Clash of Eagles E-Book

Alan Smale

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 653

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Imagine a world where the Roman Empire never fell... In AD 1218, Praetor Gaius Marcellinus, commander of the 33rd Legion, invades Nova Hesperia, a land inhabited by Powhatani, Iroqua and Cahokiani. In search of gold, he and his men find only death. Marcellinus is taken prisoner, but his life is spared. To survive he must re-evaluate his allegiances and find a new place in a strange land.

Leseprobe

Clash of Eagles

Print edition ISBN: 9781783294022

E-book edition ISBN: 9781783294039

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: March 2015

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Alan Smale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2015 Alan Smale.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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FOR KAREN

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Part I: Nova Hesperia

1

2

3

4

Part II: Cahokia

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Part III: Iroqua

20

21

22

23

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Appendix I: Cahokia and the Mississippian Culture

Appendix II: The Cahokian Year

Appendix III: Notes on the Military of the Roman Imperium in A.D. 1218

Appendix IV: Glossary of Military Terms from the Roman Imperium

Appendix V: Further Reading

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

PART I

NOVA HESPERIA

1

GAIUS PUBLIUS MARCELLINUS GALLOPED his horse along the marching line of his Sixth Cohort, racing toward the site where two of his men had been slain by skulking Iroqua warriors.

Trumpets blared, steel armor clanked, and leather creaked, but the footfalls of his legionaries made little sound in the torn-up soil. The corps of engineers that went ahead of the 33rd Legion carved a road through the Hesperian forest barely wide enough for ten men to march abreast. The skies were heavy with cloud, and this late in the afternoon there was no singing and little talking in the ranks. In front of Marcellinus stretched a column of men three miles long. Behind him, the Seventh and Eighth Cohorts would extend back at least another two miles, guarding the two hundred supply wagons that groaned in the Legion’s wake.

First Centurion Pollius Scapax awaited Marcellinus on the path, pointing into the trees. Marcellinus slid off his horse and peered into the undergrowth. “In there?”

“Two men dead,” Scapax said tersely. “Half a dozen grieving. Thirty or so standing guard.”

“Tullius?” The Tribune of the Sixth.

Scapax shrugged. “Not here yet.”

Marcellinus barely hesitated. His adjutants were far forward with the First Cohort, but if he couldn’t trust Pollius Scapax, he couldn’t trust anyone. He strode off the path, between the oaks, and into a small gap in the trees hardly wide enough to be honored with the name of a clearing.

One of the dead legionaries rested against an oak, an Iroqua arrow in his shoulder and a short spear buried deep in his gut. The other had been clubbed to the ground, arms broken and legs splayed, his throat slashed open. Both men had been scalped, their foreheads and hair hacked away roughly, leaving shocking bloody gashes in their place.

Torn bushes and trampled grass gave evidence of a short, sharp struggle. The soldiers’ weapons and armor were gone, presumably stolen by their murderers.

The dead men were both fresh-faced and callow; neither could have been more than eighteen years old.

At least it was obvious how they had died. Other legionaries had been found with ferocious wounds ripped into their flesh or—maybe even more terrifying—barely a mark on them at all.

Six men knelt in grief by the corpses, bare-headed, presumably the tent mates of the dead. “Helmets on, soldiers,” said Marcellinus. “Let’s not lose anyone else here.”

They gaped up at him, incredulous. One man thrust his helmet back onto his head with bad grace. The rest ignored the command, their faces a mixture of pain and insolence. Marcellinus chose not to notice. The days of unquestioning obedience were far behind them now.

Three contubernia—twenty-four men in all—faced outward to secure the clearing, heavy spears at the ready. Their eyes scoured the thickets. The men looked nervous, and with good reason. The dead legionaries’ wounds were fresh, and the alarm had been sounded recently. Whoever had done this could still be hiding in the brush nearby.

Not twenty feet behind them the behemoth of the 33rd Legion still marched grimly through the eternal forest.

Marcellinus looked again at the mourning soldiers. He was intruding on their pain, and nothing he could say or do would ease it. “Just a few moments longer,” he said to Scapax. “Then everyone goes back to the column.” The men on guard looked relieved.

Scapax cleared his throat. “Burial detail, sir?”

Marcellinus looked again into the underbrush that surrounded them. Pale light filtered through the trees. The last thing he wanted was to have his men exposed any longer than they had to be. But the Seventh Cohort, with the baggage train, must be only minutes away.

“Their choice,” he said. “They can wait by the column, put the bodies onto one of the wagons, and bury them tonight, or say their good-byes now and be done.”

The centurion saluted. As Marcellinus turned to leave the glade, the trumpets sounded again, one far to the west followed by another just a few hundred feet away, a complicated sequence of notes.

It was a message from Corbulo, his First Tribune. Marcellinus was needed at the head of his Legion. Another obstacle, and clearly something their engineers could not tackle easily.

Marcellinus’s shoulders and back ached from riding. Worse was the low throb of tiredness behind his eyes. Pulling himself wearily back into the saddle, he drummed his heels against his horse’s flanks.

As he rode forward, the Legion was already slowing to a halt.

Pollius Scapax’s voice boomed out across the sloping hillside. “First Cohort, stand to! Eyes up, spears out!”

The men of the First fell into battle formation, three ranks in close order. Tired soldiers set the hafts of their heavy pila in the ground and held them angled outward. Archers stood with bows strung and quivers of arrows at their feet, blinking owlishly at the shallow valley. The evening breeze ruffled the crests on their steel helmets.

No enemy was in sight, but men had died today, and this was hostile territory. The First was mustered to repel any potential attacks while the slaves and the soldiers of the other cohorts made camp.

The castra was a roving town that re-created itself daily in its own image. They rebuilt it identically every afternoon, occupied it for one night only, then abandoned it the next morning: civilization on the march through Nova Hesperia.

The engineers had chosen a site only a couple of miles past the Legion’s sudden stop. As usual it was a large open area near a river, on rising ground, with little nearby cover that could be exploited by attackers. Even before the First and Second had arrived, the engineer corps had measured and marked with a knotted rope where the streets would be laid out. Now, the meadow became a hive of activity. Up went the ramparts, earthworks six feet high around the perimeter surrounded by a deep defensive ditch. Down came any trees unfortunate enough to be within the square, their wood pressed into use to construct the raised guard platforms at each corner and above the four gates. Up went the tents, down went the latrines. Finally, up would go the five temples obligatory for feeding the Legion’s faiths: the Mithraic temple, the shrines to Cybele and Sol Invictus, the open-air altar and prayer rail of the Christ-Risen, and the small but rather forbidding statue of Jupiter Imperator, which had more presence than any of the real-life Imperators Marcellinus had served.

