The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "You would have been proud of Lucia," he said wistfully. "A fine, determined, resourceful girl, the sort of person that royal dynasties could grow from when the circumstances are right. Such a pity that—" His voice snapped off as he saw another glint from the signaler. A cloud of dust iri the distance marked the approach of the Danes.

  'Time to hide," said Alfred, following his stare.

  Vitellan looked down at the dagger again, reading the engraving on both sides of the blade. "Thank you for lifting this shadow from me. I never thought that I would know such a sense of peace again."

  "And thank you, too, for giving Wessex the Peace of Rome."

  Alfred motioned Paeder to come with him, and they urged their horses across the road and through the dense bushes. They turned to see that Vitellan was where they left him. Suddenly Paeder gasped loudly and exclaimed in Latin.

  "You!"

  "So you caught on at last. Yes, the Royal House of Wessex is distantly descended from Vitellan and Lucia. Did you never stop to think how I knew what to put in that note that I used to frighten Gentor? Lucia vivit and Romanus immortalis ad

  mortem ducatur are engraved on that family heirloom's blade."

  " 'Lucia lives,' 'Kill the immortal Roman.' " Paeder laughed and slapped Alfred on the back. "As a father of the Church of Christus I cannot praise your forgiveness highly enough. At last, after seven hundred years, the chain of hate is broken."

  "It broke long ago," he chuckled, pleased with his own deviousness. "My father thought that it was a tradition of stamping out Roman paganism. He knew nothing of Vitellan."

  As they watched Vitellan suddenly flung the dagger out over the river in a long, glittering arc. It struck the water with a small splash, and he watched the bubbles disperse

  before walking his horse across the road and into the woods. In the distance they could hear hoofbeats as the Danish scouts approached.

  "He must stay. He will stay," whispered Alfred to himself as he held his hunting horn ready and the Danish scouts rode past. The main column of raiders was very close. "Wessex is his immortality now, just as he was Gentor's. He would not desert his own flesh and blood."

  The vanguard of the Danish column drew level with Alfred and Paeder, and the young prince lifted the mouthpiece of the horn to his lips. Pax Romana vivit, he thought as he blew a long, clear note and the trees began to crash into the Danish column.

  In the following year Alfred was crowned king, and although his great victory at Edington was still seven years in the future, the promise of ultimate victory over the Danes had already been transformed from a dream to a real possibility. Gentor became so obsessed with secrecy that he would not allow anyone else to see the secret cave he had found for the new Frigidarium. He stayed away for weeks at a time, doing his own masonry and woodwork deep underground, and Vitellan was forced to appoint and train a deputy Ice-keeper to keep the old Frigidarium in order. With Alfred and his kingdom seeming more secure, Vitellan began to long for another jump across time. After all, if the steps that Alfred was taking toward civilization were to come to nothing, Roman skills might be needed in the future. He could be a type of weapon himself, to be revived in times of great crisis, but otherwise to be kept frozen. Gentor was delighted when the news reached him, and he set off at once to meet his Master and discuss his plans. All Gentor's work came to nothing, however: the Icekeeper died in a Danish ambush before Vitellan was refrozen, and the location of the new Frigidarium was lost.

  Vitellan was refrozen early in 872, after feigning death from his stomach trouble. The village of Durvonum made a show of going into mourning, and within a few years the memory of its ice chamber faded from common knowledge in the surrounding countryside.

  The Danes were never decisively defeated, and control of the land changed hands through many battles and treaties. The millennium did not see the end of the world, as many had been predicting, but 1066 saw the Normans' successful invasion. The village survived unscathed, and without having to wake its frozen Roman. By now its name had been changed from Durvonum to Durvas.

