Roma Eterna

by Robert Silverberg

  The beach was an eerie white, as though it were made up of tiny particles of powdered bone. It felt stiff to the foot, and crunched when trod upon. Drusus scuffed at it, savoring its strangeness. He thrust his staff of office deep into it, telling himself that he was taking possession of this land in the name of Eternal Roma.

  The initial phase of the landing took over an hour, as the Romans established themselves on that narrow strip of sand between the sea and the close-packed palms. Throughout it, Drusus was uncomfortably aware of the tales told by the survivors of the first expedition of Mexican arrows that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and went straight to the most vulnerable places. But nothing like that happened today. He set the landing party immediately to work cutting down trees and building rafts on which they could transport the rest of the men and equipment and provisions to the camp they would establish here. All up and down the coast, the other commanders were doing the same. The fleet, bobbing out there at anchor, was an inspiring sight: the stout heavy hulls, the high bridges, the great square sails aglow with the Imperial colors.

  In the dazzling brightness of the new day the last of Drusus’s uncertainties evaporated.

  “We have come,” he said to Marcus Junianus. “Soon we will see this place. And then we will conquer it.”

  “You should write those words down,” Marcus said. “In future centuries schoolchildren will quote them.”

  “They are not entirely original with me, I’m afraid,” said Drusus.

  The Norseman who had enmeshed the Emperor Saturninus in these fantasies of conquest was a certain Haraldus, a gigantic fair-haired mountain of a man who had turned up at the Emperor’s winter palace at Narbo in Gallia bearing wild tales of golden kingdoms across the sea. He claimed to have seen at least one of them with his own eyes.

  These Norsemen, a savage warlike sort, were common sights in both halves of the Empire. A good many of them had made their way to Constantinopolis, which in their language was called Miklagard, “the mighty city.” For a hundred years now the Eastern Emperors had maintained an elite corps of these men—Varangians, they called themselves, “Men of the Pledge”—as their personal bodyguards. Often enough they turned up in the Western capital, too, which they also referred to as Miklagard. Because they reminded Western Romans of their ancient enemies the Goths, to whom they were closely related, the Emperors at Roma had never cared to hire their own force of Varangian guards. But it was interesting to listen to the tales these much-traveled seafarers had to tell.

  The homeland of these Norsemen was called Scandia, and they were of three main tribes, depending on whether they came from Svea or Norwegia or the territory of the folk who called themselves Dani. But they all spoke more or less the same uncouth language and all were big, short-tempered people, the men and the women both, resourceful and vengeful and ruthless, who would carry two or three well-honed weapons upon their persons at all times and reached swiftly for their swords or their daggers or their battle-axes whenever they felt offended. Their small sturdy ships traveled freely and fearlessly through the half-frozen waterways of their northern world, carrying them to remote places in the north never visited and scarcely known by Romans, and Norse traders would come down out of those icy lands bearing ivory, furs, seal oil, whale oil, and other such goods much desired in the marketplaces of Europa and Byzantium.

  This Haraldus was a Svean who said his travels had taken him to Islandius and Grenelandius, which were the Norse names for two islands in the northern part of the Ocean Sea where they had settled in the past two hundred years. Then he had gone onward even farther, to a place they called Vinilandius, or Wineland, which was on the shore of an enormous body of land—a continent, surely—and then, with a little band of companions, he had set out on a voyage of exploration down the entire coast of that continent.

  It was a journey that took him two or three years, he said. From time to time they would go ashore, and when they did they often encountered small villages peopled by naked or half-naked folk of unusual appearance, with dark glossy hair, and skin that was dark also, though not in the way that the skins of Africans are dark, and strong-featured faces marked by jutting cheekbones and beak-like noses. Some of these folk were friendly, some were not. But they were all quite backward, artless people who lived by hunting and fishing and dwelled in little tents fashioned from the hides of animals. Their tiny encampments seemed to have little to offer in the way of opportunities for trade.

  But as Haraldus and his companions continued south, things became more interesting. The air was softer and warmer here, the settlements more prosperous-looking. The wandering Norsemen found good-sized villages built beside lofty flat-topped earthen mounds that bore what appeared to be temples at their summits. The people wore elaborate woven garments and bedecked themselves with copper earrings and necklaces made of the teeth of bears. They were a farming folk, who greeted the travelers pleasantly and offered them meals of grain and stewed meats, served in clay vessels decorated with strange images of serpents that had feathers and wings.

  The Norsemen worked out an effective method of communicating with these mound-building people by simple sign language, and learned that there were even richer lands farther to the south, lands where the temple mounds were built not of earth but of stone, and where the jewelry was made not of copper but of gold. How distant these places were was unclear: the voyagers just were told, with many gestures of outflung arms, to head down the coast until they reached their destination. And so they did. They went on southward and the land, which had been on their right all the way down from Wineland, dropped away from them so that they were in open sea. The mound people had warned them that that would happen. Some instinct told them to swing westward here and then south again when they picked up signs of an approaching shore, and after a time there was land ahead and they saw the coastline of the unknown western continent once again.

  Here they landed and went ashore. And everything that the mound-building people of the northern land had said proved to be true.

