Robert Silverberg

The Second Wave

They were the second wave of the invasion. The first had vanished like water into the sands. But now the Emperor Saturninus had sent another fleet to the New World, far larger than the first, and there would be more to follow if need be. “We will beat against their shores as the ocean does, and in the end we will conquer.” So the Emperor had declared, five years before, on the day news of the disaster reached the capital. “For Roma is an ocean, too: immense, inexhaustible, irresistible. They will not stand against our might.”

Titus Livius Drusus had been at his father’s side that day at the Senate when the Emperor made that speech. He was eighteen, then, a highborn young man of Roma who had not yet settled on his path in life. The Emperor’s words had left him profoundly stirred. A far-off new world awaiting conquest—whole unexplored continents far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, brimming with the treasure of mysterious copper-skinned people! And there before the Senate was the towering resplendent figure of the Emperor, magnificent in his robes of Imperial purple, crying out in that wonderfully resonant voice of his for brave men to carry the eagles of Roma’s legions to these alien empires.

Here I am, young Drusus thought, focusing every atom of his will on the broad forehead of the Emperor. I will do it! I am the man! I will conquer this Mexico for you!

But now five years had passed and the Emperor, true as always to his word, had indeed sent that second expedition across the Ocean Sea to the New World. And Drusus, no longer a starry-eyed boy dreaming of strange new worlds to conquer but an experienced soldier of twenty-three beginning to think of marriage and retirement to a country estate, had been offered a commission in the army of invasion and had accepted it, with rather less enthusiasm than he might have shown earlier. The fate of the first expedition was much on his mind. As he stared out now at the darkness of that enigmatic shore lying just ahead he found himself wondering whether he too might be going to leave his bones in this unknown and very probably hostile land, as so many valiant Romans had done before him.

It was shortly before dawn, the third day of the new year 1861. At home the month of Januarius was the coldest of the year, but if Drusus had needed a reminder that he was far from home, that dry, hot breeze blowing toward him out of the new continent would have provided it. At this time of the year not even the wind out of Africa was as warm as this.

Pale pink strands of first light came up over his shoulder. In the thinning darkness ahead he saw the shadowy outlines of a rocky, inhospitable shore that was crowned on a nearby low hill by a massive white building of impressive height and formidable blocky appearance. The land that stretched off to the west in back of it seemed virtually flat and so densely forested that no sign of habitation was visible.

“What do you think of it, Titus?” asked Marcus Junianus, who had come up quietly on deck beside him. He was two years older than Drusus, a former slave of the family, now a freedman. Free or not, he had chosen to follow Drusus to the New World. They had grown up together; though one was of the ancient Roman nobility and the other the descendant of five hundred years of slaves, they were as close as brothers. Not that anyone would take them for brothers, not ever, for Drusus was tall and pale, with soft straight hair and an aristocrat’s fine features and elegant manner of speech, and Marcus Junianus was a short, broad-beamed, swarthy man with a flat nose and thick curling hair, who spoke with the inflections of his class and carried himself accordingly. But between themselves they had never let these distinctions form a barrier: to each other they always had been Marcus and Titus, Titus and Marcus, friends, companions, even brothers, in every important way save one.

“I think it’s going to give us a struggle, Marcus. You can smell it in the air.” In truth the air itself was unwelcoming: hard, pungent, with an odd sort of spiciness to it that was not at all pleasant. “What do you think that big building is? A fortress or a temple?”

“A temple, wouldn’t you say? The Norseman told us that this was a land of great temples. And why would they bother to fortify their coast when it’s already defended by thousands of miles of empty sea?”

Drusus nodded. “A good point. Still, I don’t think it would be very clever of us to try to make our landfall right below it. Go and tell the captain to look for a safer harbor a couple of miles south of here.”

Marcus went off to give the order. Drusus leaned on the rail and watched the land as it came more clearly into visibility. It did seem uninhabited. Long stands of unfamiliar-looking trees stood shoulder by shoulder to form a solid black wall with no openings in view. And yet there was that temple. Someone had hewn those rocks and assembled that forbidding building atop this coastal headland. Someone, yes.

He had spent eight weeks at sea getting to this place, the longest voyage of his life—or anybody’s, so far as he knew. In eight weeks you could sail the Great Sea, the Mare Mediterraneum, from end to end any number of times, from the Syrian coast westward to the Pillars of Hercules in Hispania and back to Syria again. The Great Sea! How wrong the ancients had been to give the Mediterraneum so grandiose a name. The Great Sea was a mere puddle compared to this one that they had just crossed, the vast Ocean Sea that separated the worlds. It had been an easy enough journey through steadily warming waters, lengthy and dull but not in any way difficult. You hoisted your sails, you aimed your nose westward, you picked up a following wind and off you went, and, yes, sure enough, in the fullness of time you found yourself in a gentle blue-green sea dotted with tropical islands where you could replenish your supplies of food and water with no interference from the simple naked natives, and then, continuing onward, you arrived soon afterward at what was unmistakably the shore of some huge continent, which must beyond any doubt be that Mexico of which the Norseman spoke.

Looking at it now, Drusus felt not fear, for fear was an emotion that he did not regard as permissible to feel, but a certain sense of—what, he wondered? Uneasiness? A sense that this expedition might not be a particularly wise idea?

The possibility of meeting fierce military resistance did not trouble him. It was close to six hundred years since Romans had done any serious fighting, not since Maximilianus the Great had finished off the Goths and Justinianus had put down the unruly Persians, but each succeeding generation had yearned for a chance to show that the old warrior tradition still lived, and Drusus was glad that his was the one that finally would get the opportunity. So let whatever might come, come. Nor did he worry much about dying in battle: he owed the gods a death in any event, and it was always deemed glorious to die for the Empire.

