Roma Eterna (19 page)

“Yours?”

“Mine. Earned by my sweat and, yes, my blood. I am the master here. I am king, and I am their god, even. They look upon me as Odin and Thor and Frey taken all together.” And then, seeing Drusus's uncomprehending look: “Jupiter and Mars and Apollo, I suppose you would say. They are all the same, these gods. I am Olaus. I reign here. Take your army and leave.” He spat.
“Romans!”

 

Lucius Aemilius Capito said, “What kind of an army do they have, then?”

“I saw no army. I saw a city, peasants, stonemasons, weavers, goldsmiths, priests, nobles,” Drusus said. “And the Dane.”

“The Dane, yes. A wild man, a barbarian. We'll bring his pelt home and nail it up on a post in front of the Capitol the way one would nail up the pelt of a beast. But where is their army, do you think? You saw no barracks? You saw no drilling grounds?”

“I was in the heart of a busy city,” Drusus told the Con
sul. “I saw temples and palaces, and what I think were shops. In Roma, does one see any barracks in the middle of the Forum?”

“They are only naked savages who fight with bows and javelins,” said Capito. “They don't even have a cavalry, it seems. Or crossbows, or catapults. We'll wipe them out in three days.”

“Yes. Perhaps we will.”

Drusus saw nothing to gain by arguing the point. The older man bore the responsibility for conducting this invasion; he himself was only an auxiliary commander. And the armies of Roma had been marching forth upon the world for thirteen hundred years, now, without encountering a rival who could stand against them. Hannibal and his Carthaginians, the furious Gallic warriors, the wild Britons, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Persians, the bothersome Teutons—each had stepped forward to challenge Roma and each had been smashed in turn.

Yes, there had been defeats along the way. Hannibal had made a great nuisance of himself, coming down out of the mountains with those elephants and causing all kinds of problems in the provinces. Varus had lost those three legions in the Teutonic woods. The invasion force under Valerius Gargilius Martius had been utterly destroyed right here in Yucatan only a little more than five years ago. But one had to expect to lose the occasional battle. In the long run, mastery of the world was Roma's destiny. How had Virgil said it? “To Romans I set no boundary in space and time.”

Virgil hadn't looked into the eyes of Olaus the Dane, though, and neither had the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito. Drusus, who had, found himself wondering how the seven legions of the second expedition would actually fare against the forces of the bearded white god of the Maia. Seven legions: what was that, forty thousand men? Against an unknown number of Maian warriors, millions of them, perhaps, fighting on their home grounds in de
fense of their farms, their wives, their gods. Romans had fought against such odds before and won, Drusus reflected. But not this far from home, and not against Olaus the Dane.

Capito's plans involved an immediate assault on the nearby city. The Roman catapults and battering rams would easily shatter its walls, which did not look nearly so strong as the walls of Roman cities. That was odd, that these people would not surround their cities with sturdy walls, when there were enemies on every side. But the enemies must not understand the use of the catapult and the ram.

Once the walls were breached the cavalry would go plunging through the plaza to strike terror in the breasts of the citizenry, who had never seen horses before and would think of them as monsters of some sort. And then an infantry assault from all sides: sack the temples, slaughter the priests, above all capture and slay Olaus the Dane. No business about imprisoning him and bringing him back in triumph to Roma, Capito said: no, find him, kill him, decapitate the empire he had built among these Maia with a single stroke. Once he was gone, the whole political structure would dissolve. The league of cities would fall apart, and the Romans could deal with them one at a time. All military discipline among these people would dissolve, too, without Olaus, and they would become feckless savages again, fighting in their futile helter-skelter way against the formidably disciplined troops of the Roman legions.

The dark fate of the first wave of the invasion indicated nothing that the second wave needed to take into account. Gargilius Martius hadn't understood what sort of general he was facing in Olaus. Capito did, thanks to Drusus; and by making Olaus his prime target he would cut off the source of his enemy's power in the earliest days of the campaign. So he declared: and who was Titus Livius Drusus, only twenty-three years old and nothing more
than an auxiliary commander, to say that things would not happen that way?

