PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
Outside Vindobonum
Provincia Pannonia Superior
Imperium Romanum
September 5th, 167 CE
Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus stepped up to the edge of the purple-draped wooden platform on a cool bright autumn morning, standing tall. At five-eight he was several inches above average by Roman standards, and looked imposing in his gold-embossed, muscled bronze cuirass, with an Imperial purple sash about his waist and a cloak of the same hanging from his shoulders.
A wreath of gold-wrought laurel leaves rested on hair a dark brown that verged on black; that and his close-cut curled beard showed a few threads of gray.
The platform was ten feet above ground level, which added to the effect. But the eyes that looked out from that very Roman face were deep brown pools where thoughts moved glinting, like fish in the depths. Those who knew him well would have remarked that his stance was easier than it had been last year, as if some internal pain—which his Stoic training let him mostly ignore—had gone.
Stretching in front of the silk-draped square plank dais to both sides were units from all five of the legions that had crossed the Danube this May past, and from the auxiliaries who’d accompanied them and fought beside them . . . or at times in front of them. The rest were still in the north, consolidating and clearing up, building forts and roads, and nailing the victory down.
They looked splendid in their ordered ranks with the unit banners bright in front of each infantry cohort or cavalry ala, but the cool wind from the north also brought the rancid-oil-sweat-iron-brass-dirty-socks smell massed Imperial troops had in this age. Even the new legions raised three years ago—II and III Italica—now had the look of veterans, and their gear was well-kept but also showed hard use.
It all combined with the familiar scent of horses and what horses did, copiously, whenever the impulse moved them. Tribune Lucius Triarius Artorius—born Arthur Vandenberg in West Texas just a few days before Christmas in the year 1999 CE—had spent much of his childhood and adolescence on the family ranch there, and found that part a bit nostalgic.
Behind the Emperor at the rear of the square platform was a giant banner hanging from a crossbar; the pole that supported it was topped by a spread-winged golden eagle with its claws on silver thunderbolts. Embroidered on the rippling crimson silk below was a golden wreath with the letters SPQR inside it in capitalis monumentalis.
For Senatus Populusque Romanus.
Also behind the ruler and in front of the banner were a collection of bigwigs, the provincial governor of Pannonia Superior, Marcus Iallius Bassus, the legionary commanders, and Legatus Augusti pro praetore Marcus Claudius Fronto—officially second-in-command for this campaign, unofficially its general under the Emperor’s overall direction. A round dozen of the ruler’s comites, his closest advisors and the functional equivalent of a Cabinet, filled out the roster; some were in military garb, some in civilian togas with the broad or narrow purple strips of a senator or eques.
And five former Americans, here via a one-way trip in a very temporary time machine, Artorius thought.
The Emperor nodded to his court physician, Aelius Galenus, and extended his left arm in a graceful quasi-rhetorical gesture. Public speaking was at the core of Roman upper-class education, and he’d been drilled in it since childhood.
Galenus was the Latin form of Galenos, something which showed his Roman citizenship though he was born a Greek in the great city of Pergamum, in Roman Asia Minor. He was a spare man in his late thirties, wiry-slim with a high brow beneath his thick black hair and short-cropped beard.
Now his hand raised a vial of glass for the audience below the platform to see. He knocked the stem off with a deft blow from the handle of a surgical scalpel, and wiped the Emperor’s shoulder with a swatch of damp cloth that had been boiled and allowed to cool in a covered container. Then he used the point of the blade to make a deep scratch. Into that he poured a little of the liquid inside the vial, rubbed it in with another clean swatch, handed the vial and scalpel to an assistant, then deftly bandaged the slight wound.
Tribune Artorius watched it all from the rear of the temporary dais. He was thirty-four and a bit now biologically, which made him a few years younger than the Greek . . . as well as over eighteen hundred years younger, in another sense.
He was also six feet tall—which was towering by Roman standards and well above average even for the barbarian Germanii—broad-shouldered and leanly muscular. His sun-streaked fair hair and beard were cropped close and his skin deeply tanned, which made his slightly tilted blue eyes stand out vividly.
What he wore was unexceptional in this exalted company: a bleached-white tunic of fine wool with two narrow purple stripes running down from the shoulder to the hem, marking his elevation to the status of eques, a member of the Equestrian Order, the lower ninety-plus percent of the Roman aristocracy. It had often been rendered in English as “knight” and literally meant horse-rider.