But dying a foolish death—ah, that was something else again. And there were plenty of people back at the capital who felt that Emperor Saturninus’s hunger to turn the New World into a Roman province was the wildest of foolishness. Even the mightiest of empires must admit its limits. The Emperor Hadrianus, a thousand years ago, had decided that the Empire was becoming too unwieldy and had turned away from any conquests east of Mesopotamia. Persia and India, and Khitai and Cipangu farther to the east in Asia Ultima where the yellow-skinned folk lived, had been left as independent lands, though tied to Roma by treaties of trade. And now here was Saturninus going the other way, off into the distant west, with dreams of conquest. He had heard tales of the gold of Mexico and another western land called Peru, the Emperor had, and he hungered for that gold. But could this New World be conquered, across such a distance? And, once conquered, could it be administered? Would it not be more intelligent simply to strike up a mercantile alliance with the people of the new continent, sell them Roman goods in return for their abundance of gold, create new prosperity that would bolster the Western Empire against the competition of its prosperous counterpart of the East? Who did Saturninus think he was, Alexander the Great? Even Alexander had turned back from the conquest of distant lands, finally, after reaching the frontiers of India.

Drusus forced himself to brush these treasonous doubts aside. The grandeur that was Roma admitted of no obstacles, he told himself, and, Hadrianus to the contrary, no limits either. The gods had bestowed the world upon the Romans. It said so right there in the first book of Virgil’s great poem, that every schoolboy studied: dominion without end. The Emperor Saturninus had decreed that this place was to be Roman, and Drusus had been sent here to help conquer it in Roma’s name, and so it would be.

Dawn had come by the time the fleet had moved far enough down the coast to be out of sight of that hilltop temple. By the harsh light of morning he had a clearer view of the irregular rock-bound shore, the sandy beaches, the thick forests. The trees, Drusus saw now, were palms of some sort, but their curving jagged fronds marked them as different from the ones native to the Mediterranean countries. There was no indication of any settlement here.

Disembarking proved to be a tricky business. The sea was shallow here, and the ships were big ones, specially designed for the long voyage. It was impossible for them to drop anchor very close to shore. So the men had to jump down into the water—it was warm, at any rate—and struggle ashore through the surf, heavily laden with arms and supplies. Three men were swept away by a current that carried them off toward the south, and two of them went under and were lost. Seeing that, some of the others held back from leaving the ship. Drusus himself jumped in and waded ashore to encourage them.

The beach was an eerie white, as though it were made up of tiny particles of powdered bone. It felt stiff to the foot, and crunched when trod upon. Drusus scuffed at it, savoring its strangeness. He thrust his staff of office deep into it, telling himself that he was taking possession of this land in the name of Eternal Roma.

The initial phase of the landing took over an hour, as the Romans established themselves on that narrow strip of sand between the sea and the close-packed palms. Throughout it, Drusus was uncomfortably aware of the tales told by the survivors of the first expedition of Mexican arrows that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and went straight to the most vulnerable places. But nothing like that happened today. He set the landing party immediately to work cutting down trees and building rafts on which they could transport the rest of the men and equipment and provisions to the camp they would establish here. All up and down the coast, the other commanders were doing the same. The fleet, bobbing out there at anchor, was an inspiring sight: the stout heavy hulls, the high bridges, the great square sails aglow with the Imperial colors.

In the dazzling brightness of the new day the last of Drusus’s uncertainties evaporated.

“We have come,” he said to Marcus Junianus. “Soon we will see this place. And then we will conquer it.”

“You should write those words down,” Marcus said. “In future centuries schoolchildren will quote them.”

“They are not entirely original with me, I’m afraid,” said Drusus.

The Norseman who had enmeshed the Emperor Saturninus in these fantasies of conquest was a certain Haraldus, a gigantic fair-haired mountain of a man who had turned up at the Emperor’s winter palace at Narbo in Gallia bearing wild tales of golden kingdoms across the sea. He claimed to have seen at least one of them with his own eyes.

These Norsemen, a savage warlike sort, were common sights in both halves of the Empire. A good many of them had made their way to Constantinopolis, which in their language was called Miklagard, “the mighty city.” For a hundred years now the Eastern Emperors had maintained an elite corps of these men—Varangians, they called themselves, “Men of the Pledge”—as their personal bodyguards. Often enough they turned up in the Western capital, too, which they also referred to as Miklagard. Because they reminded Western Romans of their ancient enemies the Goths, to whom they were closely related, the Emperors at Roma had never cared to hire their own force of Varangian guards. But it was interesting to listen to the tales these much-traveled seafarers had to tell.

The homeland of these Norsemen was called Scandia, and they were of three main tribes, depending on whether they came from Svea or Norwegia or the territory of the folk who called themselves Dani. But they all spoke more or less the same uncouth language and all were big, short-tempered people, the men and the women both, resourceful and vengeful and ruthless, who would carry two or three well-honed weapons upon their persons at all times and reached swiftly for their swords or their daggers or their battle-axes whenever they felt offended. Their small sturdy ships traveled freely and fearlessly through the half-frozen waterways of their northern world, carrying them to remote places in the north never visited and scarcely known by Romans, and Norse traders would come down out of those icy lands bearing ivory, furs, seal oil, whale oil, and other such goods much desired in the marketplaces of Europa and Byzantium.

This Haraldus was a Svean who said his travels had taken him to Islandius and Grenelandius, which were the Norse names for two islands in the northern part of the Ocean Sea where they had settled in the past two hundred years. Then he had gone onward even farther, to a place they called Vinilandius, or Wineland, which was on the shore of an enormous body of land—a continent, surely—and then, with a little band of companions, he had set out on a voyage of exploration down the entire coast of that continent.

It was a journey that took him two or three years, he said. From time to time they would go ashore, and when they did they often encountered small villages peopled by naked or half-naked folk of unusual appearance, with dark glossy hair, and skin that was dark also, though not in the way that the skins of Africans are dark, and strong-featured faces marked by jutting cheekbones and beak-like noses. Some of these folk were friendly, some were not. But they were all quite backward, artless people who lived by hunting and fishing and dwelled in little tents fashioned from the hides of animals. Their tiny encampments seemed to have little to offer in the way of opportunities for trade.