The camp was square, with streets constructed on a grid. Its alignment was as constant as its arrangement, with the wide main street called the Cardo aligned north-south so that the evening and morning light shone down the long cross streets named for the cohorts and centuries that lived on them. The rank and file lived eight men to a tent, and Marcellinus’s own Praetorium tent formed the center of the camp. Latrines, the field hospital, stables, the smithy, and the armory were arrayed around the rim with open areas at the corners for the slaves.

As always, Marcellinus walked the streets as the camp took shape, receiving reports from his tribunes and centurions. The air reeked of stale sweat and fresh wood and rang with shouted orders, banging and sawing, and curses in a broad range of dialects.

“Two more soldiers down,” said First Tribune Lucius Domitius Corbulo moodily, joining him at the Eastgate.

Beside them legionaries and auxiliaries shoveled earth with resolve, digging the deep ditch and throwing the soil up to where their colleagues were shaping the ramparts. The soldiers knew they were being watched by their commanding officers as well as their centurion, and their faces gleamed with sweat. At the crest of the ridge of earth, other men set and bound the sharpened stakes that formed the palisade.

Marcellinus stepped aside to let a line of a dozen slaves pass, sweating and weighted down by the bags of grain they carried in from the wagons. “Two more.”

“Were they good men?”

“They’re all good men,” said Marcellinus. “Legionaries, not auxiliaries, if that’s what you’re asking. Young.”

“Do we know what happened?”

“Saw a deer and went after it, most likely. Fresh meat is hard to come by.”

Corbulo nodded, acknowledging the convenient lie. “Of course.”

Deer rarely approached a marching column. Much more likely that one of them had been caught short by his stomach and had left the column to relieve himself, guarded by his friend, and both had died for it.

Better for a soldier to die in battle, or hunting, than squatting behind a bush.

“Either way, it has to stop,” said Corbulo. “Stupid deaths like these?”

Marcellinus glanced sideways. His First Tribune was veering perilously close to insubordination. “The centurions have their orders. We can’t be more clear. Nobody leaves the column, ever. Nobody lets down their guard for a moment.” He shook his head in frustration and set off to walk north along the intervallum inside the still-growing rampart. After a pause, Corbulo followed in his wake.

The 33rd Legion had begun to leak men as if from a slow wound soon after they’d broken camp and marched away from the Mare Chesapica. Now, four weeks inland, they were down fifty-eight soldiers, this out of a legion in which their so-called centuries had been only seventy men strong to begin with.

They had cleared villages and taken slaves but had yet to be engaged by the enemy in a real fight. Their losses were due solely to harassing actions: the lone arrow flying out of the trees, the blade from behind, and more often than not, the unexplained disappearance. It was hard enough to march into an empty continent on the wrong side of a giant ocean, blaze a trail, tramp twenty miles along it each day, and then build a marching camp the size of a small town every night without having to risk being picked off by cowardly savages whenever a few twigs’ worth of cover separated you from your comrades.

And, since Marcellinus’s cohorts were rounded out with the superstitious denizens of Roman provinces from Aethiopia to Scythia, Magyar to Hispania, and back around, the night camp was always alive with rumors. Man-bears were hiding behind trees; huge hawks were swooping in from the air to pick off the valiant Roman infantry one by one. Giant rodents burrowed up from beneath them. It seemed that in the wilderness of a foot soldier’s imagination no animal was allowed to be normally proportioned. Superstition was strong at the best of times in a rabble like that, and the farther away from Urbs Roma he took them, the worse they got.

Marcellinus shook his head. Nobody in his right mind could feel comfortable with two months of ocean separating him from the Imperium. But however far afield his duties took him, he wasn’t about to start believing in giant hawks.

That left the natives. They were everywhere; on the fleet’s arrival the shores of the bay had been crowded with villages of cringing fishermen. Many had fled. Others were now roped to the heavy carts that made up the Legion’s supply train.

Now, though, they’d left behind the fisherfolk and the berry pickers. The villages they passed might be empty, but the woods around them were not. Hiding behind the tree trunks of inland Nova Hesperia was a different breed of native altogether.

Marcellinus turned. “Where have you put our prisoner?”

“Should be in your tent by now.” Corbulo cocked an eye at him. “I thought you might want her undamaged.”

“Very considerate of you,” said Marcellinus, straight-faced. “You have a heart after all.”

“If I do, this country will be the destruction of it.”

“Aren’t we supposed to march over all obstacles in our path?” If Corbulo could needle him about the deaths, the least Marcellinus could do in return was chide his tribune for letting the whole Legion come to an ignominious halt.

“I was at the rear of the First at the time, consulting with Gnaeus Fabius,” said Corbulo, and then, seeing Marcellinus’s frown, grudgingly drew himself up a little straighter. “Yes, sir … It shouldn’t have happened. I take responsibility. And I’ll talk to Scapax about it.”

“Scapax was back with me, at the … with the Sixth.”

“That would be part of the problem, then.” Corbulo grinned wryly. “But stopping like that? The First Cohort? I’m surprised they didn’t break into a run, straight at her.”

“So am I,” said Marcellinus. “So am I.”

Corbulo glanced past Marcellinus, grimacing. “Ah. Here comes our Britannic ray of sunshine.”

Aelfric, Tribune of the Fourth and Fifth Cohorts, gruff and mustachioed, was walking down a lane toward them. He had shed his armor, but retained the padded jerkin that went between that armor and his tunic, and the scarf that prevented chafing at the neck. Unlike the other legionaries he wore braccae, the woolen breeches of his countrymen. The overall effect was unflattering. Corbulo sniffed.

Aelfric eyed Corbulo with trepidation but addressed Marcellinus directly. “West rampart is up and ready for your inspection, sir. And most of my lot are tents up and set for the evening.” He looked leftward at the northern ramparts, where the Second and Third were still toiling, and grinned at Corbulo. “Your fellows need a hand, do they?”

“Hardly,” said Corbulo, frost in his tone. “They just do a proper job.”

“Oooh,” said Aelfric. “Is that a fact? And what do mine do, then?”

