Roma Eterna (20 page)

On the twenty-eighth day several hundred Maian troops appeared on the beach armed with spears, swarthy little men practically naked except for feather headdresses and the quilted-cotton armor. Drusus himself led the counterattack, though he was hard pressed to find enough men capable of withstanding the rigors of battle. The Maia conducted themselves surprisingly well against Roman swords and Roman shields, but finally were driven off, at the cost of thirty Roman lives. A few more battles like this, Drusus thought, and we are finished.

Capito died of his fever the next day.

Drusus saw to it that he had a proper burial, as befitted a Consul who had died in the service of the Empire on a foreign shore. When the last words had been chanted and the last shovelful of sand had been thrown upon the grave, Drusus, taking a deep breath, turned to his lieutenants and said, “Well, we are done with this, now. To the ships, everyone! To the ships!”

 

This time, of the more than forty thousand men who had gone forth on Roma's second attempt to conquer the New World, six hundred returned. Hundreds more were lost at sea in the return voyage, including those aboard the vessel that Drusus had placed under the command of Marcus Junianus. For Drusus that was the hardest blow of all, losing Marcus on this idiotic adventure in folly. Try as he could to look upon Marcus's death with the dispassionate eye of a Roman of ancient days, he found himself incapable of hiding from the pain of his grief. He owed the gods a death, yes, but he had not owed them Marcus's death, and he knew he would carry the sorrow of that loss, and the guilt of it, to his grave.

The arduous voyage home had left him greatly weak
ened. He required two weeks of rest at his family estate in Latium before he was strong enough to deliver his report to the Emperor, who received him at the thousand-year-old royal villa at Tibur.

Saturninus seemed to have grown much older since Drusus last had seen him. He was not as tall as Drusus remembered—perhaps he had begun to stoop a little—and his lustrous black hair was touched now with the first gray. Well, everyone gets older, Drusus thought. But something else had gone from the Emperor besides his youthful glow. That aura of irrepressible regal vitality that had made him such an awesome figure seemed to have left him as well. Perhaps it was the passing of time, thought Drusus, or perhaps it was only his own memories of Olaus the Dane, that man of truly boundless force and limitless ferocity, that by comparison had lessened the Emperor in his eyes.

The Emperor asked Drusus, in a distant, somewhat dim way, to tell him of the fate of the second expedition. Drusus replied in a measured, unemotional tone, describing first the land, the climate, the splendor of the one Maian city that he had seen. Then he went on to the calamity itself: there had been great problems, he said, the heat, the serpents and scorpions and the stinging ants, disease, the hostility of the natives, above all a terrible storm. He did not mention Olaus the Dane. It seemed unwise to suggest to the Emperor that a savage Norseman had built an empire in that far-off land that was able to hold Roma at bay: that would only fire Saturninus up with the desire to bring such a man to Roma in chains.

Saturninus listened to the tale in that same remote manner, now and again asking a question or two, but showing a striking lack of real interest. And now Drusus was approaching the most difficult part of his report, the summary of his thoughts about his mission to the New World.

This had to be done carefully. One does not instruct an Emperor, Drusus knew; one merely suggests, one guides
him toward the conclusions that one hopes he will reach. One has to be particularly cautious when one has come to the realization that a favorite project of the Emperor's is wrongheaded and impossible.

So he spoke warily at first about the difficulties they had encountered, the challenge of maintaining supply lines over so great a distance, the probable huge native population of the New World, the special complexities posed by climate and disease. Saturninus appeared to be paying attention, but from very far away.

Then Drusus grew more reckless. He reminded the Emperor of his revered predecessor the Emperor Hadrianus, who had built the very villa where they were sitting now: how Hadrianus had come to see, in the end, that Roma could not send her legions to every nation of the world, that there were limits to her grasp, that certain far frontiers had to be left unconquered. Although at first he had not agreed with Hadrianus's thinking, Drusus told the Emperor, his experiences in Yucatan had changed his mind about that.

The Emperor no longer appeared to be listening, though. And Drusus realized that it was very likely that he had not been listening for some while. In sudden desire to break through this glacial remoteness of Saturninus's he found himself on the verge of saying outright, “The thing is impossible, Caesar, we will never succeed, we should give it up as a bad job. For if we continue it will destroy many thousands of our best troops, it will consume our revenues, it will break our spirit.”