But as Haraldus and his companions continued south, things became more interesting. The air was softer and warmer here, the settlements more prosperous-looking. The wandering Norsemen found good-sized villages built beside lofty flat-topped earthen mounds that bore what appeared to be temples at their summits. The people wore elaborate woven garments and bedecked themselves with copper earrings and necklaces made of the teeth of bears. They were a farming folk, who greeted the travelers pleasantly and offered them meals of grain and stewed meats, served in clay vessels decorated with strange images of serpents that had feathers and wings.

The Norsemen worked out an effective method of communicating with these mound-building people by simple sign language, and learned that there were even richer lands farther to the south, lands where the temple mounds were built not of earth but of stone, and where the jewelry was made not of copper but of gold. How distant these places were was unclear: the voyagers just were told, with many gestures of outflung arms, to head down the coast until they reached their destination. And so they did. They went on southward and the land, which had been on their right all the way down from Wineland, dropped away from them so that they were in open sea. The mound people had warned them that that would happen. Some instinct told them to swing westward here and then south again when they picked up signs of an approaching shore, and after a time there was land ahead and they saw the coastline of the unknown western continent once again.

Here they landed and went ashore. And everything that the mound-building people of the northern land had said proved to be true.

“There is a great nation there,” Haraldus told the Emperor. “The citizens, who are extremely friendly, wear finely woven robes and they have an astounding abundance of gold, which they use in every imaginable way. Not only do men and women both wear golden jewelry, but even the toys of the children are of gold, and the chieftains take their meals on golden plates.” He spoke of colossal stone pyramids like those of Aegyptus, of shining marble temples, of immense statues depicting bizarre gods that looked like monsters. And, best of all, this wealthy land—Yucatan, its people called it—was only the nearest of many rich kingdoms in this remarkable new world across the sea. There was another and even greater one, the Norsemen had been informed, off to the west and north of it. That one was called Mexico, or perhaps Mexico was the name for this entire territory, Yucatan included: that was unclear. Sign language could communicate only so much. And still farther away, some inconceivable distance to the south, was still another land named Peru, so wealthy that it made the wealth of Mexico and Yucatan seem like nothing at all.

Upon hearing this the Norsemen realized that they had stumbled upon something too great for them to be able to exploit by themselves. They agreed to split into two parties. One group, headed by a certain Olaus Danus, would remain in Yucatan and learn whatever they could about these kingdoms. The other, under the command of Haraldus the Svean, would carry the news of their discovery to the Emperor Saturninus and offer to lead a Roman expedition to the New World on a mission of conquest and plunder, in return for a generous share of the loot.

Norsemen are a quarrelsome lot, though. By the time Haraldus and his friends had retraced their coastal path back to Vinilandius in the far north, feuding over rank aboard their little ship had reduced their numbers from eleven to four. One of these four was slain by an angry brother-in-law in Vinilandius; another perished in a dispute over a woman during a stop in Islandius; what happened to the third man, Haraldus did not say, but he alone reached the mainland of Europa to tell the tale of golden Mexico to Saturninus.

“Instantly the Emperor was gripped by an overpowering fascination,” said Drusus’s father, the Senator Lucius Livius Drusus, who was at court the day Haraldus had his audience. “You could see it happening. It was as though the Norsemen had cast a spell over him.”

That very day the Emperor proclaimed the western continent to be Nova Roma, the new overseas extension of the Empire—the Western Empire. With a province of such fantastic opulence gathered under its sway, the West would gain permanent superiority in its rivalry with its increasingly troublesome sister realm, the Empire of the East. Saturninus raised a veteran general named Valerius Gargilius Martius to the rank of Proconsul of Mexico and gave him command of three legions. Haraldus, though not even a Roman citizen, was dubbed a duke of the realm, a station superior to Gargilius Martius’s, and the two men were instructed to cooperate in the venture. For the voyage across the Ocean Sea a fleet of specially designed ships was constructed that had the great size of cargo vessels but the swiftness of warships. They were powered by sails as well as oars and were big enough to carry an invading army’s full complement of equipment, including horses, catapults, tents, forges, and all the rest. “They are not a warlike race, these Mexicans,” Haraldus assured the Emperor. “You will conquer them with ease.”

Of all the thousands of men who set forth with great fanfare from the Gallian port of Massilia, just seventeen returned home, fourteen months later. They were parched and dazed and enfeebled to the point of collapse from an interminable ocean voyage of terrible hardship in a small open raft. Only three had sufficient strength even to frame words, and they, like the others, died within a few days of their arrival. Their stories were barely coherent. They gave rambling accounts of invisible enemies, arrows emerging out of nowhere, frightful poisonous insects, appalling heat. The friendliness of the citizens of Yucatan had been greatly overestimated, it seemed. Apparently the whole expeditionary force but for these seventeen had perished, one way or another. Of the fate of Duke Haraldus the Norseman and of the Proconsul Valerius Gargilius Martius they could tell nothing. Presumably they were dead too. The only thing that was certain was that the expedition had been a total failure.

At the capital, people solemnly reminded one another of the tale of Quinctilius Varus, the general whom Augustus Caesar had sent into the Teutonic forests to bring the northern barbarians under control. He too had had three legions under his command, and through his stupidity and incompetence they were massacred virtually to the last man in an ambush in the woods. The elderly Augustus never entirely recovered from the catastrophe. “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” he would cry, over and over. And he said no more about sending armies to conquer the wild Teutons.