“Gentlemen,” said Marcellinus.

Corbulo raised a sardonic eyebrow. Certainly he himself was a patrician, a Roman citizen of the Imperium. The Briton could never be.

Dropping the matter, Aelfric looked at the skies. The wind was picking up, the tents flapping behind him. “Might rain in a bit.” To Marcellinus he said, “Want me to stop by the Sixth? See if Tully needs anything? He’s probably got his hands full, what with the burials and morale and all.”

“I’m sure he can’t wait to see you,” said Corbulo. “Well, sir, my centurions will be expecting me. Enjoy your interrogation.”

“Interrogation?” said Aelfric.

“Up with the news as always,” said Corbulo, and with a curt nod to Marcellinus he strode forward to heap invective on a soldier of the Second who had stopped to lollygag with his shovel mate.

Aelfric watched Corbulo go. “He seems out of sorts. What did you do to him?”

“Two more dead,” said Marcellinus.

“I hadn’t forgotten,” said the Briton. “But they weren’t his men.”

“Shouldn’t matter. Either way, it’s my fault.” Marcellinus was their Praetor. As Corbulo had just made very clear, it was his job to stop things like this from happening.

“If you say so. But at least it’s a slow bloodletting. At this rate we’ll have time to walk twice around the world before they get us all.”

Marcellinus grunted. Corbulo was right; Britons had a dark sense of humor.

The blacksmiths’ forge was already up and running, sending a wave of heat across the intervallum area. Two of the smiths were shoeing horses, a third hammered out the rim of a wagon wheel that had gotten bent on the road, and a fourth man made nails. Marcellinus looked longingly at the flurry of activity, the flying sparks, and the hiss of the quenching. Back in Campania his family had owned a small horse farm with stables and a forge, and on calmer evenings on the march Marcellinus liked nothing better than to banter with the Legion’s smiths and sometimes even take a turn at the anvil. Shaping iron was a simpler art than leading soldiers.

He turned his back. Tonight he had other duties.

“Aelfric. With me, if you please.”

It was time to face their captive.

* * *

“I am supposed to ravish you now,” said Marcellinus, “but I shall not.”

The young Powhatani brave gaped, shaking so hard that the necklace of seashells on his chest rattled and the crow feathers nearly fell out of his hair.

“Not you,” said Marcellinus, exasperated. “You’re here to translate. Tell her that.”

The Powhatani word slave—they called him Fuscus because he was brown—only now saw the woman sitting on the blanket on the floor of the Praetor’s tent headquarters. Fuscus eyed her warily but didn’t seem upset on her behalf. Why would he be? She wasn’t of his tribe.

He babbled at her, and she replied rather haughtily for one of her smallness and unpromising situation. Compared with the mellifluous flow of patrician Latin, their primitive Algon-Quian tongue sounded like baby talk and twigs snapping. Fuscus gestured as he spoke, and the gestures were not hard to interpret.

Her eyes narrowed. The expression she turned on Marcellinus was contemptuous.

Perhaps she had misunderstood. Algon-Quian had an ungodly wide range of dialects. Marcellinus turned to the word slave. “She understands? She is my prisoner. I should brutalize—use?—use her, then give her to my men. Custom demands it. But I shall not do that. I show her mercy. Yes?” Here he knew he was on safe ground; “mercy” was one of the first words Fuscus had learned. He repeated it often.

The woman spit out a couple of words, steel in her sneer. Marcellinus sighed. “Now you’re supposed to tell me what she said.”

Fuscus cleared his throat nervously. “She say, ‘Disgust.’ And that Roman are like wild dog.” Alert to Marcellinus’s irritation, he took a step back. “She say it, sir. Not me.”

“Ask her what she was doing in the road in front of my army,” the Praetor said.

Such was the height of the 33rd Legion’s superstition that it had taken just one lone woman to bring them to a halt. Faced with twenty braves, or a thousand, his soldiers would have charged and hacked them into bloody meat. But at the sight of a solitary woman standing calmly in their path with flames leaping up from a fire behind her, they’d slowed to a ragged stand-easy and looked back over their shoulders for orders. Marcellinus would have to thicken their spines somehow before they reached the lands of the mound builders and their—Norse-alleged—city of gold.

“She from west farther, sir. Over hills-and-hills. Hear tell of Roman, come to see. She chieftain, daughter of chieftain. She ask you, go home where you come.”

“I see,” said Marcellinus.

The woman struggled to her feet. The two guards who stood in the doorway of the Praetorium tent looked at Marcellinus hopefully, but he shook his head at them, allowing her impertinence.

The woman gestured.

“She ask what you want.”

Marcellinus looked at her. “We want your land. Your country. Your gold and spices. Whatever you have is now ours.”

She glanced blankly at Fuscus and spoke. Fuscus translated, “She say you cannot take the ground. Cannot take sky. It here always.”

Marcellinus stepped closer. Well nourished compared with these people, he towered over her. The woman’s eyes widened, but she stood as tall as she could. Given that the Romans in their metal armor and red-plumed helmets must have appeared utterly alien to her, her courage was considerable.

Her forehead was flat and her hair muddy, but her cheekbones were set higher than those of the coastal tribes and her bronze skin seemed better cared for. Most telling of all, she stood straight and calm, with a dignity their local captives lacked. She was the dusk, the evening star; she was Nova Hesperia, the giant unopened continent of it. And he, Marcellinus, was a bully and past his prime. Worse, he knew it.

He made his decision. “What is her name?”

“She calls her Sisika,” said the brave.

“Well, if Sisika really is ‘daughter of chieftain,’ the tribes to the west will know her. Yes?”

“Yes,” Fuscus said.

“Then say this to her: ‘Sisika, I set you free. You will run ahead of my army and tell all the tribes of the Iroqua, tell whoever else might lie in our path that the Romans are coming.’ ” He struck his steel chest plate with his fist, making an impressive clang. “She will tell the tribes we are mighty and shall not be stopped. We will pass through their lands and onward to the west.”

The Powhatani quacked and popped at Sisika, relaying Marcellinus’s message. He continued: “If the tribes allow us passage, we will spare them. But if they resist, if any more of my men die in these cowardly sneak attacks, we will kill every man, woman, and child, every deer and bird, and the land will be silent and broken after our passing. She must tell them this or their blood will be on her head.” Marcellinus jabbed a finger toward her, and she flinched. “On you, Sisika. We will wipe them from the earth because of you.”