But before any of those words could pass his lips he heard the Emperor murmur, like an oracle speaking in a trance, “Roma is the ocean, Drusus, immense and inexhaustible. We will beat against their shores as the ocean does.” And he realized in shock and horror that the Emperor was already beginning to plan the next expedition.

T
he uglier of the two Praetorians, flat-faced and gruff, with close-cropped red hair and thick Slavic cheekbones, said, “The Emperor wants you, Antipater. Has some work for you, he says.”

“Translation work,” said the prettier guardsman, a ringleted blond Gaul. “The latest little love note from our friends the Greeks, I guess. Or maybe he wants you to write one for him to them.” He gave Antipater a flirtatious little wink-and-wriggle, mock-seductive. The Praetorians all thought Antipater was of that sort, probably because he had such a sleek, well-oiled Levantine look about him, but perhaps merely because he was fluent in Greek. They were wrong, though. He was a slim-hipped, dusky-skinned, dark-haired man of somewhat feline gait and undeniably Eastern appearance, yes, but that was simply an artifact of his ancestry, the heritage of his long-ago Syrian forefathers. His understanding of Greek was a requirement of his job, not an advertisement of his sexual tastes. But he was at least as Roman as either of them. And as for his preference for women's embraces, they need only ask Justina Botaniates, to name just one.

“Where is His Majesty now?” Antipater asked coolly.

“The Emerald Office,” replied the Slav. “Greek Letters, he said. Get me the Master of Greek Letters.” He glanced at his companion and his broad face writhed in a heavy grin. “We'll all be masters of Greek letters soon enough, won't we, Marius?”

“Those of us who can read and write, at any rate,” said the Gaul. “Eh? Eh?—Well, get along with you now, Antipater! Don't keep Caesar waiting!”

They had no respect. They were crude men. Antipater was a high palatine official and they were mere soldiers, and they had no business ordering him about. He glared them down and they backed away, and he gathered up his tablets and stylus and went down the dimly lit halls of the palace annex to the tunnel that led to the main building, and thence to the row of small private offices—Emerald, Scarlet, Indigo, Topaz—clustered along the east side of the Great Hall of Audience. The Emerald Office, the farthest in the series, was the Emperor Maximilianus's favorite, a long narrow windowless room hung with draperies of Indian weave, dark-green in hue, on which scenes of men with spears hunting elephants and tigers and other fantastic creatures were depicted.

“Lucius Aelius Antipater,” he told the guard on duty, a vacant-eyed boy of eighteen or so, whom he had never seen before. “Master of Greek Letters to Caesar.” The boy nodded him on through, not even bothering with the routine check for concealed weapons.

Antipater wondered about today's assignment. An outgoing letter, he supposed. In these dark days, three or four went out for every one that came in. Yet what was there to write about, with the Greek army on the verge of pouring across the Western Empire's porously defended frontiers? Surely not still another stern ultimatum addressed to Roma's great enemy the Basileus Andronicus, ordering him to cease and desist at once from further military encroachment on the Imperial domain. They had sent the lat
est in the long series of such ultimatums only last week. The courier most likely was no farther east with it yet than Macedonia, certainly was still a long way from delivering it to the Basileus in Constantinopolis—where it would only be tossed aside with a snort of amusement, like all the rest.

No, Antipater decided. This one had to be something more unusual. A letter from Caesar to some slippery Byzantine lordling on the African coast of the Great Sea, say—the exarch of Alexandria, maybe, or of Carthage—urging him, with the promise of immense bribes, to defect to the Roman side and launch some surprise attack from the rear, one that would distract Andronicus long enough for Roma to recover its balance and mobilize its long overdue counterthrust against the invaders.

A wild stratagem indeed. Nobody but he would ever think of it. “The trouble with you, Lucius Aelius,” Justina liked to tell him, “is that you have too much imagination for your own good.”

Maybe so. But here he was, just thirty-two years old that year—which was the year 1951 since the founding of the city—and for two years now he had been a member of the high palatinate, the Emperor's inner circle. Caesar had already bestowed a knighthood on him and a seat in the Senate would surely be next. Not bad going for a poor lad from the provinces. A pity that he had achieved his spectacular rise to prominence just as the Empire itself, weakened by its own senseless imprudence, seemed to be about to collapse.