  The climate was not quite so kind to the villagers. A warm interglacial fluctuation drove up the average temperature. Snow ceased to fall in winter, and even frosts became rare. At first ice was carted across from the highlands of Wales, then a treaty was made with a Welsh landlord to allow a dozen men and women from Durvas to live in the highlands permanently. Vitellan's frozen body was secretly carted there and kept in a new Frigidarium cave. Not having the Roman sleeper within the village weakened the tradition of tending him, yet that tradition was centuries in dying. Finally, in the late thirteenth century, the strain of maintaining an outpost of Durvas in the Welsh highlands began to prove too much in the face of changing social structures and the continuing wanner climate. As the fourteenth century opened, Tom Greenhelm was appointed Icekeeper, and he immediately called a meeting to decide how best they could serve their Master as the village continued to decline.

  After over twelve centuries of operation, the world's second and only human-powered time machine was about to be made automatic.

  3

  charons anchor

  Brie, Northern France: 6 June 1358, Anno Domini

  As the nine travelers stopped to rest, they found that the stone ruins of the great house were still hot from the fire that had destroyed it. Guy Foxtread, the Icekeeper, warily inspected the charred and smoking rubble as the others un- packed their rations of dried meat and nuts. A day earlier this had been a fortified mansion on a prosperous estate, but in the evening .. .

  The English travelers had been camping in a forest fifteen miles to the west, yet they had noticed the glow of the fire reflected against wispy clouds, a strange and evil parody of sunrise which had persisted for much" of the night. The Jacques had been here. It was 1358, two years after King John of France had been captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers. The whole of northern France lived in fear of the Jacques.

  Everything that had not been burned had been trampled, smashed, or looted, and even vines and vegetables had been ripped out of the ground. Guy estimated that about seven hundred villeins had rampaged over the place. Resistance had apparently been minimal. They had seen a few bodies lying near the road as they approached, and six of them were Jacques. The four others, those of the defenders, had been beaten and trampled to a bloody pulp. Guy was about to* return when something in a nearby field caught his eye. A smoking mound of ashes, something that one would not expect in the middle of a field. The ground was trampled and compacted, and had a faint reek of urine. The mob of Jacques had gathered here for some hours. Suddenly apprehensive, he set out for the mound, his heart pounding, his skin clammy with horror. It might have merely been the site of a feast of butchered livestock, yet it did not have the look of a feast. There was a thick, charred stump protruding from the ashes. Crows flapped into the air as he approached.

  Someone had been burned at the stake. Guy saw that the stake had burned through near the base, and had toppled into the ashes along with the body. He tripped and stumbled, then realized with a new surge of horror that he had caught his foot on a body so smeared with mud that it seemed no more than a low mound. A woman, stripped naked, plump and middle-aged. Guy stared down, wringing his hands. A day ago he would have been in awe of her, she would have been an important noble, ordering servants about and perhaps scoffing at the danger from the Jacquerie. Stooping, Guy reached out to feel her neck for a pulse. He snatched his hand back and shuddered as he realized that her throat had been cut.

  There were bodies of more women scattered around the ashes, stripped and caked with mud. One was of a girl, barely pubescent, with very long hair. Guy checked that all were indeed dead, then sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands, but after one breath the stench of blood and piss on his hands made him retch. He heard footsteps but did not bother to turn. Only one man in all the world walked with the strange, measured march-step of the vanished Roman legions.

  Vitellan
stopped beside Guy and looked about. For a long time they were silent and still. Crows were circling impatiently.

  "I have seen some horrors in thirteen centuries, but... if I have seen worse than this I cannot force myself to remember it." His English was stiff and halting, he had been learning it for barely eighteen months.

  "Look at her, Master, she can't have been but thirteen," Guy blurted before his voice cracked into sobs.

  "Who could do this? The Jacques?"

  "Folk such as I be, Master, though they be French and all," gasped Guy, his voice faint and hoarse as he fought to control his breath. "Common folk."

  "Such cruelty, such evil... it hangs over this place like a cloud, chilling me though the sun shines brightly." The crows were circling lower, inky blots on the bright, clear sky of late spring. Some landed close by. They cocked their heads and stared at the humans, both living and dead.

  "The French nobles don't treat their common folk as well as do English. They treat 'em as pigs, aye, and now the pigs have turned to bite."