As Fuscus finished his translation, Marcellinus held the woman’s gaze, stern and unblinking. She stared back. Her deep brown eyes were very disconcerting.

She babbled while Marcellinus waited. One of his soldiers languidly drew his pugio, a short dagger, and poked the Powhatani from behind. The word slave yelped and said, “Sisika will do this, tell tribes Praetor words.”

She had certainly said more than that. “And … ?”

“And, but, land of Iroqua, very savage, very hurt. Men of harsh.”

“And?”

“And once past Iroqua, west, is then great city, people of Hawk and Thunderbird. These will fall on you and … burn, cut off your hair, laugh.”

The city the Norsemen had told them of, perhaps. Marcellinus’s interest quickened. Now he was getting somewhere. “This Great City has gold?” He showed Sisika the ring on his finger, the plate on his table, the small statues of his lares, his household gods. “Gold?”

Sisika reached for one of the statues, and Marcellinus had to slap her hand away. Her eyes flared, and for a frozen moment he thought she might actually hit him back, guaranteeing her instant execution. Instead she turned to Fuscus and spoke.

“She ask who these toy persons are.”

“They are not toys. Ask her about the gold.”

Fuscus tried again, pointing anew to the various objects, but the answer was clear in her demeanor. She didn’t understand gold’s significance. She had never seen it before.

Fuscus looked nervous. “She say no gold.”

“And how far to the city?”

“Far and far. She not know.”

Of course she didn’t. How could she?

“All right,” said Marcellinus. “Enough. Get them out of here. Wait outside with them until I come.”

He turned as his guards manhandled the captives out of his tent. “Well, so much for that. What d’you think?”

“That your soft heart will be the death of you.” Aelfric stood comfortably at the rear of the Praetorium tent, arms folded.

“Likely enough,” said Marcellinus.

Aelfric shrugged. “Not bad, to send the woman on ahead, though the Iroqua will probably cut her down before she gets twenty miles.”

“She made it here. She can make it back.”

“Perhaps.”

Marcellinus walked to the tent door. “Did Sigurdsson return yet?”

“None of the scouts did. I’ll bring ’em to you right away when they do.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t fret,” said his tribune dismissively, walking past him out of the tent. “Our Norsemen can rip the arse out of any ‘men of harsh’ this sorry land might throw at ’em.”

Strictly speaking, they weren’t yet Roma’s Norsemen. The Imperator Titus Augustus had shut down the Viking raids on the coasts of Britannia thirty years ago, gobbling up Scand for the Imperium and acquiring every Dane and Geat and Sami clear up to Ultima Thule. But these days a nation had to live loyally within the Pax Romana for two hundred years before its people were granted full citizenship.

By the calendar of the Christ-Risen that Aelfric’s people and most of the Norse used, it was A.D. 1218. It was a full 1,971 years since the founding of Roma, Ab Urbe Condita, and it would be the year 2100 by the Roman reckoning before every new Scand child would enter the world a Roman citizen.

The Norse didn’t care a fig about the delay, though. A pragmatic race, they had already carved themselves out a critical role. Roma needed its navy now as never before, and the well-traveled Norsemen were just the people to help them run it.

After a decade of stagnation and even retreat under the rulers who had followed Titus, the new Imperator Hadrianus III had grasped the nettle. Right out of the gate the man had thought big. He had vowed at his coronation that under his leadership the power of Roma would encircle the globe. Only twenty-nine years of age at his accession, he had figured that if he set the wheels moving quickly enough and remained popular enough to die of old age, he might leave as his legacy a world where the sun never set on the Roman Imperium.

Candidly, Marcellinus thought the man was cracked. Roma had reined in its expansion in the first place because of the high cost of defeating the Khazars and the eastern sultanates. And now Hadrianus was trying to expand the Imperium even farther into the east at precisely the moment when the Mongols and Turkic tribes were swooping westward into Kara Khitai and southward toward the Chin Dynasty. Leave the buggers to it; that was what Marcellinus thought. Let the nomadic Mongol Khan swallow all that and try to administer it. Roma should hold its current line in the sultanates around the Ganges, which Temujinus—or Chinggis, or however he wanted to be addressed these days—had shown no ambitions toward. Eventually the Mongol Khanate would overreach itself and crumble, and that would be Roma’s moment to march eastward again. In the meantime, the real estate from Hispania to the Himalaya and from the barren northern ice to the fetid jungles of Aethiopia Interior should surely be enough Imperium for anyone.

But of course it wasn’t, and so here they were, pushing on beyond the sunset into Nova Hesperia, New Land of the Evening. Because clearly if your territorial ambitions were stalled in one direction, it was only logical to spearhead an attack in the other. As if controlling two frontiers at the same time hadn’t been a nightmare for the Imperium ever since the first Nero had tried to conquer the barbarians beyond the Danube while simultaneously holding the Parthians at bay.

“Imperators,” as Marcellinus might say over dinner, “have no sense of history.”

And “Soldiers,” as First Tribune Corbulo would regularly chide him in response, “have no grasp of economics.”

Corbulo would remind Marcellinus that if popularity cost money, keeping your army loyal cost even more. Bread, circuses, and bribes: big money. And if you were an Imperator spending coin faster than you were collecting it in taxes, you needed somewhere to invade so you could steal more.

Which brought Marcellinus full circle, back to the Norse.

His officers awaited him in the open air outside his Praetorium, armor off and cloaks on against the growing breeze of dusk: Corbulo, sitting off to one side looking bored; Aelfric, tapping his foot; Tribune Marcus Tullius, solid, earnest, sunburned, and blond, still brooding over his lost men; Gnaeus Fabius, the magistrate and junior tribune Hadrianus had assigned to the 33rd Legion at the last minute either to get him out from underfoot or to spy on Marcellinus (most likely both); and Leogild, his Visigoth quartermaster. Nearby, Marcellinus’s guards stood bunched around Sisika and Fuscus.

Sisika’s eyes were wide. When they had frog-marched her into the Praetorium the castra had been little more than an outline, a large square ditch and embankment surrounding virgin meadowland. In the intervening hours the camp had sprung up all around them to become a living community of wooden buildings and goatskin tents as familiar to Marcellinus as his hometown and as foreign to Sisika as the surface of the moon.