“Caesar?” he said, peering into the Emerald Office.

At first Antipater saw no one. Then, by the smoky light of two dim tapers burning in a far corner of the room, he perceived the Emperor at his desk, the venerable Imperial desk of dark exotic woods that had been occupied in the past by the likes of Aemilius Magnus and Metellus Domitius and Publius Clemens and, for all Antipater knew, by Augustus and Hadrianus and Diocletianus as well. Great
Caesars all; but the huge curving desk seemed to swallow their current successor, a pallid wiry little man with a glint of wholly justified worry in his close-set, sea-green, brightly shining eyes. He was wearing a simple gray jerkin and a peasant's red leggings; only the faint thread of pearls running along one shoulder, flanked by a pair of purple stripes, indicated that his rank was anything out of the ordinary.

He bore a grand name, did Maximilianus. It had been Maximilianus III, Maximilianus the Great, who in his short but brilliant reign had beaten the troublesome barbarians of the north into submission once and for all, the Huns and Goths and Vandals and the rest of that unruly shaggy-haired crowd. But that had been almost seven hundred years ago, and
this
Maximilianus, Maximilianus VI, possessed none of his famous namesake's fire and drive. Once again the Empire was at risk, tottering on the brink, in truth, as it had seemed to be in that other Maximilianus's far-off time. But this latter-day Maximilianus was not very likely to be its savior.

“You summoned me, Caesar?”

“Oh, Antipater. Yes. Look at this, Antipater.” The Emperor held a yellow vellum scroll out toward him. So what needed translation was an incoming document of some sort, then. Antipater noticed that the Emperor's hand was quivering.

The Emperor, as a matter of fact, seemed to have turned overnight into a palsied old man. There were tics and tremors all over him. And he was only fifty, too. But he had held the throne for twenty grueling years, now, and his reign had been a hard one from its very first hour, when news of his father's death had reached him virtually at the same moment as word of the Greek thrust westward into the African proconsular region. That African invasion was the first major escalation of what had until then been a slow-burning border dispute confined to the province of Dalmatia, a dispute that had blossomed, through subse
quent Greek probes along the border separating the two empires, into a full-scale war between East and West that now seemed to be entering its final dismal phase.

Antipater unrolled the scroll and began quickly to scan it.

“This was intercepted at sea by one of our patrols,” said the Emperor. “Just south of Sardinia. Greek ship, it was, disguised as a fishing vessel, sailing northward out of Sicilia. I can understand some of what the message says, of course—”

“Yes,” Antipater said. “Of course, Caesar.” All educated men knew Greek; but it was the Greek of Homer and Sophocles and Plato that was taught in the academies of Roma, not the very different modern-day Byzantine version spoken from Illyricum eastward to Armenia and Mesopotamia. Languages do change. The Latin of Maximilianus VI's Roma wasn't the Latin of Virgil and Cicero, either. It was for his fluency in modern Greek that Antipater had won his place at court.

He moved swiftly through the casually scrawled words. And very quickly he realized why the Emperor was trembling.

“Merciful God defend us!” he muttered, when he was only halfway through.

“Yes,” said the Emperor. “Yes. If only he would.”

 

“What it was,” said Antipater to Justina that evening in his small but pleasantly situated apartments on the Palatine Hill, “was a dispatch from the Byzantine admiral in Sicilia to the commander of a second Greek fleet that seems to be moored off the western coast of Sardinia, although we didn't know until now that any such fleet was there. The message instructs the commander of the Sardinian naval force to proceed on a northerly route past Corsica toward the mainland and capture our two ports on the Ligurian coast. Antipolis and Nicaea, their names are.” He had no business telling her anything of this. Not only was he re
vealing military secrets, an act that in theory was punishable by death, but she was a Greek, to boot. A daughter of the famed Botaniates family, no less, which had supplied illustrious generals to the Byzantine Emperors for three hundred years. It was fully probable that some of the Greek legions that were marching toward Roma at this very moment were under the command of distant cousins of hers.