  Vitellan helped Guy to his feet, then flung a clod of soil at the crows. "Just look at that, first the Jacques, now crows. These folk must be buried."

  "Master, there's eleven women and the burned lord here. Then there's those brave men as died defendin' the house, so that's four more. Sixteen graves is a day's work for nine men such as us."

  "We can't leave them in the field for the dogs and crows. Gah, such a filthy way to die."

  "Death be filthy whatever its form, Master. Still, if ye think we can spare a day from our journey, then we can spit in the devil's face and give these folk a Christian burial."

  Guy walked into the ashes and examined the charred corpse. "Nailed to the stake by his hands. That's how he stayed with it until it burned through."

  "I've seen pagan Romans kill for sport in the arena, but this has happened after thirteen centuries of Christ's Word. Death was quick in the Roman arenas, at least as I saw it."

  "I fought at Crecy, I saw whole fields piled deep with bodies, a thousand times more than this. Why is this worse now, Master?"

  Vitellan knelt beside the girl's body, then gently lifted it from the mud. The limbs were stiff, and it seemed to have little weight. He started back for the ruins, Guy beside him.

  "Long ago, when Trajan was Emperor of Rome, I saw ... there was a goodwife whose sanity twisted. She killed her family in their sleep, then took her own life. That was a little like this, it squeezed my heart more than the bloodiest battlefield."

  "So ye have a mind to bury these folk, Master?" "Yes."

  "Even the Jacques?"

  "Not the Jacques. Let them do some good at last by feeding the crows." They walked on in silence, the girl's hair hanging to the ground and trailing in the mud. Guy gathered up the hair and walked with it in his hands. "There is smoke over there," Vitellan observed, nodding to the southeast.

  Guy squinted into the distance. "Aye, looks to be a hamlet."

  "We'll get the others to help us carry these folk back to their house, then cover them with boards and stones. The villeins in that hamlet can dig the graves."

  "I doubt that they'll be willing as to help the likes of us, Master. Bein' scarcely a mile distant, I'd say their menfolk were here last night with the Jacques."

  "I did not say they'd be willing, Guy."

  The people of the hamlet were not alarmed to see five strangers come striding into the place. The country was full of stragglers trying to join up with the main group of Jacques that had just swept past. A dog sensed something odd and began to bark, but nobody raised an alarm. Some of the women and children were disporting before the others in fine robes from the nearby mansion. Those of the men who had not gone off with the Jacquerie were out of sight, still sleeping off the wine of the night before.

  The travelers entered an outlying house, leaving two at the door. A moment later they emerged, blood dripping from their swords. They were already entering the second house before the reality of what had happened sank in and the screaming began. Drowsy men stumbled out of houses armed with hoes, scythes, and billhooks, only to be methodically cut down by the well-trained men-at-arms. Those who fled into the fields were shot down or turned back by the four strategically placed archers, and those who tried to hide in their houses were dragged back out and bound. Vitellan paced before the captives, speaking in French that was all the more terrifying for being slow and broken. There had been over ninety people living in the hamlet that morning, but twenty-six had died before the survivors were seated in the dust before their nine attackers.

  "Men with mud or blood on their loins, hanging!" At once a collective groan went up, blending with shrill pleas for mercy. Mai and Guy walked among the captives, slashing away leggings with their knives, culling those marked as guilty. Fifteen villeins soon knelt trembling and whimpering. They ranged from teenagers to the hamlet's elders.

  "All others. Men, women, children ... ah, wash dead nobles, clothe dead nobles. Dig graves. Bury." There was silence at his words, there was sure to be worse to come.

  "All take off clothes. Houses, clothes, we burn!" Screams of anguish and pleas erupted, but to no avail. The naked villeins watched as the fifteen men were hanged, then they were driven over to the ruins of the mansion carrying spades, washtubs, and looted clothing while the hamlet burned behind them. Mai, who had trained for a time to be a deacon, conducted a service for the dead.

  Within five hours the English party was back on the road, marching briskly and leading their four horses. That night they camped in open woodlands and buried a small amount of looted coin, silver, and jewelry that they had found in the hamlet. They left no marker over the little cache, and drew no map to locate it again.