Fuscus, who witnessed this transformation every night, had adopted an even more noticeable air of condescension toward her. It was a dynamic Marcellinus often saw among slaves and captives, this petty jockeying among the have-nothings for small scraps of perceived status. He smacked the word slave over the head and pointed down the lane toward the slave quarters, and Fuscus cringed obsequiously and set off at a trot.

To his guards, the Praetor said: “Safe conduct for this one, out of the camp. No interference. Understood?”

Leogild assessed her up and down. Sisika’s hair was still matted and her knees skinned, but her light brown skin was clear and uncreased, almost glowing in the evening light. She was easily the most attractive native they’d come across since landing on the shores of Nova Hesperia. He cleared his throat. “Couldn’t the men have a go with her first? Send her on her way proper like?”

“That is hardly what ‘safe conduct’ means,” said Marcellinus.

“They’ll be disappointed,” the Visigoth said.

“They can have the next hundred women we snare. This one has a job to do. I’m sending her out with an ultimatum to the villages ahead: get out of our way or perish.” He turned back to his guards. “Two of you, escort her to the Northgate. Nobody meddles with her.”

Sisika looked back at him with those disconcerting brown eyes. His soldiers unhappily watched her go.

Corbulo eyed her legs as she walked by. “We make agreements with barbarians now?”

“This is a new land,” said the Praetor. “We try things, and we see what works. Worst case, we’ve only lost one woman.”

“Whatever will get us to the gold more quickly,” said Gnaeus Fabius.

Too many expectations of gold. “And home more quickly,” said Marcellinus.

It was quite the walk Sisika had to make down the Cardo, hemmed in close by a long silent gauntlet of leering soldiers, but Marcellinus noted that she walked with her chin up and showed little fear. Maybe she really was “daughter of chieftain.”

“Cut off your hair, eh?” murmured Aelfric, referring to the woman’s earlier statement. “A dire threat. I’ll wager you didn’t see that one coming.”

Marcellinus swallowed. Aelfric had not seen the dead soldiers scalped by the Iroqua just hours earlier. “Perhaps they could arrange me a manicure as well,” he said.

Fifty yards shy of the Northgate, Sisika came level with the wooden shrine housing the golden eagle standard of the Legion. Her mouth dropped open, and she turned to stare at it. The Aquila, wings upraised, lightning bolts around its feet, glowered back at her with its beady raptor gaze. The aquiliferi honor guard stepped forward instantly, hands on sword hilts; orders or no orders, if Sisika had disrespected the Aquila, its guards would have cut her down where she stood. But Sisika knelt, bowing so deeply that her forehead touched the road.

Tribune Corbulo stood to watch. “She’s left it a little late to curry favor.”

Marcellinus had seen real eagles here, wheeling high in the dusk skies. And Sisika had mentioned them. “Maybe the Aquila is sacred to her, too. She honors the bird, not us.”

Sisika stood and walked on through the Northgate. If she ran, she waited until she was out of sight.

Marcellinus wished he hadn’t asked her name.

Corbulo tutted. “A wasted opportunity to raise morale, Gaius. It’ll be trouble, and we need no more of that.”

“One woman,” said the Praetor.

“Still bad tactics with the troops as fractious as they are.”

“Discipline’s a problem,” added Gnaeus Fabius, who rarely passed up an opportunity to state the obvious, or suck up to Corbulo.

“An even worse problem if the redskins keep picking us off.” Marcellinus looked around him. “I did not request a discussion on this topic, gentlemen.”

“God knows what we’d all have caught off her,” Aelfric said loudly, glancing around at the other tribunes. “I doubt these people ever bathe. A good commander safeguards his men’s health as well as his own.”

“And the men bless you for it, sir,” Leogild said to Marcellinus, straight-faced.

Marcellinus grimaced. “Don’t we have a convenient festival coming up? Where do we stand on wine?”

“We’ll be out of corn and cheese first,” said the quartermaster. “Wine’s not yet an issue.”

The other officers looked at one another. None of them had any clearer idea of the date than Marcellinus did. His adjutants would be keeping track, but they weren’t here. And Marcellinus had raised the issue of supplies again, and that was something none of them wanted to think about.

“Let’s call it Easter,” said Aelfric. “That’s a movable feast anyway.”

“Tomorrow, not today,” warned Corbulo. “Let them walk off this disappointment first.”

“Of course,” said Marcellinus, who’d had no intention of inciting his legionaries with extra liquor this night. “All right. Get out there and make it known that she was a chieftain’s daughter whom I sent out to calm the way ahead and that I’m not setting any new precedents with this. And then remind them that tomorrow’s Easter.”

“Most of them won’t know what that is,” said Fabius.

“Or care,” said Marcus Tullius, scratching under his helmet.

“Tell ’em it’s the Christ-Risen feast of double wine rations,” said Aelfric. “They’ll understand that.”

“Dismissed,” said Marcellinus, and Leogild and most of his tribunes—Corbulo, Fabius, Tullius—saluted and set off through the camp in various directions to brief their centurions.

Naturally, Aelfric dallied. “So, Praetor. Even when you were younger. Would you have spoiled her?” He raised his hands. “Nothing implied. I’m just making conversation.”

Marcellinus looked at him. It was an impertinent question, but that was Aelfric’s way. Britons were very direct. “You don’t have daughters, do you, Aelfric?”

“No.”

“Ask me again when you do.”

* * *

Much like the Britons, the Norse were a smart people who understood the advantages of being important to the Imperium and the terrible costs of being an irritant. But every race contained its bad apples, and so the Imperator Hadrianus had issued an edict allowing no quarter to Norse pirates, those renegade few who refused to come to heel.

Two years earlier, a Roman navy warship had intercepted a Norse longship approaching the north coast of Hibernia. An innocent Norse vessel sailing home from the recently discovered Vinlandia had naught to fear from a Roman inspection; this longship had tried to use its greater maneuverability to escape and, when that failed, had tried to bluff the Roman captain, badly.

After a brief but fierce engagement the Romans boarded the vessel to find it stuffed with gold plate, jewelry, and bizarre statues from an as yet unknown culture, along with large quantities of turquoise and lapis lazuli and a few bags of spice. Alas, Roman efficiency had slammed into Viking berserker battle ardor with such completeness that there was nobody left alive on the longship capable of testifying about where they had acquired such a lucrative cargo.

Despite this inconvenience, Hadrianus was badly in need of revenue and not one to pass up such an opportunity. It was at that point that he had raised the priority of the conquest of the continent beyond Vinlandia.