Intensive preparations for battle began at once in all three Roman camps. The siege machinery was hauled into position at the edge of the forest, and work began on cutting paths through the trees for them. The cavalrymen got their steeds ready for battle. The centurions drilled and redrilled the troops of the infantry. Scouts crept out under cover of night to probe the Maian city's walls for their weakest points.

It was hard work, getting everything ready in this terrible tropical heat, that clung to you like a damp woolen blanket. The stinging insects were unrelenting in their onslaught, night and day, not just mosquitoes and ants, but scorpions also, and other things to which the Romans could give no names. Serpents now were seen in the camps, quick, slender green ones with fiery yellow eyes; a good many men were bitten, and half a dozen died. But still the work went on. There were traditions of many centuries' standing to uphold here. Julius Caesar himself was looking down on them, and the invincible Marcus Aurelius, and great Augustus, the founder of the Empire. Neither scorpions nor serpents could slow the advance of the Roman legions, and certainly not little humming mosquitoes.

Early in the afternoon on the day before the attack was scheduled to begin the clouds suddenly thickened and the sky grew black. The wind, which had been strong all day, now became something extraordinary, furnace-hot, roaring down upon them out of the east, bringing with it such lightning and thunder that it seemed the world was splitting apart, and then, immediately afterward, the torrential rains of a raging storm, a storm such as no man of Roma had ever seen or heard of before, that threatened to scoop them up as though in the palm of a giant's hand and hurl them far inland.

The tents went almost immediately, one after another
ripping free of its pegs and whisking away. Drusus, taking refuge with his men under the wagons, watched in amazement as the first row of trees along the beach bent backward under the force of the gale so that their crowns almost touched the ground, and then began to topple as their roots lost their grip. Some did a crazy upside-down dance before they fell. The wagons themselves were shunted about, rising and tipping and crashing down again. The horses set up a weird screaming sound of terror. Someone cried out that the ships were capsizing, and, indeed, many of them had, Drusus saw, knocked over as though by a titan's hand. And then a towering wave came up out of the sea and crashed with devastating strength against the western wall of the palisade, sweeping it away.

The power of the storm seemed almost supernatural. Was Olaus the Dane in league with the gods of this land? It was as though he did not deign to expend his warriors against the invaders, but had sent this terrible tempest instead.

Nor was there any way to hide from it. All they could do was to lie cowering in the midday darkness, pinned down along this narrow strip of beach, while the whirlwinds screamed above them. Lightning cut across the sky like the flash of mighty swords. The boom of thunder mingled with the horrifying wail of the rending winds.

After some hours the rain seemed to slacken, and then it abruptly halted. An eerie stillness descended over the scene. There was something strange, almost crackling, about the quiet air. Drusus rose, stunned, and began to survey the devastation: the ruined walls, the vanished tents, the overturned wagons, the scattered weaponry. But then almost at once the wind and rain returned, sweeping back as if the storm had only been mocking them with that interlude of peace, and the renewed battering went on all night.

When morning came the camp was a shambles. Nothing that they had built still stood. The walls were gone. So was a wide swathe of beachfront trees. There were deep
pools all up and down the beach and hundreds of drowned men lay asprawl in them. Many of the ships had disappeared and others were lying on their sides in the water.

The day brought choking heat, air so clogged with moisture it was next to impossible to breathe, and wave upon wave of noxious creatures—snakes, spiders, avalanches of stinging ants, platoons of scorpions, and all manner of other unpleasant things—that the storm appeared to have flushed out of the forest and driven toward the beach. It was like a dream that would not end with the coming of daybreak. Grimly Drusus marshaled his men and set them to working at cleaning the place up, but it was hard to know where to begin, and everyone moved as though still adrift in sleep.

For two days they struggled against the chaos that the storm had left. On the second morning Drusus sent a runner down toward Capito's camp to find out how things had fared there, but the man returned in little more than an hour, reporting that a great arc of beachfront had been washed away not far to the south, cutting the shoreline route in half, and the forest flanking the coast was such a maze of fallen trees that he had found that impassable too and had to turn back.