But Saturninus, young and boundlessly ambitious, reacted differently to the loss of his expedition. Construction of a new and greater invasion fleet began almost immediately. Seven legions would be sent this time. The Empire’s most capable military men would lead it. Titus Livius Drusus, who had already won distinction for himself in some minor border skirmishes in Africa, where even at this late date wild desert tribes occasionally caused trouble, was among the bright young officers chosen for a high position. “It is madness to go,” his father muttered. Drusus knew that his father was growing old and conservative, but still he was a man of profound understanding of events. Drusus also knew, though, that if he refused this commission, which the Emperor himself had offered him, he was dooming himself to a lifetime of border duty in places so dismal that they would make him long most keenly for the comforts of the African desert.

“Well,” said Marcus Junianus as he and Drusus stood side by side on the beach, supervising the unloading of the provisions, “so here we are in Yucatan. A strange sort of name for a place that is! What do you think it means, Titus?”

“‘I don’t understand you.’”

“Pardon me? I thought I was speaking very clearly, Titus. I said, ‘What do you think it means?’ I was referring to Yucatan.”

Drusus chuckled. “I heard you. And I answered you. You asked a question, and ‘I don’t understand you’ is what I replied. All around the world for centuries now we’ve been going up to the natives of one far-off place or another and asking them in nice grammatical Latin what that place is called. And since they don’t know any Latin, they reply ‘I don’t understand you’ in their own language, and we put that down as the name of the place. In this case it was Norse, I guess, that they don’t happen to speak. And so, when Haraldus or one of his friends asked the natives the name of their kingdom, they answered ‘Yucatan,’ which I’m almost certain isn’t the name of the place at all, but merely means—”

“Yes,” said Marcus Junianus. “I think I grasp the point.”

The immediate task at hand was to set up a camp as quickly as they could, before their arrival attracted the attention of the natives. Once they were secure here at the water’s edge they could begin sending scouting expeditions inland to discover the location of the native towns and assess the size of the challenge facing them.

For most of the voyage the fleet had kept close together, but as the ships approached the coast of Yucatan they had fanned out widely, by prearrangement, so that the initial Roman beachhead would cover twenty-five or thirty miles of the shoreline. Three legions, eighteen thousand men, would constitute the central camp, under the command of the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito. Then there would be two subsidiary camps of two legions apiece. Drusus, who had the rank of legionary legate, would be in command of the northernmost camp, and the southernmost one was to be headed by Masurius Titianus, a man from Pannonia who was one of the Emperor’s special favorites, though nobody in Roma could quite understand why.

Drusus stood in the midst of the bustle, watching with pleasure as the camp swiftly came together. Workmen swarmed everywhere. The expedition was well equipped: Saturninus had poured a fortune into it, an amount equal to the total annual revenue of several provinces, so they said. Brawny loggers quickly chopped down dozens of the palm trees that fringed the beach and the carpenters got busy squaring the lumber off to use in constructing the palisades. The surveyors laid out boundaries for the camp along the beach’s widest part and marked guidelines for its interior: the central street, the place where the legate’s tent would go, the tents of the craftsmen, of the legionaries, of the scribes and recorders, the site of the stables, the workshops, the granary, and all the rest. The horses had to be brought ashore also and given an opportunity to regain their land legs after their long confinement aboard the ships.

As the guide stakes went into the ground, the infantrymen set about erecting the rows of leather tents where they would dwell. Foragers, accompanied by an armed force, made the first ventures inland to find sources of food and water.

These were experienced men. Everyone knew his job. By nightfall, which came on surprisingly early—but this was winter, after all, Drusus reflected, warm though the climate was—the outline of the camp was clearly delineated and the beginnings of a rampart had risen. There did not seem to be any rivers or streams nearby, but, as Drusus had suspected from the presence of so dense a forest, fresh water was readily obtainable even so: the ground, which was exceedingly stony beneath its shallow covering of soil, was honeycombed everywhere with passageways through which underground water came welling up. One of these wells lay not far inland, and a team of engineers started to sketch out the route of a shallow canal that would carry its cool, sweet water the short distance to the camp. The foragers had also found abundant wildlife in the adjacent forest: a multitude of small and apparently fearless deer, herds of what seemed to be little pigs of a kind that had no tails and stiff upright ears, and vast numbers of large, very odd-looking birds with brilliant reddish-green plumage and great fleshy wattles at their throats. So far, so good. The Norseman had said they would have no difficulties finding provisions, and it looked as though he had told the truth about that.

At midday Drusus sent a runner down the beach toward the central camp to bear news of his landing. The man returned a little before sundown with word from the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito that the main body of men had come ashore as well, and the work of building a camp was under way. To the south, Masurius Titianus had also effected his landing without encountering opposition from the natives.

The first night in the camp was a tense one, but first nights in camp in an unfamiliar place always were. Evening dropped over them like a shroud, with scarcely any interval between sunset and darkness. There was no moon. The stars above the camp were unusually brilliant, but they were arranged in the strange, unsettling configuration of the southern latitudes. The heat of the day did not abate, and the men in the tents complained of the stifling atmosphere inside. Raucous screeching cries came from the forest. Birds? Monkeys? Who could say? At least they didn’t sound like tigers. Clouds of mosquitoes appeared, pretty much similar to those of the Old World, but the humming noise that they made as they swooped in upon one was much nastier, almost jubilant in its intensity, and their stings were maddeningly fierce. At one point Drusus thought he saw a flight of bats passing close overhead. He loathed bats with a powerful loathing that he did not at all understand. Perhaps they are not bats but only owls, he thought. Or some new kind of eagle that flies by night.

Because the camp did not yet have a proper rampart, Drusus tripled the ordinary watch. He spent much of his night strolling among the sentries himself. They were uneasy and would appreciate his presence. They too had heard those tales of arrows whistling out of nowhere, and it heartened them to have their commander sharing their risks on this first and most uncertain of nights.

But the night passed without incident. In the morning, as work on the palisade resumed, Drusus summoned Marcus Junianus, who was serving as his prefect of the camp, and ordered him to begin assembling the scouting party that would attempt to find the location of the nearest Mexican village. Junianus saluted smartly and hurried off.