There was no reason to suspect that the equatorial regions of the Evening Continent should be any richer than those of famine-stricken Aethiopia. Logically, then, the gold must have originated around the same latitude as Roma.

Hadrianus sent scouting parties into Nova Hesperia. Those who returned brought back tales of a large city of mounds, longhouses, and at least ten thousand people in the plains far beyond the mountains. Admittedly they hadn’t brought any gold back with them, but then again, the locals hadn’t allowed them within the boundaries of the city.

Very well; Hadrianus could spare a legion to throw at a high-risk, high-return venture. All he needed was the right Praetor to lead it.

By dawn the next day the legionaries had folded tents and were on the trail again, heading west in as straight a line as they could manage. Which, being Romans, was pretty damned straight.

For a while, Marcellinus’s tactic seemed to be working. The harassing actions the Iroqua had been running against the Legion’s advanced corps of engineers and its flanks and stragglers stopped. Freeing one woman had apparently earned the Fighting 33rd a clear path all the way to the mountains. Even the grumpy Domitius Corbulo had to agree it was well done. The miles fell away under the military sandals of the Legion. Day by day they left the sea farther behind, and the interior of the giant land opened up around them. They covered two hundred miles without a single death, and the march became so routine that the centurions grumbled that the men were getting soft and added daily weapons drills.

True to his word, Marcellinus left the villages unscathed. Usually the inhabitants deserted them and hid out in the wilds till the army had passed; sometimes they sat sullenly outside their scrappy, insect-ridden hovels with their heads bowed. Good enough, thought Marcellinus. They may be untouched by civilization, but at least they comprehend a threat when they hear it.

Truth be told, Marcellinus felt sorry for them. He hadn’t asked to be sent here, and these folks hadn’t asked to have a Roman legion trampling their pastoral quiet. The Hesperians had so little to begin with. Roma’s ancient ancestors might have been painted men very much like these, long before all the marble buildings and the metalsmithing and the lawmaking. They were less than farmers, and their tiny patches of sickly corn were so pitiful that even Leogild didn’t think them worth requisitioning; as far as Marcellinus could tell, the inland peoples survived by trapping coneys and picking berries. Marcellinus could be ruthless when necessary, but there was no glory in waging war against beggars. The true enemy lay ahead, in the Great City that the Norse scouts had reported and Sisika had confirmed.

Soon enough, the terrain creased around them and rose up into a series of rolling ridges and craggy mountains that Fuscus, in his broken tongue, called Appalachia. The peaks were neither as classically sculpted as the Alps of Europa nor as grand as the ranges of the Himalaya, but they had a hazy comeliness to them that reminded Marcellinus of parts of northern Italia. Despite the rigors of getting the Legion through such a trackless wilderness, Marcellinus thought it a land of some charm. Then again, he got to ride a horse up the interminable hills.

They had only a couple of dozen horses, and only the Praetor and his tribunes, scouts, and dispatch riders rode them. They were much too valuable to put to work hauling the supply wagons, and besides, they had slaves for that; to their surprise the Hesperian shores had proved to be devoid of beasts of burden. Aside from the Powhatani themselves, that is.

Marcellinus felt the odd twinge of guilt about resting easy in the saddle, but he genuinely needed to conserve his strength. At night in castra his men might drink their watered wine and gossip over games of knucklebones with no further cares, but Marcellinus spent those hours meeting with his quartermaster about the ever-present question of supplies, his tribunes and armorers about their battle readiness, his centurions on matters of discipline, and doing a hundred and one other things. There was never a lazy evening for a Praetor. Technically he might have left some of these details to others, but with his authority over the Legion as precarious as it now seemed, it behooved him to stay involved with all aspects of legionary logistics. If Marcellinus could be everywhere at once, no one could talk about him behind his back.

The men noted his diligence and didn’t seem to begrudge him the ride. Their job was the hike; his was to look after his men and keep them as comfortable as possible, not waste the sweat they were donating to the enterprise, and be trusted not to squander their lives when the crunch came.

Around noon one day Marcellinus found himself riding near Marcus Tullius, who hailed from Etruria. “What d’you think, Tully? Long views and enough land for anyone once we get rid of some of these damned trees.”

Tullius made a sour face. “Over that whore of an ocean? It’s too far from Roma. Nobody is going to want to come and farm this crap.”

It was true enough. Romans were not natural sailors, and the trans-Atlanticus voyage had been a puking nightmare the way the big troop transports rolled on a heavy swell.

“Some men might prize a bit of separation from the capital. Independent sorts, regulation-weary?”

“Ex-convicts, maybe. But they won’t be growing olives or grapes on these slopes. Bad soil, worse sun. You’ve seen what passes for corn here? Even the Norse can’t make a go of it, and they can farm Graenlandia.”

“Well, only with sheep and a few cattle,” said Marcellinus. “They don’t grow crops there.”

“Either way. No, if the redskins have gold, we want it; if not, we just kill the bastards off. Hack ourselves a bloody road right across the continent and use it to go and stab the slant eyes in the back.”

Marcellinus winced. “That might be quite a distance,” he murmured, and didn’t raise the issue of natural beauty again.

Whatever their scenic glory, the Legion found the high ridges heavy going, and their average daily march dropped from twenty-two miles to nearer twelve. On one frustrating day when they had to ford several streams and backtrack twice in search of a route the baggage carts could negotiate, they advanced only seven. Finding areas broad and flat enough to host a full castra added to the challenge, and Marcellinus sorely missed the guidance of Thorkell Sigurdsson and his other Norse scouts, still conspicuous by their absence.

His men grumbled, and even Leogild’s sunny Visigoth humor began to cloud over. Each day took them farther from the coast and stretched their provisions even thinner. Battle was ahead, a city to be sacked, spoils to be had—but how far? It was the conversation on every tongue, the thought in everyone’s mind.

Arguments broke out over the Legion’s campfires on a nightly basis. Best to go on to death or glory, risk everything on a single throw of the dice? Or eventually beat a prudent retreat to the coast, winter up, and next spring surge back along the path they had already carved?

They could go on, but once winter came, the march would be over. The Legion would have to build a fortress and hunker down within it, unable to travel again until the thaw. And then what would they eat?

Marcellinus heard the discontent and shared it, but all he could do was show a resolute face and push on.

Then came the ambush, and everything changed.