Far in the past that had been meant literally, describing those who came to early Rome’s war levy on horseback. Most later European languages had had some equivalent that meant gentleman too, chevalier or caballero or the like.
As opposed to cowboy in Texan, he thought with a hidden whimsical smile.
That elevation to the Equestrian Order had been made by Marcus Aurelius himself, and on this very spot, a little more than a year ago. Along with enough land to make him quite respectable, gifted from the res privata, the Emperor’s private estates. All four of his American companions . . . once graduate students . . . had gotten lesser but substantial rewards then too.
Back from June 2032 CE to June 165 CE in an instant, unconscious, then two years plus three months forward at normal living pace, he thought. We started slow, but things have sped up lately . . . since we showed up at that first battle here last May and turned things around. Nine months to get ready for that, on our own. Birthing a biggish baby . . . We’ve sure done a lot more since, but it helps to have the Big Boss grateful and helpful. Per ardua ad astra!
The hem of the tunic came to his knees, because the garment was bloused up through his balteus—the military belt and baldric that held his sword and dagger—of red-dyed leather mostly covered in worked silver plaques. That and the caligae on his feet, the strapped hobnailed sandal-boot of the Roman army, were rank markers too: they showed he was a soldier, and the whole ensemble said tribunus angusticlavius to Roman eyes—literally a tribune of the narrow stripe.
None of them would blink at the white scars on his legs, though they might find their shape unusual . . . because they’d been made by an improvised bomb, eighteen hundred years from now in a future that probably no longer existed. Though he’d never know for sure, which was one of the many reasons he thought about that future as little as he could. Particularly not about the personal parts, which still gave him nightmares now and then.
He was also a Tribune attached to the Imperial headquarters; in American terms he was a high-ranking general staff officer. Lively rumor made him much more, that and the fact that the Emperor obviously paid his counsel close attention.
Which had brought an embarrassment of bribe offers, too, from people who wanted to buy their way to the Emperor’s notice. Learning to turn those down tactfully and without giving mortal offense had been . . .
A steep learning curve.
The troops before them had won a crushing victory over the coalition of barbarian tribes led by the Marcomanni and Quadi. They were still feeling cocky about beating what Romans called the Magna Coniuratio Barbarae—the Great Barbarian Conspiracy. For that matter, those who’d fought the fight would boast about it all their lives, and on their inscribed tombstones too.
And they were feeling very, very well-inclined toward Tribune Artorius and his clients, who they all knew had drastically reduced the cost of that victory with his new things aka “the Pannonian gear.”
Artorius the War-Wise was their nickname for him.
Though they don’t know the Marcomannic Wars would have lasted for fourteen years without us Americans. That’s an accomplishment, soldier! From fourteen years of mutual slaughter and burning and wasting from here to Italy . . . all scaled down to one campaigning season on a successful defensive and then one more on the highly successful offensive. With a fair bit of slaughter, granted; the first battle here, that Quadi night attack on Carnuntum that I called . . .
That still made him sweat in retrospect. He’d made an educated guess and it had vastly increased his reputation. If it hadn’t worked out, though . . .
. . . then vastatio north of the Danube until the enemy were desperate enough to stop retreating and fight the final biggie this summer. . . . But not year after year of mutual slaughter this time, and the Roman territories aren’t devastated. And it’s over for good, and the Marcomanni and Quadi and a lot of others are under the wings of the Eagles . . . also for good.
Which Roman phrase meant the Marcomanni and Quadi were now obedient subjects of the Empire and beneficiaries of the Pax Romana, whether they liked it or not.
Probably every second free man of military age in those great tribal confederations was dead, or crippled and fumbling at tasks that had once been easy, or in chains heading south to the slave markets and the Imperial mines and the gladiatorial arenas. With a much higher casualty rate among the tribal elites, because they were the closest thing to professional fighters their people had and had been in the front lines from the beginning.
The survivors were not eager for a rematch.
Their few living chiefs . . . or the minor-age sons of their dead chiefs, represented by their mothers . . . were scrambling to accept the terms offered, harsh though they were. They knew full well that the Romans could kill or enslave them all . . . and were perfectly willing and able to do just that if they caused serious trouble.