Later in the day Drusus sent for him again, on another matter. A long while went by; and then the messenger returned with the news that Junianus was not in the camp.

“Not in the camp?” said Drusus, puzzled.

“No, sir. I am told that you sent him out on a scouting mission this morning, sir.”

Drusus stared. Anger rose in him like a fountain, and it was all he could do to keep from striking the man. But that would be stupidly misdirected anger, he knew. Marcus was the one at fault, not the messenger. He had never given Marcus any order to go out scouting, just to get a team of scouts together. With the rampart only half finished, it was much too soon to dispatch scouts: the last thing Drusus wanted now was to alert the natives prematurely to their presence, which could easily happen if the scouts stumbled incautiously into one of their villages. And in any case he had never had any intention of sending Marcus himself out with those scouts. Scouts were expendable; Marcus was not.

He realized that this was something he should have foreseen. Marcus, now that he was a freedman, was forever trying to demonstrate his civic valor. More than once he had put himself needlessly in danger when he and Drusus were serving on border patrol in Africa. Sometimes one had to take deliberate risks, yes—Drusus himself, standing watch with his men this night past, had done just that. But there were necessary risks and there were foolish ones. The thought of Marcus blithely misunderstanding his intent so that he could lead the scouting party in person was infuriating.

There was nothing that could be done about it now, though. He would have to take it up with Marcus when the scouting party returned, and forbid him to place himself at risk again.

The problem was that the day passed, and sundown came and deepened swiftly into black night, and the scouts did not return.

Drusus had had no discussion with Marcus about the length of time the scouting mission was supposed to stay out. He had never had it in mind himself to ask the scouts to remain out overnight, not the very first night; but what Marcus had had in mind, Jupiter alone could say. Maybe he planned to keep going until he found something worth finding.

Morning came. No Junianus. At midday, deeply exasperated and more than a little apprehensive, Drusus sent a second band of scouts off to look for the first ones, telling them that under no circumstances were they to remain out after dark. But they returned in less than three hours, and the instant Drusus saw the look on the face of their captain, a Thracian named Rufus Trogus, he knew there was trouble.

“They have been captured, sir,” said Trogus without any preamble whatever.

Drusus worked hard to conceal his dismay. “Where? By whom?”

The Thracian told the story quickly and concisely. A thousand paces inland due west and two hundred paces to the north they had come upon signs of a struggle, broken branches, scuffed soil, a fallen scabbard, a javelin, a sandal. They were able to follow a trail of disturbed undergrowth for another hundred paces or so westward; then the forest closed over itself and there was no further sign of human presence, not so much as a bent twig. It was as though the attackers, having surprised and very quickly overcome the scouting party, had in short order melted into the air, and their prisoners also.

“You saw no bodies?”

“None, sir. Nor signs of bloodshed.”

“Let’s be grateful for that much, I suppose,” Drusus said.

But it was a miserable situation. Two days on shore and he had already lost half a dozen men, his best friend among them. At this moment the natives might be putting them to the torture, or worse. And also he had inadvertently sent word to the folk of this land that an invading army had once again landed on their shores. They would have found that out sooner or later anyway, of course. But Drusus had wanted to have some sense of where he was located in relation to the enemy, first. Not to mention having his camp fully walled in, his siege engines and other war machinery set up and ready, the horses of the cavalry properly accustomed to being on land once again, and all the rest.

Instead it was possible now that they might find themselves under attack at any moment, and not in any real way prepared for it. How splendid, that Titus Livius Drusus would be remembered down the ages for having so swiftly placed the second New World expedition on the path to the same sort of catastrophe that had overwhelmed the first!

It was appropriate, Drusus knew, to send word of what had happened down the beach to Lucius Aemilius Capito’s camp. One was supposed to keep one’s superior officer informed of things like this. He hated the idea of confessing such stupidity, even if the stupidity had been Marcus Junianus’s, not his own. But the responsibility ultimately was his, he knew. He scribbled a note to the effect that he had sent a scouting party out and it appeared to have been captured by enemies. Nothing more than that. No apology for having let scouts go out before the camp was completely defended. Bad enough that the thing had happened; there was no need to point out to Capito how serious a breach of standard tactics it had been.

From Capito, toward nightfall, came back a frosty memorandum asking to be kept up to date on developments. The implication was there, more in what Capito did not say than in what he did, that if the natives did happen to strike at Drusus’s camp in the next day or two, Drusus would be on his own in dealing with it.

No attack came. All the next day Drusus moved restlessly about the camp, urging his engineers onward with the job of finishing the palisade. When new foraging parties went out to hunt for deer and pigs and those great birds, he saw to it that they were accompanied by three times as many soldiers as would ordinarily be deemed necessary, and he worried frantically until they returned. He sent another party of scouts out under Rufus Trogus, too, to investigate the zone just beyond the place where Marcus and his men had been taken and look for clues to their disappearance. But Trogus came back once more with no useful information.

Drusus slept badly that night, plagued by mosquitoes and the unending shrieks and boomings of the jungle beasts and the moist heat that wrapped itself about him with almost tangible density. A bird in a tree that could not have been very far from his tent began to sing in a deep, throbbing voice, a tune so mournful it sounded to Drusus like a funeral dirge. He speculated endlessly about the fate of Marcus. They have not killed him, he told himself earnestly, because if they had wanted to do that, they would have done it in the original ambush in the forest. No, they’ve taken him in for interrogation. They are trying to get information from him about our numbers, our intentions, our weapons. Then he reflected once more that they were unlikely to get such information out of Marcus without torturing him. And then—

Morning came, eventually. Drusus emerged from his tent and saw sentries of the watch coming down the beach in his direction.