  “There is a great nation there,” Haraldus told the Emperor. “The citizens, who are extremely friendly, wear finely woven robes and they have an astounding abundance of gold, which they use in every imaginable way. Not only do men and women both wear golden jewelry, but even the toys of the children are of gold, and the chieftains take their meals on golden plates.” He spoke of colossal stone pyramids like those of Aegyptus, of shining marble temples, of immense statues depicting bizarre gods that looked like monsters. And, best of all, this wealthy land—Yucatan, its people called it—was only the nearest of many rich kingdoms in this remarkable new world across the sea. There was another and even greater one, the Norsemen had been informed, off to the west and north of it. That one was called Mexico, or perhaps Mexico was the name for this entire territory, Yucatan included: that was unclear. Sign language could communicate only so much. And still farther away, some inconceivable distance to the south, was still another land named Peru, so wealthy that it made the wealth of Mexico and Yucatan seem like nothing at all.

  Upon hearing this the Norsemen realized that they had stumbled upon something too great for them to be able to exploit by themselves. They agreed to split into two parties. One group, headed by a certain Olaus Danus, would remain in Yucatan and learn whatever they could about these kingdoms. The other, under the command of Haraldus the Svean, would carry the news of their discovery to the Emperor Saturninus and offer to lead a Roman expedition to the New World on a mission of conquest and plunder, in return for a generous share of the loot.

  Norsemen are a quarrelsome lot, though. By the time Haraldus and his friends had retraced their coastal path back to Vinilandius in the far north, feuding over rank aboard their little ship had reduced their numbers from eleven to four. One of these four was slain by an angry brother-in-law in Vinilandius; another perished in a dispute over a woman during a stop in Islandius; what happened to the third man, Haraldus did not say, but he alone reached the
mainland of Europa to tell the tale of golden Mexico to Saturninus.

  “Instantly the Emperor was gripped by an overpowering fascination,” said Drusus’s father, the Senator Lucius Livius Drusus, who was at court the day Haraldus had his audience. “You could see it happening. It was as though the Norsemen had cast a spell over him.”

  That very day the Emperor proclaimed the western continent to be Nova Roma, the new overseas extension of the Empire—the Western Empire. With a province of such fantastic opulence gathered under its sway, the West would gain permanent superiority in its rivalry with its increasingly troublesome sister realm, the Empire of the East. Saturninus raised a veteran general named Valerius Gargilius Martius to the rank of Proconsul of Mexico and gave him command of three legions. Haraldus, though not even a Roman citizen, was dubbed a duke of the realm, a station superior to Gargilius Martius’s, and the two men were instructed to cooperate in the venture. For the voyage across the Ocean Sea a fleet of specially designed ships was constructed that had the great size of cargo vessels but the swiftness of warships. They were powered by sails as well as oars and were big enough to carry an invading army’s full complement of equipment, including horses, catapults, tents, forges, and all the rest. “They are not a warlike race, these Mexicans,” Haraldus assured the Emperor. “You will conquer them with ease.”

  Of all the thousands of men who set forth with great fanfare from the Gallian port of Massilia, just seventeen returned home, fourteen months later. They were parched and dazed and enfeebled to the point of collapse from an interminable ocean voyage of terrible hardship in a small open raft. Only three had sufficient strength even to frame words, and they, like the others, died within a few days of their arrival. Their stories were barely coherent. They gave rambling accounts of invisible enemies, arrows emerging out of nowhere, frightful poisonous insects, appalling heat. The friendliness of the citizens of Yucatan had been greatly overestimated, it seemed. Apparently the whole expeditionary force but for these seventeen had perished, one way or another. Of the fate of Duke Haraldus the Norseman and of the Proconsul Valerius Gargilius Martius they could tell nothing. Presumably they were dead too. The only thing that was certain was that the expedition had been a total failure.

  At the capital, people solemnly reminded one another of the tale of Quinctilius Varus, the general whom Augustus Caesar had sent into the Teutonic forests to bring the northern barbarians under control. He too had had three legions under his command, and through his stupidity and incompetence they were massacred virtually to the last man in an ambush in the woods. The elderly Augustus never entirely recovered from the catastrophe. “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” he would cry, over and over. And he said no more about sending armies to conquer the wild Teutons.

  But Saturninus, young and boundlessly ambitious, reacted differently to the loss of his expedition. Construction of a new and greater invasion fleet began almost immediately. Seven legions would be sent this time. The Empire’s most capable military men would lead it. Titus Livius Drusus, who had already won distinction for himself in some minor border skirmishes in Africa, where even at this late date wild desert tribes occasionally caused trouble, was among the bright young officers chosen for a high position. “It is madness to go,” his father muttered. Drusus knew that his father was growing old and conservative, but still he was a man of profound understanding of events. Drusus also knew, though, that if he refused this commission, which the Emperor himself had offered him, he was dooming himself to a lifetime of border duty in places so dismal that they would make him long most keenly for the comforts of the African desert.

  “Well,” said Marcus Junianus as he and Drusus stood side by side on the beach, supervising the unloading of the provisions, “so here we are in Yucatan. A strange sort of name for a place that is! What do you think it means, Titus?”