And by the time a new generation had grown up and could start thinking about revenge for dead fathers, with gunpowder weapons no longer so supernatural seeming . . . By then the new provinces would be webbed with Roman roads—done macadamized style as helpfully suggested by Artorius and his four followers. And tacked down with forts, newly founded cities and veteran colonies, and heavily salted with civilian settlers from the older, more Romanized provinces to the south of the Danube, or from Dacia north of it.
A lot of the widows and orphaned daughters would end up married or mated to Romans and Roman subjects one way or another, too. To soldiers, or incomers without womenfolk. Their children would grow up speaking Latin . . .
The settlers would be moved to move there not least by the new silver and gold mines discovered by Artorius & Co., from Fuchs’s twenty-first-century maps, physical and digital. Combined with better—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century style—refining techniques, those would make considerable fortunes for their backers, large new revenues for the Imperial government, and they would shed a thick dandruff of orders for food and tools and markets for services and general lavish spending all around them to grease the Romanization process.
In front of the soldiers were some of the improved carroballistae, field catapults, that the time travelers had designed, drawn up in neat ranks on their two-wheeled, split-trail carriages, with their ammunition limbers behind. Hundreds were coming out of the military workshops now, with the aim of giving every legion about sixty of them. Saltpeter and sulfur and charcoal were pouring into the workshops to make ammunition too.
That was a visual reminder, not least to the envoys from various Germanic tribes and the Sarmatian Iazyges and Roxolani who were also present.
They threw what the Roman soldiers called thunderballs, or Jupiter’s thunderballs, or just Jupiter’s Balls: sheet-bronze spheres about the size of a man’s head full of black powder and lined with lead bullets held in tree resin, with a quick-match fuse through a plug on top. The catapults could throw the twenty-five-pound weight to over three hundred yards, equivalent to a longbow shot.
When they exploded, they had about the same destructive impact as a shell from a heavy mortar in the twenty-first-century American army when you took into account the extra oomph given by the dense formations everybody used here. They could also throw an unpleasant form of napalm-like incendiary he’d introduced that was now called Ignis Romanus, Roman Fire, in a pottery jug.
What a battery of six throwing that did to a timber-palisade fort had to be seen to be believed.
And in front of them were eighteen cannon cast from bronze, modeled on the twelve-pounder Napoleon gun-howitzer of the American Civil War—the only cannon in the world, right now, and the product of nearly a year of sweating-hard labor, plus plenty of fatal and maiming accidents until the locals got the concepts of explosion and recoil internalized. Lessons which had nearly killed him once.
Fortunately, bronze casting was something Romans were already good at; that had gone faster. It had been boring out the barrels that took time . . . and Dr. Fuchs’s measuring gauges.
The Roman troops called them tormenta—which meant both throwing engines and instruments of torture, a sign that soldiers’ humor didn’t change much.
The first of the new carroballistae and thunderballs had been made privately, by the Americans on the Villa Lunae . . . and then demonstrated—
Demonstrated, he thought. Nice neutral term.
Demonstrated at the battle here in May of last year, when the Tenth Legion was on the brink of being destroyed by a Marcomannic host. The cannon project on the other hand had been backed by Marcus Aurelius after he’d arrived that summer, and hence by the Imperial treasury, thank God or the Gods. By then they had impressed the Roman military . . . and the provincial bigwigs . . . and then the Emperor . . . to the necessary level. As he’d told his four American companions, you needed a government for that sort of massive rush job. Preferably a big government with big revenues.
The twelve-pounders had helped win the final victory too, in their very first battlefield use. Not so much the casualties inflicted at the final enormous fight between the field armies of Rome and the Great Barbarian Conspiracy, though those had been considerable. The crucial thing had been their picador work in giving the huge barbarian host an unpalatable choice between running away and probably starving, or attacking and hoping that worked.
The tribes present at that fight had included allies from all across the Barbaricum, as far away as the North Sea. They’d chosen to attack after hours of being lethally pummeled from far beyond the range of any weapon they had, instead of their original and highly sensible plan of making the Romans come to them.
Charging en masse over the open mile between their start line and the Roman army . . . first through the flail of the cannon firing round shot and then grapeshot . . . then the rain of hundreds upon hundreds of thunderballs . . . then at sword’s point with the Roman auxiliary foot soldiers who held them in place while clouds of arrows and still more thunderballs fell on them . . . then in a short, shattering battle with the fresh and eager legionary heavy infantry.