Marcus Junianus was with them, looking weary and tattered, and trailing along behind were half a dozen equally ragged Romans who must have been the scouts he took with him on his venture into the forest.

Drusus suppressed his anger. There would be time enough for scolding Junianus later. The flood of relief that surged through him took precedence over such things, anyway.

He embraced Junianus warmly, and stepped back to study him for signs of injury—he saw none—and said, finally, “Well, Marcus? I didn’t expect you to stay away overnight, you know.”

“Nor I, Titus. A few hours, a little sniffing around, and then we’d turn back, that was what I thought. But we had hardly gone anywhere when they fell upon us from the treetops. We fought, but there must have been a hundred of them. It was all over in moments. They tied us with silken cord—it felt like silk, anyway, but perhaps it was some other kind of smooth rope—and carried us away on their shoulders through the forest. Their city is less than an hour’s march away.”

“Their city, you say? In the midst of this wilderness, a city?”

“A city, yes. That is the only word for it. I couldn’t tell you how big it is, but it would be a city by anyone’s reckoning, a very great one. It is the size of Neapolis, at the least. Perhaps even the size of Roma.” The forest had been cleared away over an enormous area, he said, gesturing with both arms. He told of broad plazas surrounding gleaming temples and palaces of white stone that were greater in their dimensions than the Capitol in Roma, of towering pyramids with hundreds of steps leading to the shrines at their summits, of terraced avenues of the same finely chiseled white stone stretching off into the jungled distance, with mighty statues of fearsome gods and monstrous beasts lining them for their entire lengths. The population of the city, Junianus said, was incalculably huge, and its wealth had to be extraordinary. Even the common folk, though they wore little more than simple cotton tunics, looked prosperous. The majestic priests and nobles who moved freely among them were magnificent beyond belief. Junianus struggled for words to describe them. Garbed in the skins of tigers, they were, with green and red capes of bright feathers on their shoulders, and brilliant feather headdresses that rose to extravagant, incredible heights. Pendants of smooth green stone hung from their earlobes, and great necklaces of that same stone were draped about their necks, and around their waists and wrists and ankles they had bangles of shining gold. Gold was everywhere, said Junianus. It was to these people as copper or tin was to Romans. You could not escape the sight of it: gold, gold, gold.

“We were fed, and then we were taken before their king,” Junianus told Drusus. “With his own hands he poured out drink for us, using polished bowls of the same smooth green stone that they employ for their jewelry. It was a strong sweet liquor, brewed of honey, I think, with the herbs of this land in it, strange to the taste, but pleasing—and when we had refreshed ourselves he asked us our names, and the purpose for which we had come, and—”

“He asked you, Marcus? And you understood what he was saying? But how was that possible?”

“He was speaking Latin,” Junianus replied, as though that should have been self-evident. “Not very good Latin, of course, but one can expect nothing better from a Norseman, is that not so? In fact it was very poor Latin indeed. But he spoke it well enough for us to comprehend what he was saying, after a fashion. Naturally I didn’t tell him outright that I was a scout for an invading army, but it was clear enough that he—”

“Wait a moment,” Drusus said. His head was beginning to spin. “Surely I’m not hearing this right. The king of these people is a Norseman?”

“Did I not tell you, Titus?” Junianus laughed. “A Norseman, yes! He’s been here for years and years. His name is Olaus Danus, one of those who came down from Vinilandius with Haraldus the Svean on that first voyage long ago, when the Norse discovered this place, and he’s lived here ever since. They treat him almost like a god. There he sits on a glistening throne, with a scepter of green stone in his hand and a bunch of golden necklaces around his throat, and wearing a crown of feathers half as tall as I am, and they strew flower petals before him whenever he gets up and walks, and crouch before him and cover their eyes with their hands so he won’t blind them with his splendor, and—”

“Their king is a Norseman,” Drusus said, lost in astonishment.

“A great hulking giant of a Norseman with a black beard and eyes like a devil’s,” said Junianus. “Who wants to see you right away. Send me your general, he said. I must speak with him. Bring him to me tomorrow, early in the day. There should not be any soldiers with him. The general must come alone. He told me that I am permitted to accompany you as far as the place in the forest where we were set upon, but then I must leave you, and you must wait by yourself for his men to fetch you. He was very clear on that point, I have to say.”

This was rapidly getting beyond the scope of Drusus’s official authority. He saw no choice but to take himself down the shore in person and report the whole business to the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito.

Capito’s camp, Drusus was pleased to see, was not nearly as far along in construction as Drusus’s own. But the Consul had had his tent, at least, erected—unsurprisingly, it was quite a grand one—and Capito himself, flanked by what looked like a small regiment of clerks, was at his desk, going over a thick stack of inventory sheets and engineering reports.

Looking up, he gave Drusus a bilious glare, as though he regarded a visit from the legionary legate of the northern camp as an irritating intrusion on his contemplation of the inventory sheets. There had never been much amiability between them. Capito, a hard-faced, slab-jawed man of fifty, had evidently had some serious battles with Drusus’s father in the Senate, long ago, over the size of military appropriations—Drusus was unsure of the details, and did not want to know—and had never taken the trouble to conceal his annoyance at having had the younger Drusus wished off on him in so high a position of command.

“A problem?” Capito asked.

“It would seem so, Consul.”

He set the situation forth in the fewest possible sentences: the safe return of the captured scouts, the discovery of the startling proximity of a major city with its inexplicable Norse king, and the request that Drusus take himself there, alone, as an ambassador to that king.

Capito seemed to have forgotten all about the missing party of scouts. Drusus could see him rummaging through his memory as though their disappearance were some episode out of the reign of Lucius Agrippa. Then at last he fixed his cold gaze on Drusus and said, “Well? What do you intend to do?”

“Go to him, I suppose.”