2

THE LEGION MARCHED DOWN a long valley that was narrow and high-sided. Below them the plains opened up; they had conquered the Appalachia, and an enemy might suppose that high spirits would make them careless. But the Fighting 33rd were career soldiers to a man, and this was such an obvious site for an ambush that there really had to be one.

They had been sighting Iroqua all day: a fleeting glimpse of a warrior behind a tree here, a feather seen over a rock there. Once the trend was clear, Marcellinus passed the order down through his tribunes and centurions that the men were to ignore the natives until actively engaged. That way, the natives might assume they’d gone unnoticed. Even as the Iroqua tried to lull the Romans into a false sense of security, Marcellinus was sanguine that he had instead tricked them into overconfidence.

As his cohorts tromped downhill, eagerly awaiting the onslaught and whistling like longshoremen, Marcellinus felt that surge of energy he loved, the spark that ran like lightning through well-trained men on the verge of combat. Today, at least, his Legion was behind him to the last man.

Sure enough, where the way was narrow and the crags around them tall, the Iroqua attacked.

Predictable. And yet not.

Suddenly the air was full of darting shapes that whirled above them as if the laws of nature and common sense had ceased to apply.

Briefly, Marcellinus feared he had lost his mind. A swarm of giant moths seemed to assault him, and for several dangerous seconds he couldn’t even bring them into focus. Then the shapes resolved, and he realized they were farther away than he’d thought.

The moths were actually men harnessed to rigid triangular wings.

Each pilot was spread-eagled beneath his wing, lying prone, steering left and right by tugging at a stiff cord that passed under his chest and extended from wingtip to wingtip. Yet control of these crude aerial vehicles required only part of their energy; each also held a bow and could reach across himself to pull arrows from a streamlined quiver strapped to his thigh to rain down death on Marcellinus’s troops. Each aviator wore a mask bearing the powerful hooked beak of a falcon.

His thoughts raced. Men in flight! Had this been a circus display, he might have laughed for joy. But these wings were not for sport; their intent was deadly serious. Marcellinus had been caught flat-footed. Behind the beat of the battle, he mentally lunged to catch up.

He was not the only one. Legionaries shouted, turning around and around, flinching from this strange aerial threat but finding nowhere to retreat to. Centurions barked, fighting to regain control. Close to Marcellinus a soldier lifted his shield over his head in defense, knocking the helmet off the man next to him. Soldiers slipped and fell.

The archers of his First Cohort, the cream of his military crop, capable of recognizing an enemy no matter what direction it came from, laconically pumped arrows into the air. But they were below the thrust of the attack and so were forced to fire back over the mass of the Legion. If they weren’t careful, there was a real risk that their arrows would fall among their own fellows.

As the Iroqua swooped over the densely packed line of the Legion, their deadly projectiles rarely failed to find a mark. These arrows needed only to wound, poison-tipped for sure; legionary after legionary toppled to the ground like a cut-string puppet moments after suffering no more than the shallowest nick. Fortunately, most of the arrows plinked off armor.

The trumpeters looked to Marcellinus for commands. A pair of flying Iroqua buzzed them, an arrow thwacked into the ground by his side, and Marcellinus found his tongue. Over the pandemonium he shouted, “First, Second, Third: split line! Fire outward! All other cohorts, orbis!”

The signalmen nodded, and the trumpets brayed.

As always, the 33rd Legion spread over several miles. The Iroqua attack was concentrated on his first three cohorts, bottling up the men behind. Expecting a ground assault from both sides, Marcellinus had planned a split line anyway, and it was also the best formation to resist an attack from the air. The cohorts in the rear were overextended, and for them the hollow-square orbis formation would form the best defense even if hordes of barbarians flooded down the ravine behind them, given the advantages of discipline and steel armor.

More Iroqua swooped and soared; more legionaries fell. Up the hill the cohorts of Tullius and Aelfric were breaking into sections and forming ragged squares. Beyond them, in the distance, the slaves were crawling under the supply wagons. From somewhere came the unmistakable scream of a horse.

On either side of Marcellinus, the First and Second fell into close-order parallel lines, facing out to the left and right. Behind the First, the honor guard clustered around the Aquila.

From the sky came stones as well as arrows. Some of the flying warriors were armed with slings rather than bows. More arrows came from Iroqua archers standing on the crags above, shooting from much greater range.

One of his signiferi took an arrow in the neck and went down, screaming. Carrying no shields, the standard-bearers made easy targets from above. Next to Marcellinus an adjutant received an arrow to the arm; calmly, the man knelt and used his pugio to slice into his skin to yank out the arrowhead and then sucked the poison from his wound.

Then the Third Cohort broke in panic. Legionaries milled and shouted, unable to evade the soaring enemies without trampling their comrades. Such a loss of discipline was unacceptable. Where was Corbulo? Marcellinus recovered himself, left the First under the control of his senior centurion, Pollius Scapax, and ran uphill into the ranks of the Third.

Marcellinus thought Corbulo was down and wounded until he reached his tribune’s side. Instead, Corbulo was watching the wings whirl over his head with something like terror, his hand thrown up as if to ward off a curse.

Marcellinus applied his foot to Corbulo’s ribs. “Up, man! Must your men see you trembling and afraid?”

“What?” Corbulo’s eyes searched for him as if the tribune were drunk or in darkness.

“Men in kites! You’re not so daunted by that?”

“Kites?” said Corbulo in a daze.

“Aye, kites,” the Praetor said. “And aboard them, just men.”

“Men!” said Corbulo. “Of course, I see it now,” and rose to his feet. Rushing into a group of his archers, he marshaled them to shoot long at the Iroqua who stood on the crag tops waiting to launch. A fusillade of arrows knocked a good half dozen of the attackers off their perches, and several more leaped off the crags, consigning themselves to the air. At least one crashed to earth immediately, a victim of the treacherous winds swirling up the valley.

Marcellinus leaned back to study the flying braves. It was the Praetor’s job to think strategically, but he was hard-pressed to devise a strategy against an enemy that soared out of reach.

Now, up the hill, he saw smoke. A flaming arrow had embedded itself in the canvas of one of the supply train carts and was setting a merry blaze. Critical provisions were at risk.

Marcellinus grabbed a pilum from a fallen soldier and ran to launch it upward at the nearest Iroqua. The javelin drifted lazily behind the wing and dropped back to earth; Marcellinus had badly underestimated the flying brave’s height and speed.