When the barbarians were already exhausted and whittled down and reeling from their losses and terrified by the supernatural-seeming long-range death.
After about a half hour of that they had bolted rearward in screaming panic . . . the rather less than half of their original vast numbers still alive by that point. Pursued by Roman cavalry, now equipped with wood-framed saddles with stirrups and raised cantles, on horses with nailed-on iron horseshoes, and holding long lances used in the medieval couched style originally invented about eight or nine hundred years after this date.
Not many had escaped, only the ones who’d run first and fastest, or had fresh horses under them, or both. Those tribal envoys sent to this ceremony from groups that hadn’t been at the battle had been shown over the field of battle first, and even some of the hardened barbarian warriors had heaved and retched at the sight and smell of forty or fifty thousand corpses left to rot in the summer heat and feed the foxes and wolves, crows and vultures, maggots and worms.
It was already being avidly discussed from here to Rome and beyond, the news spread by galloping couriers. As the greatest victory Roman arms had ever won on a single day . . . a discussion that would be helped along by broadsheets printed in Latin or Greek on the new paper and stuck up at street corners from here to Rome and eventually from Eboracum in northern Britannia to Nisibis on the border with Parthia.
Propaganda changes when you’ve got paper and printing presses, not just faces on coins and statues in marketplaces and temples. And people here don’t have . . . antibodies to it. Not yet.
Generally about a third to a half of Roman male city dwellers could read, much more than in farming country. Basically because it was just more useful there. And they were accustomed to doing it aloud for their illiterate family members and neighbors.
Few people here read silently anyway; that was considered the mark of a great scholar. Probably that was partly due to the way they ran all the words together without punctuation or spaces in ordinary everyday cursive writing. They had writing, but it was still more closely linked to an oral culture than it had become later.
Though all the printers they’d trained used upper- and lower-case letters with twenty-first-century Western text conventions now, and it would spread by sheer force of numbers if nothing else. Before they’d arrived, a best seller had a few hundreds of handmade copies in total, and they were passed from hand to hand too. Even things like Homer or Virgil only had thousands, and that meant Empire-wide in a population of around seventy million. Books had been expensive, costing the equivalent of a good used car in the 21st century, or an ordinary slave here.
Nearly all the books coming off the new presses outnumbered those done in the old style and they were much, much cheaper. They had the prestige of officially approved novelty, too.
Marcus Aurelius would ride the ceremonial chariot in triumph through the streets of Rome when he returned there soon, with an attendant holding the victor’s crown over his head and whispering remember you are mortal . . . which he’d endure because it was customary. Rather than really enjoying the screaming adulation from the spectators.
He was an unusual man for this time and place.
And Marcus Claudius Fronto, who’d been in command under the Emperor’s supervision, would get the ornamenta triumphalia, the ornaments of a triumph. Nobody but a reigning Emperor and their close relations actually celebrated a triumph through the streets of the capital these days; that had been the rule since the time of the first Augustus a century and a half ago.
The others on the platform stepped forward in their turn to be vaccinated. So did Artorius, and his four ex-students—Paula Atkins, very black and by now statuesquely full-figured rather than plump; Jeremey McCladden, who was like a slightly scaled-down version of Artorius as far as his body went and had a deceptively frank, open, snub-nosed Midwestern small-town-boy face; tall, gawky Mark Findlemann; and Filipa Chang’s wiry athletic slimness.
They’d all been immunized in their home century and didn’t really need the vaccine, but showing willingness now was important. Particularly since they were commonly regarded as quasi-supernatural, which was the reason Paula and Filipa were present at this military ceremony and on the dais itself. Normally nobody female except possibly an empress would be, unless they were a spectator in the distance; a fair proportion of the residents of Vindobona—of both sexes—had walked out to watch all this, and they were grouped a fair ways back of the dais.
And we all have trouble paying for a drink in Vindobonum, Artorius thought. They know what we saved them from. Now they think they can be saved from the plague . . . and they can.
Though the former Harvard graduate students were officially named Paula, Julius, Marcus and Philippa Triarus on their certificates of Roman citizenship, the libellus. With Latinized versions of their surnames tacked on the end of the tria nomina as a cognomen. Paula Atkins was Paula Triaria Atcintia, for starters, though women often used only the first two.