“You suppose? What other option is there? By some miracle this man has made himself king of these copper-skinned barbarians, the gods alone know how, and now he summons a Roman officer to a conference, quite possibly for the sake of concluding a treaty that will convey this entire nation to the authority of His Imperial Majesty, which was the intent of these Norsemen in the first place, I remind you—and the officer hesitates?”

“Well—but if the Norseman has some other and darker intention, Consul—I will be going to him without an escort, I remind you—”

“As an ambassador. Even a Norseman would not lightly take the life of an ambassador, Drusus. But if he does, well, Drusus, I will see to it that you are properly avenged. You have my pledge on that. We will extract rivers of blood from them for every drop of yours that is shed.”

And, favoring Drusus with a basilisk smile, the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito returned his attention to his inventories and reports.

It was well past dark by the time Drusus reached his own camp again. The usual beasts were howling madly in the woods; the usual mysterious flying creatures were flitting by overhead; the mosquitoes had awakened and were seeking their nightly feast. But by now he had spent four nights in this place. He was growing accustomed to it. A little to his own surprise, he passed a good night’s sleep, and in the morning made ready for his journey to the city of the copper-skinned folk.

“He will not harm you,” said Marcus Junianus gloomily, as they reached the trampled place in the forest where they were supposed to part company. “I’m entirely certain of that.” His tone did not carry much conviction. “The Norse are savage with each other, but they’d never lift a hand against a Roman officer.”

“I don’t expect that he will,” Drusus said. “But thank you for your reassurance. Is this the place?”

“This is the place. Titus—”

Drusus pointed back toward the camp. “Go, Marcus. Let’s not make a drama out of this. I’ll speak to this Olaus, we’ll find out how things stand here, and by evening I’ll be back, with some idea of the strategy to follow next. Go. Leave me, Marcus.”

Junianus gave him a quick embrace and a sad smile and went trudging off. Drusus leaned against the rough trunk of a palm tree and waited for his barbarian guides to arrive.

Perhaps an hour went by. Though it was only an hour past sunrise, the heat was already becoming troublesome. If this is what winter is like here, he thought, I wonder how we will survive a summer. Drusus had chosen to dress formally, greaves and chain mail, the crested helmet, his cloak of office as a legate, his short ceremonial sword. He had wanted to muster as much Roman majesty as he could when he came before the barbaric king of these barbaric people. But it was all a little too much for the warmth of this place, and he was sweating as though he were at the baths. An insect or two had penetrated his armor, too: he was aware of bothersome ticklings along his back. He was beginning to feel a little faint by the time he caught sight of a line of marchers emerging out of the thickets in front of him, moving forward without making a sound.

There were six of them, bare to the waist, dusky-skinned, with tightly set, unsmiling mouths, noses like hatchet blades, and odd sloping foreheads. They were amazingly short, no bigger than small women, but their dignity and gravity of bearing made them seem taller than they were, and also they wore headdresses of jutting green and yellow feathers that rose to an astounding height. Three were armed with spears, three with nasty-looking swords made of some dark, glassy stone, their blades notched like those of saws.

Were these his guides, or his executioners?

Drusus stood motionless as they approached. It was an uneasy moment for him. Of personal fear he had none. As ever, he understood that he owed the gods a death, sooner or later. But, as ever, he did not want it to be a shameful, embarrassing death—walking with his eyes wide open into the clutches of a murderous enemy, for instance. In times of danger he had always prayed that if the time of his death were at hand, let it at least serve some useful purpose for the Empire. There could be no purpose in dying stupidly.

But these men hadn’t come here to kill him. They reached his side and took up positions flanking him, three before, three behind, and studied him for a moment with eyes black as night and utterly expressionless. Then one of them signaled with the tips of two fingers, and they led him away into the forest.

The hour was still short of noon when they reached the city. Marcus Junianus had not exaggerated its splendor. If anything he had underestimated its grandeur, not having the command of language that would allow him to describe the place in all its majesty. Drusus had grown up in Urbs Roma, and that was his standard of greatness in a city, eternal Roma, than which there was no city greater, not even, so he had heard, Constantinopolis of the East. But this city seemed just as imposing as Roma, in its very different way. And, he realized, it might not even be the capital city of these people. Once more Drusus began to wonder just how simple the conquest of this New World was going to be.

He was in a plaza of titanic size. It was bordered on each side by vast stone buildings, some rectangular, some pyramidal, all of them alien in style but undeniably grand. There was something strange about them, and after a moment he realized what it was: there were no arches anywhere. These people did not seem to make use of the arch in their construction. And yet their buildings were very large, very solid-looking. Their façades were elaborately carved with geometric designs and painted in brilliant colors. Long rows of stone columns stood before them, engraved with savage, barbaric figures that looked like warriors in full regalia, no two alike. The columns too were painted: red, blue, green, yellow, brown. In the very center of the plaza was a stone altar with the statue of a double-headed tiger on it; to each side of it were curious figures of a reclining man with his knees drawn up and his head turned to one side. Some god, no doubt, for each figure’s upturned belly bore a flat stone disk that was covered with offerings of fruit and grain.

Throngs of people were everywhere about, just as Marcus had said, commoners in their skimpy tunics, nobles in their flamboyant headdresses and robes, all of them on foot, as though neither the cart nor the litter was known here. Nor was there a single horse in sight. Whatever had to be carried was being carried by men, even the heaviest of burdens. The creatures must not be found in this New World, Drusus thought.

Nobody seemed to take notice of Drusus as he passed among them.

His guardians marched him to the flat-topped pyramid on the far side of the plaza and up an interminable stone staircase to the colonnaded shrine at the top.

Olaus the Norseman was waiting for him there, enthroned in regal majesty with the scepter of green stone in his hand. Two richly costumed natives, high priests, perhaps, stood beside him. He rose as Drusus appeared and extended the scepter toward him in a gesture of the greatest solemnity.