“Lead with your bows!” he shouted. “Fire ahead of them! Well ahead!”

Across the Legion the wave of terror had passed. The cohorts were getting back under control, shields arrayed in defense and bows at the ready. The men had found themselves an enemy they could fight. It became a game now, though a deadly one; the more practiced Iroqua slew three Romans for every wing the legionaries sent tumbling into the rocks.

Marcellinus took a bow from a man of the Third who had fallen to his knees, cradling his arm. Nocking an arrow, he swung it upward and let fly. And then he did it again. His second arrow pierced an Iroqua’s stomach, and he savored the man’s scream as he plummeted into the ground.

The bow was not Marcellinus’s favored weapon. Let no man say the Praetor was not flexible in a pinch.

When the final tally came in, the Legion had lost two hundred fifty men in the skirmish. In return the Romans had shot down several dozen of the wings. Perhaps a couple of dozen more of the Iroqua had fallen out of the sky from overzealousness, or had misjudged the canyon walls, forging their own disasters.

Marcellinus loathed the loss of even a single legionary out here beyond the edge of the world, where they could not be replaced. Yet the deaths of their comrades brought such fire and fury to his men that considered as a whole, his Legion might well be the stronger for it.

“Cowards and skulkers, shooting their poison arrows from on high! We can hardly clamber into the air and meet them blade to blade!”

Side by side they rode at the head of the Legion, Praetor Gaius Publius Marcellinus and First Tribune Lucius Domitius Corbulo, as they had in happier times out east.

“Aye,” said Marcellinus tactfully. Corbulo was obviously not taking his momentary lapse of reason on the battlefield well.

Corbulo skewered him with a glance, and Marcellinus added, “As cowardly as picking off our legionaries when they step out of their marching line or go to fetch firewood.”

“Worse. What kind of man hides in the air?”

“The flying itself is not without risk,” Marcellinus pointed out. “Merely learning the skill must present its hazards. Plenty of opportunities to tumble out of the sky onto your head.”

“The basic trick looked simple enough,” Corbulo grumbled. “Those men were not warriors.”

Marcellinus doubted the simplicity of it. He had ordered his adjutants to ensure that one of the crashed wings was packed into his cart for later study. The wing appeared to be constructed of deerskin scraped thin as parchment and stretched over pine and cedar spars and adorned with feathers. Certainly Marcellinus would never jump off a cliff under such a flimsy frame and knew of no other sane Roman who would. And once the Romans had organized and begun to get their enemies’ range, the Iroqua had retreated by flying back up to land on the crags once more, also hardly an easy task.

The skills of these aerial warriors must have taken a lifetime’s learning. More ominously, the fliers must be supported by their community while honing their talents. On the shores of the Mare Chesapica it had been every Hesperian’s chore to trap his own fish. Here, though, they were no longer scrabbling farmers and part-time warriors, but specialists. It implied civilization and a level of organization previously unthinkable for barbarian tribes such as these.

“But there’ll be no next time,” said Corbulo, shaking Marcellinus out of his reverie. “It’s a trick that only works once. You know how the wind rises on meeting a steep slope? Their kites ride on that. But the mountains are behind us now, and I see no terrain ahead where they’d have that advantage.”

Marcellinus glanced sidelong at his First Tribune. “No more element of surprise.”

“No more surprises,” Corbulo agreed.

And yet a small part of Marcellinus regretted that he would never see such a thing again. If the aerial Iroqua had not been deadly enemies, he could have watched them all day. Idly, he imagined himself jumping off the Palatine Hill and circling over the glitter and marble of the Roman Forum before alighting in front of the new Curia building where the Senate met. Now that would be a triumph!

He wished he’d opened his eyes even wider to take it all in.

Domitius Corbulo checked back over his shoulder. “And speaking of savages … a word in your ear about Aelfric.”

“Aelfric?” Marcellinus said, startled.

“He presumes too much. And you allow too much.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Have a care, Marcellinus. Your friends should be patrician Romans, not Norse, Britons, or any other bloody outlanders. You’ll be chumming it up with Fuscus next.”

“Last I heard, Britannia was still solidly part of the Imperium.”

Corbulo gave a laugh so short that it was almost a cough. “Then you’ve never been there. Did you know I was stationed up in Caledonia, at the Wall of Antoninus? For three years.”

“That’s a long time,” Marcellinus said.

“Dismal bloody weather and a complete mess politically. You wouldn’t believe so many client kings and bizarre religions would fit onto such a small pair of islands. I could write you a list of the odd things they believe. It’s one of the few regions left in the Imperium where they still have genuine shamans, you know. The Hibernians are the worst: mystics and moaners. They’d wail as soon as talk.”

“Somehow Aelfric never struck me as the wailing type,” Marcellinus said.

Corbulo would not be distracted from his theme. “Britons are all natural plotters and counterplotters; it’s in their blood. And they mask it with congeniality. They’ll worm their way inside your thoughts, get you talking, though they’re quiet ones themselves. Before you know it, you’ve told ’em secrets they can use against you.”

That brought Marcellinus up short. He had certainly discussed many things with Aelfric that it would never have occurred to him to tell Corbulo. About his long-lost wife and daughter, his doubts that they’d find gold, and probably a dozen other topics that he probably shouldn’t have confided to a tribune. All because he felt comfortable with the man. What did he really know about Aelfric’s motivations?

“I see I’m not wrong,” Corbulo said. “And what do you know of him in return? Do you even know where he was born? I do. Eboracum. He’s a Brigante.”

The Brigantes were a Celtic gens with an ancient heritage in the north of Britannia, one of the last tribes to fall to Roma during the conquest. But that was a thousand years ago.

Marcellinus frowned. “He’s really a Celt? Isn’t Aelfric a Saxon name?”

“Celt, Saxon, they’re all mixed up together now. But either way, Aelfric is too familiar by far. Ponder on it; that’s all I ask.”

“I’ll take care,” said Marcellinus. He paused. “Thank you.”

Corbulo smiled.

Imperators come and go. In Marcellinus’s time he’d seen six and served four, and he would not have donned the Imperial purple himself for a million sesterces. He would sooner have lived as a beggar in a shack than be Imperator of Roma, and everyone knew it, so he had survived many a bloody Imperial transition to become one of the most senior legates in the army. His problem with Hadrianus III was the Imperator’s ambition, not his own.