Artorius had picked Triarius as a mild joke, since it was a recognized Roman middle name—the nomen, originally a clan marker—but also meant old soldier.
He was literally an old soldier, himself. A graduate of West Point, and very briefly a captain in the US Army, 1st Battalion, 75th Rangers, though he’d retired after a bad wound from an IED. And done his doctorate in classical history at Harvard right afterward, starting while he was still on crutches . . . and receiving it not long before he ended up here.
And in a real sense, here-and-now we are all the same clan!
The others had been graduate students, also of varied fields of classical studies and five or six years younger than him, recruited at the request of an Austrian physicist named Hans Fuchs. Who’d claimed to have invented a mechanism for securely, precisely dating any historical artifact. That had been a bald lie to get them to Klosterneuburg, just north of Vienna, where the Institute of Science and Technology campus was located.
Fuchs had had a direct . . . personal . . . reason for wanting a range of Roman experts.
It was really a time machine, of course, Artorius thought. Though I didn’t believe it when he told me. Seeing was believing, though!
Remembering the flickering stop-go sensation as Fuchs hastily triggered it when the news of World War Three starting poured in through phones and tablets, then tried to dash back and jump inside the circle of gridwork with the Americans and what they’d come to call his baggage.
That had been like slow motion in real life, and had given Artorius a . . .
Really interesting experience and I don’t want to see anything that interesting ever again as long as I live.
. . . an interesting view of the flash and blast wave hitting the building the time machine was in.
Complete with watching the cracks spreading in the glass of the windows as they prepared to scatter in razor-sharp high-velocity shards through anyone standing in their path. Followed if they’d still been there by the burning building collapsing on whatever was left of your head, and then the fallout plume finishing things off if you were unlucky enough to live through all that and feel the puking, bleeding, rotting-alive sensations of radiation poisoning.
I can’t really object, since Vienna and most of the cities in the world were fusion-bombed just about the same time we . . . left. We made it by a second or less. Though Fuchs didn’t make it. Well, he made it but minus his legs from midthigh down and we buried him. And kept the very useful metric ton of baggage he’d put together for the trip!
He carefully didn’t think of what he’d been tricked into leaving behind: a wife he’d loved since high school and married a month after graduating from the Academy, and their children, for starters. Sometimes his subconscious didn’t agree with that and sent unpleasant dreams about their probable fate . . . if they hadn’t just been erased by what he was doing here.
The dreams came less and less often, though. As far as he was concerned, Arthur Vandenberg the American had died then, killed with his family on the same day. If you repeated something to yourself often enough and hard enough you started believing it.
I’m Artorius now, and Roman. Sort of. Reformist Roman, maybe? And I’ve been a Stoic in philosophical terms since I found out what that was. Fate doesn’t give you love, it loans it to you and can take it back at any instant. Prepare to be punched out by Fate, because that will happen, sooner or later. More than once, probably, and it all ends in death.
When everyone on the dais had gotten their cleansing wipe and scratch and bandage, Marcus Aurelius gestured Galen forward to address the assembly. Designated men in the more distant cohorts would relay his words to those too far away to hear clearly.
The Greek’s Latin was fluent, but with a definite hometown Ionian accent. That wouldn’t hurt, since Hellenes had high prestige in matters scientific . . . or philosophical, as they’d say here.
Nor did it hurt that he was physician to the Imperial family and court, and had introduced—or relayed from the Americans and gotten the credit for—the new antiseptic treatments that had kept unprecedented numbers of them alive after being wounded in action, and other measures which had cut the usual camp diseases radically. More than half of the rather light Roman casualties in the summer just past had been due to direct enemy action rather than infected wounds otherwise survivable, plus camp fevers and dysentery.
Which is unprecedented and everyone realized it.
In his own history, that probably hadn’t happened for any major military campaign until World War One. And only on the Western Front, even in that one.
Galen’s divinely inspired, they think: Asclepius whispers in his ear, instead of just us. Which is good. People are less likely to argue when they think it’s God . . . or a God . . . talking.
“Soldiers of Rome, and foreign guests,” Galen said.
Utterly terrified and bewildered foreign guests, Artorius filled in silently.