On the third day came the first Maian offensive: a shower of arrows, descending without warning out of thin air. No archers were in view: they had to be well back in the forest, sending their shafts aloft without aiming, using bows of unusual force and carrying power. Down from the sky the arrows came in the hundreds, in the thousands, even, striking at random in the Roman camp. Fifty men perished within moments. Drusus ordered five squadrons of armored infantrymen into the forest under the command of Marcus Junianus in search of the attackers, but they found no signs of anyone.

The next day a ship flying the banner of Lucius Aemilius Capito appeared in the harbor, with three more behind it. Drusus had himself rowed out to greet the Consul.
Capito, looking very much the worse for wear, told him that the storm had all but destroyed his camp: he had lost nearly half his men and all his equipment, and the site itself had been rendered unusable by flooding. These were his only surviving ships. Unable to make contact with the southern camp of Masurius Titanus, he had come sailing up the coast, hoping to find Drusus's camp still reasonably intact.

Drusus had no alternative but to surrender command of the camp to Capito, although the older man seemed addled and befogged by all that had befallen him. “He is useless,” said Marcus Junianus vehemently, but Drusus shrugged away his friend's objections: Capito was the senior officer, and that was that.

Another attack by archers came the next day, and the day after that. The arrows came in thicker clouds even than before, falling in dense barrages from the sky. Drusus understood now that there was no end to the Maian archers—he imagined thousands of them, millions, standing calmly in row upon row for miles, each row waiting to step forward and discharge its arrows when the one before it had had its turn. This land was full of people and all of them were enemies of Roma. And here the invading force waited in the wreckage of its camp, unable to move fifty feet into that steaming inimical jungle, vulnerable to new storms, venomous crawling creatures, hunger, illness, mosquitoes, arrows. Arrows. It was an impossible situation. Things could not have been worse for Quinctilius Varus who had lost the three legions of Augustus Caesar. But there were
seven
legions at risk here.

After proper consultation with the obviously ailing Capito, Drusus stationed a line of his own archers along the beach, who met the Maian onslaught with shafts of their own, sent blindly into the bush. This had some small effect: a dozen dead Maia were found after the battle. They were wearing armor of a sort, made of quilted cotton. But the Romans had lost twenty more to the arrows
falling from the sky in the second attack, and fifteen in the third. The camp was still full of snakes, and they did lethal work also; and other men puffed up and died from the stings of insects, no one knew which.

Fever was the next enemy—the men began sickening by the dozens—and food was beginning to run short, the storm having denuded the nearby forest of its deer and pigs. Marcus Junianus drew Drusus aside and said, “We are beaten, even as the first expedition was. We should get aboard our ships and sail for home.” Drusus shook his head, though he knew it was true. Any order to retreat would have to come from Capito, and the Consul was lost in some foggy feverish dream.

So the days passed. Each dawn brought its casualties from disease or hunger or simple weariness, and the sporadic attacks by the Maian archers brought more. “We will smash down the walls of their city,” Capito declared in one of his few lucid moments, but Drusus knew there was no possibility of that. It was all they could do to hold their own here at the camp, forage for food and water, drive off the unending waves of archers.

On the twenty-third day a little band of men, perhaps fifty of them, gaunt and ravaged, came staggering up the beach from the south. They were the only survivors of Masurius Titianus's camp, who had cut their way through the forest in search of other remaining Romans. Titianus himself was dead, and all their ships had gone down in the storm.

“We have to leave this place,” Drusus told the glassy-eyed Capito. “There's no hope for us here. The archers will pick us off by handfuls every day, and if the rest of us don't die of fever, eventually Olaus the Dane will send an army in here to finish the job.”

“The Emperor has sent us to conquer this land,” said Capito, rising halfway to a sitting position and glaring around with some desperate semblance of vitality. “Are
we not Romans? Do we dare return to His Imperial Majesty with a sorry tale of failure?” And sank back exhausted, muttering in indistinct whispers; but Drusus knew that he must still regard him as the commander.