  “‘I don’t understand you.’”

  “Pardon me? I thought I was speaking very clearly, Titus. I said, ‘What do you think it means?’ I was referring to Yucatan.”

  Drusus chuckled. “I heard you. And I answered you. You asked a question, and ‘I don’t understand you’ is what I replied. All around the world for centuries now we’ve been going up to the natives of one far-off place or another and asking them in nice grammatical Latin what that place is called. And since they don’t know any Latin, they reply ‘I don’t understand you’ in their own language, and we put that down as the name of the place. In this case it was Norse, I guess, that they don’t happen to speak. And so, when Haraldus or one of his friends asked the natives the name of their kingdom, they answered ‘Yucatan,’ which I’m almost certain isn’t the name of the place at all, but merely means—”

  “Yes,” said Marcus Junianus. “I think I grasp the point.”

  The immediate task at hand was to set up a camp as quickly as they could, before their arrival attracted the attention of the natives. Once they were secure here at the water’s edge they could begin sending scouting expeditions inland to discover the location of the native towns and assess the size of the challenge facing them.

  For most of the voyage the fleet had kept close together, but as the ships approached the coast of Yucatan they had fanned out widely, by prearrangement, so that the initial Roman beachhead would cover twenty-five or thirty miles of the shoreline. Three legions, eighteen thousand men, would constitute the central camp, under the command of the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito. Then there would be two subsidiary camps of two legions apiece. Drusus, who had the rank of legionary legate, would be in command of the northernmost camp, and the southernmost one was to be headed by Masurius Titianus, a man from Pannonia who was one of the Emperor’s special favorites, though nobody in Roma could quite understand why.

  Drusus stood in the midst of the bustle, watching with pleasure as the camp swiftly came together. Workmen swarmed everywhere. The expedition was well equipped: Saturninus had poured a fortune into it, an amount equal to the total annual revenue of several provinces, so they said. Brawny loggers quickly chopped down dozens of the palm trees that fringed the beach and the carpenters got busy squaring the lumber off to use in constructing the palisades. The surveyors laid out boundaries for the camp along the beach’s widest part and marked guidelines for its interior: the central street, the place where the legate’s tent would go, the tents of the craftsmen, of the legionaries, of the scribes and recorders, the site of the stables, the workshops, the granary, and all the rest. The horses had to be brought ashore also and given an opportunity to regain their land legs after their long confinement aboard the ships.

  As the guide stakes went into the ground, the infantrymen set about erecting the rows of leather tents where they would dwell. Foragers, accompanied by an armed force, made the first ventures inland to find sources of food and water.

  These were experienced men. Everyone knew his job. By nightfall, which came on surprisingly early—but this was winter, after all, Drusus reflected, warm though the climate was—the outline of the camp was clearly delineated and the beginnings of a rampart had risen. There did not seem to be any rivers or streams nearby, but, as Drusus had suspected from the presence of so dense a forest, fresh water was readily obtainable even so: the ground, which was exceedingly stony beneath its shallow covering of soil, was honeycombed everywhere with passageways through which underground water came welling up. One of these wells lay not far inland, and a team of engineers started to sketch out the route of a shallow canal that would carry its cool, sweet water the short distance to the camp. The foragers had also found abundant wildlife in the adjacent forest: a multitude of small and apparently fearless deer, herds of what seemed to be little pigs of a kind that had no tails and stiff upright ears, and vast numbers of large, very odd-looking birds with brilliant reddish-green plumage and great fleshy wattles at their throats. So far, so good. The Norseman had said they would have no difficulties finding provisions, and it looked as though he had told the truth about that.

&nb
sp; At midday Drusus sent a runner down the beach toward the central camp to bear news of his landing. The man returned a little before sundown with word from the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito that the main body of men had come ashore as well, and the work of building a camp was under way. To the south, Masurius Titianus had also effected his landing without encountering opposition from the natives.

  The first night in the camp was a tense one, but first nights in camp in an unfamiliar place always were. Evening dropped over them like a shroud, with scarcely any interval between sunset and darkness. There was no moon. The stars above the camp were unusually brilliant, but they were arranged in the strange, unsettling configuration of the southern latitudes. The heat of the day did not abate, and the men in the tents complained of the stifling atmosphere inside. Raucous screeching cries came from the forest. Birds? Monkeys? Who could say? At least they didn’t sound like tigers. Clouds of mosquitoes appeared, pretty much similar to those of the Old World, but the humming noise that they made as they swooped in upon one was much nastier, almost jubilant in its intensity, and their stings were maddeningly fierce. At one point Drusus thought he saw a flight of bats passing close overhead. He loathed bats with a powerful loathing that he did not at all understand. Perhaps they are not bats but only owls, he thought. Or some new kind of eagle that flies by night.

  Because the camp did not yet have a proper rampart, Drusus tripled the ordinary watch. He spent much of his night strolling among the sentries himself. They were uneasy and would appreciate his presence. They too had heard those tales of arrows whistling out of nowhere, and it heartened them to have their commander sharing their risks on this first and most uncertain of nights.