Looking at the ambassadors aka hostages huddled in clumps, surrounded by Roman “honor guards” with their hands on their swords and unpleasantly predatory expressions on their faces. The envoys snatched horrified glances at the new weapons every now and then. They’d been given luridly helpful demonstrations of what the carroballistae and cannon could do, with live sheep or pigs or occasionally living but shortly to be dead condemned criminals as targets. That usually hurt less than crucifixion . . .
Foreign guests convinced that nowadays Romans throw thunderbolts like Gods. We’ve introduced a lot of new stuff . . . starting with wheelbarrows and on to paper and printing, which took a lot longer and a lot more trial and error . . . but gunpowder . . . yeah, that gets their attention. With a bang! People who’ve never seen explosions before are . . . impressed.
“You will all have heard of the terrible new plague from the east,” the Greek physician said. “This—”
He held up the now-empty little glass flask.
“—is an infallible preventative. Ten days after you receive this treatment, the plague will have no power to touch you. There will be a slight flush of fever, but nothing to worry you, and then you are safe from this terrible illness for the rest of your life!”
Unexpectedly, a chant of “AVE! AVE!” came from the troops.
Galen started a little, and you could see him stop himself from looking around for the one the accolade was directed at.
What the ampoule contained was the scabs from scratches on the shaven stomachs of calves where they’d been rubbed with matter from cows sick with cowpox. The scabs were cleaned, dissolved in distilled water and then the ampule was sealed with a careful daub of molten glass.
That was how the Victorians had done it, low-tech but effective.
They now knew definitely that the Antonine Plague—also known to historians in their native century as the Plague of Galen, from his descriptions of it—was smallpox. An odd, ancient variant of it, even more viciously contagious than later types, swiftly and agonizingly lethal to half or more of those infected. Diseases tended to get less virulent with time because letting their hosts live longer made reproduction easier, so evolution pushed them in that direction. They were far enough back that smallpox was even more dangerous than it had been in the last few centuries before it was extinguished.
In the original history the Antonine Plague had killed somewhere between a tenth and a third of the entire population of the Roman Empire, and much more than that in the concentrated masses of the cities and in the armies. That had been a fair chunk of humanity, since the Roman Empire right now held a third of the human race.
Rome had never really recovered; it had been the first painful face-plant on a long and ever-steeper downhill slope of bone-breaking impacts, with the Dark Ages at the bottom.
Though this time it won’t kill the co-Emperor.
Imperator Caesar Lucius Aurelius Verus Augustus was an amiable nonentity, one who always looked a little guilty when his far more energetic older adopted brother was around.
He’s alive because we dosed him with some of our precious stock of twenty-first-century antivirals when he got here with a fever of a hundred and five and the beginnings of pustules, Artorius thought. The ones aimed at monkeypox . . . which is part of the same general family as smallpox. And we cured Marcus Aurelius’ ulcers with antibiotics, too. Ulcers which are almost certainly what killed him twelve years from now in the history we studied. Live long and reign well, Emperor of Rome!
Experiment had shown that cowpox still gave a nearly perfect rate of protection against this variety of smallpox, just as Jenner had found in the eighteenth century. And like its close relative smallpox, the cowpox virus was large and formed a protective sheath and could lie dormant but contagious for long periods when protected from sunlight and heat and desiccation. In the ampoules it would stay active for quite some time, if they were kept in boxes and the boxes kept in shade.
Plus, apparently cowpox was common in cows around here anyway. They’d use the vaccine to infect them if they had to—that way one dose could make thousands.
The farmers looked at us as if we were men from Mars when we asked about that, it being something everybody knows. And in a sense we are like big-eyed gray aliens here.
So far only three locals knew they were from the future as well as “America.” There were Marcus Aurelius and Galen, who’d used their formidable intellects to jointly figure out that the Americans’ cover story had gaping holes. For example, why would people from the other side of Oceanus itself know the geography of northern Europe better than the Romans who lived next door to it?
The Emperor had confronted him about it privately. And believed him when he told the truth and gave some demonstrations on his phone, which was linked to the military-grade laptops in the baggage. People here knew less, and less of their information was accurate; that didn’t mean they were necessarily stupid.
At all. Galen and the Emperor were both scary-bright.