  At that time there was a truce in the Hundred Years War between the English and French, so Vitellan's party could move as freely as the brigands, Free Companies, and Jacquerie would permit in the anarchy of the French countryside. They passed within sight of Paris, but did not approach the city. There was a dispute going on between the Dauphin and Etienne Marcel, and fighting flared from time to time. In spite of what had happened at the hamlet, the travelers were not looking for trouble.

  Their guise was good, that of English men-at-arms going to meet with their lord in Berne, then escort him back through the troubled and dangerous French countryside. Their armor was hardened butt-leather and sewn iron strips over quilt padding: nothing worth stealing, but very effective in a fight. Four were bowmen, five were infantry. As they journeyed, word of what the Jacques were doing was always with them. Houses and castles burned, looting, mass rape, murder, and estates abandoned by nobles who had fled in no more than the clothes that they were wearing. They reached the River Marne, making their way carefully because of a huge force of Jacques said to be in the area. Vitellan rode one of the packhorses most of the time, as he tired easily.

  "The late spring weather's to blame for the Jacques," Guy said as they walked. "It's warm, and there's food a-plenty to be had in the countryside. Such a big rabble would starve and die as quick as swallows if this were winter."

  "It's early June, aye, so there be a whole summer as to have the Jacques rampagin', " Walt added. Guy had nothing to say to this.

  "If we came upon a dozen knights ravishing a peasant girl, would we attack as readily as we did in the hamlet?" asked Mai, who was something of a scholar and had a knack of asking awkward questions.

  "Your questions will get ye a brushwood footwarmer one day," muttered Guy, but he did not have an answer.

  "If they were knights, I'd tell 'em 'tis wrong," Walt ventured. "If they'd not stop, I'd lose my life shamin' those knights that a commoner be more chivalrous than they."

  "And if they were a thousand Jacques ravishing a noblewoman, and there was but one of you?" asked Vitellan. "Would you give your life to shame men who know no shame?"

  "I. . . reckon so," Walt decided. "How else could I face my Creator when I die?"

  "Would it not be better to go away, recrui
t a hundred men-at-arms and return to slaughter those evil men, so that they murder and ravish no more than that one woman?"

  "Should a thousand sinners die so that one innocent should live?" asked Mai. Guy cursed and swatted at him with the end of his liripipe.

  "Aye, that they should," said Walt firmly.

  "Then what say the same noble lady had taken a handsome traveler into her house while her husband be off at battle—Guy here, for example." Guy turned to scowl at Mai, but he smiled and continued. "What say she bedded him, but was ravished and killed by a thousand Jacques a day or two later. They are all sinners now, all bound for hellfire if they die unconfessed. Should the Jacques not be allowed to ravish her and cut her throat?"

  "Her adultery does bring death upon her by law in some parts," Guy agreed. "But so it should be for each of those Jacques for the sin of ravishin' too!"

  "Aye, and you also for mountin' her in t'first place," said Walt solemnly.

  "I never mounted anyone but my wife!" snapped Guy, whose wife had died of the Black Death a decade ago, and whose patience with the joke was wearing thin. "I'll not be doin' so in time to come, either." They were silent for a few dozen steps. Will, who was some distance ahead, stopped on the crest of a hill and waved that all was clear. Vitellan turned to check the bowmen, who were following the horses with Gilbert as rearguard.

  "The Jacques should die because she's a noble," Vitellan declared.

  "Say you that nobles are different in God's eyes?" asked Mai.

  "No, but nobles represent order. Order builds churches, castles, and roads like the one we walk. Order stores grain against famine and allows kings to form armies to protect villages from brigands. I saw England in the ninth century, and it was very like France as it is now. What would you have? The rule of nobles, or the rule of the Jacquerie and Free Companies?"

  "But, but if the noblewoman had committed adultery—" began Mai.

  "A king who buggers a sheep is still a king! Upon his death he might have trouble talking his way past the Gates of Heaven, but meantime he is still a king."