But he could withhold nothing from her. He loved her. He trusted her. Justina would never betray him, Greek though she was. A Botaniates, even, although from a secondary and impoverished branch of the family. But just as his own people had given up their allegiance to Byzantium to seek better opportunities in the Western Empire, so had hers. The only difference was that his family had Romanized itself three and a half centuries back and hers had crossed over when she was a little girl. She still felt more comfortable speaking in Greek than in Latin. Yet to her the Byzantines were “the Greeks” and the Romans were “us.” That was sufficient for him.

“I was in Nicaea once,” she said. “A beautiful little place, mountains behind it, lovely villas all along the coast. The climate is very mild. The mountains shelter it from the north winds that come down out of the middle of Europa. You see palm trees everywhere, and there are plants in bloom all winter long, red, yellow, purple, white. Flowers of every color.”

“It isn't as a winter resort that the Basileus wants it,” Antipater said. They had just finished dinner: grilled breast of pheasant, baked asparagus, a decent bottle of the smooth sweet golden-hued wine of Rhodes. Even here in wartime fine Greek wines were still available in Roma, if only to the fortunate members of the Imperial elite, though with the eastern ports suffering from the Byzantine blockade the stocks were unlikely to last much longer.

“Here. Look at this, Justina.”

He snatched up a tablet and quickly sketched a rough
map: the long peninsula of Italia with Sicilia at its tip, the coastline of Liguria curving away along the mainland to the west with the two big islands of Corsica and Sardinia in the sea to the south of it, and that of Dalmatia to the east. With emphatic little dots of his stylus he marked in Antipolis and Nicaea on the coast just to the left of the place where Italia began its southward thrust out of the heart of Europa toward the African shore.

Justina rose and walked around to his side of the table so that she could stand behind him and peer over his shoulder. The fragrance of her perfume drifted toward him, that maddeningly wonderful Arabian myrrh of hers that also could no longer be bought in Roma because of the Greek blockade, and his heart began to pound. He had never known anyone quite like this little Greek. She was a light-boned, delicately built woman: tiny, actually, but with sudden and surprisingly voluptuous curves at hip and bosom. They had been lovers for the past eighteen months and even now, Antipater was convinced, she had not yet exhausted her entire repertoire of passionate tricks.

“All right,” he said, compelling himself rigorously to focus on the matter at hand. He gestured toward the lower part of his map. “The Greeks have already come across from Africa, just a short hop, and established a beachhead in Sicilia. It would be child's play for them to cross the strait at Messana and start marching up the peninsula toward the capital. The Emperor expects that some such move is imminent, and he's stationed half the home legions down here in the south, in Calabria, to keep them from getting any closer to us than the vicinity of Neapolis, let alone all the way up to Roma. Now, over here in the northeast”—Antipater indicated the upper right corner of the peninsula, where Italia bordered on the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, which now were fully under Byzantine control—“we have the other half of the home army, guarding the border out back of Venetia against the inevitable push from that direction. The rest of our north
ern frontier, the territories bordering on Gallia and Belgica, is secure at this time and we aren't anticipating any Greek attempt to break through from that direction. But now, consider this—”

He tapped the stylus against the western shores of Sardinia and Corsica.

“Somehow,” he said, “Andronicus seems to have managed to get a fleet up the far side of these two islands, where we haven't expected them to go sniffing around at all. Possibly they marched westward along the African shore and secretly built a bunch of ships somewhere on the Mauritanian coast. However they did it, they're there, apparently, and now they're in a position to outflank us on the west. They sail up past Corsica and seize the Ligurian seacoast, and then they use Nicaea and Antipolis as bases to send an army down the peninsula through Genua and Pisae and Viterbo and right on into Roma, and there's not a thing we can do about it. Not with half our army tied up on the northeast frontier to keep them from moving against us out of Dalmatia and the other half waiting south of Neapolis for an invasion from Sicilia. There isn't any third half to defend the city from a fast attack on our unguarded side.”

“Can't the frontier legions be pulled down out of central Gallia to defend the Ligurian ports?” Justina asked.

“Not quickly enough to head off a Greek landing there. And in any case if we yanked troops out of Gallia, the Greeks could simply move their forces westward from Dalmatia, break into Gallia Transalpina themselves, and come down out of the mountains at us the way Hannibal did fifteen hundred years ago.” Antipater shook his head. “No, we're boxed in. They've got us on three sides at once, and that's one too many.”