So was Josephus ben Matthias, the Jewish merchant who’d discovered the involuntary time travelers unconscious beside Fuchs’s baggage and who’d given them invaluable help. But he had also mentally worried at the curiosities of their appearance like a very smart bulldog until Artorius took him into his confidence about it.
He’d even noticed that all the coins in Fuchs’s chest of cash looked new-minted; they’d been fresh from an Italian firm in the twenty-first century who made replicas of Roman currency. When they should have had lots of wear and tear because they bore the face of Antoninus Pius, who’d adopted the current Emperors as his heirs—Marcus Aurelius was his nephew anyway—and died five years before the Americans showed up.
And he’d puzzled over the fact that he’d found the five of them . . . five and a half, if you counted Fuchs who hadn’t quite completely made it into the temporal field . . . in a forest clearing. With absolutely no sign or track of the pack animals or carts that could have brought their metric ton of baggage to a remote spot, as if they’d dropped out of the air.
Which we did, pretty much.
Their cover story for the rest was that they were exiles from America, an island realm beyond Hibernia, now utterly destroyed by a terrible war fought with weapons of Godlike power. Perhaps even sunk beneath the waves, like Plato’s Atlantis.
Which has the virtue of being . . . in a way . . . the truth. And it’ll account for there not being any ruins when we get around to doing the sailing the ocean blue in the local equivalent of 1492. Fairly soon now. It’ll be the Age of Exploration but supercharged, with an electric cable up the butt. With modern sailing ships, sextants and chronometers and accurate maps.
Galen waited until the shouts died down; the Roman soldiers were brave as you could want facing human enemies, but everyone in this period feared disease with excellent reason, and rumors about the plague had been spreading even faster than the virus. Their relief was palpable.
“Men I have trained—” he went on.
Paula Atkins snorted very quietly from behind Artorius. That included a fair number of women she’d seen to training as well, over the past eight months, for what would be scary but well-paid work . . . and they’d get paid just what the men would, too. It would take the rest of their working lives as well since it would be a couple of decades before everyone in the Empire could be vaccinated. By then enough children would have been born that they’d have to start again . . .
There were practical reasons for including women in the program, which she’d used to justify it: there were many places in the Roman Empire, particularly in the east or Greece, where married men would be deeply reluctant to let a male physician near their wives and daughters, and women could spread the plague as easily as anyone.
In her own mind and in English she regarded it as a strike against what she called the general dick-worshipping-dickitude of Roman civilization. This was not a time or place to fill a feminist with joy, to put it mildly, though there were others that would have been worse.
If we’d ended up in Assurbanipal’s Assyria or Athens in Pericles’ time for instance.
Galen went on: “—are even now travelling east and west, north and south, to all parts of the Empire, bearing this preventative and the means to make more of it. Escorted by some of your comrades, the brave soldiers of the Roman Empire. Together we will defeat this plague, crush it as we crushed the barbarians!”
That got him another round of cheers; not least because these were the soldiers who had defeated the barbarians, and they were intensely proud of their deeds. Those cheers died to disciplined silence as Marcus Aurelius stepped forward in his turn and raised his right hand high in the standard Roman rhetorical gesture for a public address, which was distinctly similar to their military salute:
“Soldiers of Rome! You will all receive this treatment today, just as I have.”
“ROMA! ROMA! ROMA!”
That unified bellow was a standard response to the opening of an address by the Emperor; it didn’t startle Artorius the way it had the first time. Nobody had warned him then, since it was another of those things everybody knew and nobody had bothered to write down . . . or which hadn’t made it to the twenty-first century if someone had.
Marcus Aurelius touched his bandaged left arm.
“Every soldier of the Empire shall receive it as soon as may be, and their families too. Every encampment, even the furthest, shall receive it in the next six months.”
That was doable, but only with a massive effort. As for the families . . . technically, soldiers in the Roman army couldn’t marry while serving their twenty-five-year enlistment.
They did anyway, of course. The resulting wives and children were legitimized—and given citizenship, if necessary—when the husband mustered out or died, not least because the male children often joined the Army themselves and fitted in better than random recruits. The auxiliaries who formed the other half of the Army were recruited from perigrinii, noncitizen Imperial subjects, but they got citizenship at the end of their hitches and their mates and children did too.
