they had recorded, Everard and Floris felt again a little of the spell. They had well-nigh been swept away too, humbled, exalted, with the throng that lifted weapons and shouted as Edh walked back to the hall. "Total conviction," Floris said.

  "More to it than that," Everard answered. "A gift, a power—real leadership has a touch of mystery, something transhuman. . . . But I wonder if also the time stream isn't bearing her along."