Rome had always had a much more liberal attitude to extending its citizenship than most ancient civilizations . . . which was one important reason it had ended up as ruler of a third of the human race. The Imperial army was a giant Romanization machine, among other things, and a major reason so much of Europe had ended up speaking languages derived from Latin. At second hand, it was why two Latin-derived languages had stretched from the Rio Grande in south Texas to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America.
Probably even more so this time ’round, Artorius thought. It’ll likely replace Proto-Germanic in the next couple of centuries, the way it’s been doing with the Celtic languages and Dacian and most of proto-Basque already. Add in a solid block from Tripoli to Morocco, too. And it’ll spread explosively overseas when we bring in advanced sailing ships . . .
In fact, he thought Latin might well remain a single language, though it would change over time as all tongues did; the written, formal form was already a bit different from what people actually spoke, though less so than English had been in his birth century. But it hadn’t started to diverge regionally very much in Artorius’ history until after the Empire broke up and that cut trade and travel to small fractions of their former volume. Hopefully in the history the Americans were making those would only increase . . . and literacy in standard Latin would grow too.
Less actual regional variation right now than English in the twenty-first, in fact. Less variation between the way it’s written and spoken, too.
You knew that if you’d experienced what people actually spoke in, say, Jamaica or Glasgow or Freetown in Sierra Leone. All of which he had, with travel paid courtesy of Uncle Sam. Or thought about why thought was spelled with ught but pronounced thot.
The Emperor went on:
“This preventative medicine, this vaccine, will also be sent to the City of Rome itself and to the cities and towns along the routes to the east, from where the plague is spreading, to stop that spread. As a shield turns a sword! Then it will be sent to every province, every district, in the end to every village and villa and farm from Britannia to Mesopotamia. The Empire protects its citizens and subjects, with the favor of the Gods!”
A roaring chorus of:
“AVE! AVE, IMPERATOR!”
. . . greeted the words, shouted in unison from ten thousand throats.
Marcus Aurelius had been well-respected and fairly popular before the brief and triumphant Marcomannic War. Now the Army, at least, and as the news spread the population in general, regarded him as Julius Caesar or Augustus come again, or a new Trajan at the very least. Having the divinely inspired Galen and the mysterious and divinely favored (or possibly sorcerous or just divine) Marcus Triarius Artorius and his helpers at his back didn’t hurt at all either, as rumors about them spread. And now he’d promised to halt a plague in its tracks.
Roman Emperors in this period—except the more megalomaniacal ones, like Caligula or Nero—usually didn’t claim divine status while they were alive. The ones who did that didn’t tend to live very long, either. They were deified after death, unless they were so violently unpopular with the Senate in retrospect that their successor didn’t want to spend political capital on it.
The Emperor Vespasian, most of a century ago, had murmured: Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a God! as a mordant joke on his last sickbed.
That was a technicality that didn’t mean much beyond the city of Rome and the upper classes. The fact that the Emperor was generally regarded as equivalent to a God would reduce resistance to this unfamiliar treatment. Though you had to bear in mind that the Classical-pagan concept of what a God was differed very strongly from that of monotheists like Jews and Christians.
Stopping cold the dreaded plague that had already slain multiple tens of thousands wouldn’t hurt either once the evidence became clear to all, which would be another nice little positive-feedback cycle. The plague was bad enough to frighten everyone out of their wits, but this time it wouldn’t actually do more than a small fraction of the original . . . if original meant anything here . . . damage.
Which means a lot of people are going to live a lot longer because of us . . . not bad, not bad at all.
Marcus Aurelius finished:
“Roma aeterna victrix! Rome forever victorious! Favored by the Gods, guarded by brave men, Rome shall have imperium sine fine—”
Those Latin words meant empire without limits or eternal rule everywhere, roughly. It was a quote from Virgil, though not many of this audience would be familiar with the poet, except some of the officers.
“—and bring all the world, all the human race, beneath the wings of our Eagles and the reach of the Pax Romana!”
Artorius nodded in grim agreement with the cheers that greeted that, unconscious of the way his face had set like something cast in raw iron.
And since this Roman Empire is favored by time travelers, Rome may actually get it. Imperium sine fine; one world, one government . . . in the very long run, a democratic one . . . and no nuclear war. Not a planet left to the rats and roaches and cringing scabby savages scuttling through ruins while they died by inches. We can do that.
He nodded again, without noticing he was doing it.
We will do that, or die trying.