He was so startling a sight that Drusus felt a sudden momentary weakness of his knees. Not even the Emperor of Roma, the Augustus Saturninus Caesar Imperator himself, had ever stirred any such awe in him. Saturninus, with whom Drusus had had personal audience on more than one occasion, was a tall, commanding-looking figure, majestic, unmistakably royal. For all that, though, you knew he was only a man in a purple robe. But this Olaus, this Norse king of Yucatan, seemed like—what?—a god?—a demon? Something prodigious and frightening, a fantastic, almost unreal being.

His costume itself was terrifying: the tiger pelt around his waist, the necklace and pendant of bear’s teeth and massive green stones lying over his bare chest, the long golden armlets, the heavy earrings, the intricate crown of gaudy feathers and blazing gems. But this outlandish garb, nightmarish though it was, formed only a part of the demonic effect. The man himself provided the rest. Olaus was as tall as anyone Drusus ever had seen, better than half a head taller than Drusus himself, and Drusus was a tall man. His body was a massive column, broad through the shoulders, deep through the chest. And his face—

Oh, that face! Square-jawed, with a great outthrust chin, and dark blazing eyes set wide apart in deep, brooding sockets, and a ferocious snarling maw of a mouth. Though most of his countrymen were blond and ruddy, Olaus’s hair was black, a wild mane above and a dense, bristling beard covering his cheeks and much of his throat. It was the face of a beast, a beast in human form, cruel, implacable, remorseless, enduring. But the intelligence of a man shone out of those eyes.

Marcus’s description had not even begun to prepare him for this man. Drusus wondered if he was expected to salute him by some sort of abasement, kneeling, genuflecting, something like that. No matter: he would not do it. But it seemed almost to be the appropriate thing to do before a man of this sort.

Olaus came forward until he was disturbingly close and said, in bad but comprehensible Latin, “You are the general? What is your name? Your rank?”

“Titus Livius Drusus is my name, son of the Senator Lucius Livius Drusus. I hold the appointment of legionary legate by the hand of Saturninus Augustus.”

The Norseman made a low rumbling sound, a kind of bland growl, as though to indicate that he had heard, but was not impressed. “I am Olaus the Dane, who has become king of this land.” Indicating the man on his left, a scowling, hawk-nosed individual dressed nearly as richly as he was himself, the Norseman said, “He is Na Poot Uuc, the priest of the god Chac-Mool. This other is Hunac Ceel Cauich, who is the master of the holy fire.”

Drusus acknowledged them with nods. Na Poot Uuc, he thought. Hunac Ceel Cauich. The god Chac-Mool. These are not names. These are mere noises.

At another signal from the Norseman, the priest of Chac-Mool produced a bowl of that polished green stone that they seemed to admire so much here, and the master of the holy fire filled it with the same sweet liquor that Marcus had told him of receiving. Drusus sipped it cautiously. It was both sweet and spicy at the same time, and he suspected that it would turn his head if he had very much of it. A few politic sips and he looked up, as though sated. The priest of Chac-Mool indicated that he should drink more. Drusus pretended to do so, and handed the bowl back.

Now the Norseman returned to his throne. He beckoned for some of the honey-wine himself, drank a bowlful of it at a single draught, and, transfixing Drusus with those fiery, fearsome eyes of his, launched abruptly into a rambling tale of his adventures in the New World. The story was difficult to follow, for Olaus’s command of Latin had probably never been strong to begin with, and plainly he had not spoken it at all for many years. His grammar was largely guesswork and his sentences were liberally interspersed with phrases from his own thick-sounding northern tongue and, for all Drusus knew, the local lingo as well. But it was possible for Drusus to piece together at least the gist of the story.

Which was that Olaus, after Haraldus and his friends had left him here in Yucatan and sailed off toward Europa to bring the news of the New World to the Emperor, had very quickly established himself as a man of consequence and power among the people of this place, whom he referred to as the Maia. Whether that was their own name for themselves or some invention of Olaus’s, Drusus could not tell. He doubted that the word had any relationship to the Roman month of the same name. Nor did he get any clear notion of what had become of the other Norsemen who had stayed behind in the New World with Olaus, and he was shrewd enough not to ask: he knew well enough what a brawling, murderous bunch this race was. Put seven of them in a room and there will be four left alive by morning, and one of those will set fire to the building and leave the other three to burn as he slips away. Surely Olaus’s companions all were dead by now.

Olaus, though, through his size and strength and unshakable self-assurance, had managed to make himself first the war leader of these people, and then their king, and, by now, virtually their god. It had all happened because a neighboring city, not long after Olaus’s arrival, had chosen to make war against this one. There was no sovereign authority in this land, Drusus gathered: each city was independent, though sometimes they allied themselves in loose confederacies against their enemies. These Maia all were fierce fighters; but when war broke out, Olaus trained the warriors of this city where he was living in military methods of a kind they had never imagined, a combination of Roman discipline and Norse brutality. Under his leadership they became invincible. City after city fell to Olaus’s armies. For the first time in Maian history a kind of empire was formed here in Yucatan.

It seemed to Drusus that Olaus claimed also to have made contact with the other kingdoms of the New World, the one to the west in Mexico and the one to the south that was called Peru. Had he gone to those distant places himself, or simply sent envoys? Hard to tell: the narrative swept along too quickly, and the Norseman’s way of speaking was too muddled for Drusus to be certain of what he was saying. But it did appear that the peoples of all these lands had been made aware of the white-skinned, black-bearded stranger from afar who had brought the warring cities of Yucatan together in an empire.

It was the troops of that empire that met the three legions of Saturninus’s first expedition, and wiped them out with ease.

The Maian armies had used the knowledge of Roman methods of warfare that Olaus had instilled in them to defend themselves against the legions’ attack. And when they made their own response, it was to strike from ambush in a way that Roman military techniques, magnificently effective though they had proven everywhere else, were entirely unsuited to handle.

“And so they all perished,” Olaus concluded, “except for a few that I allowed to escape to tell the tale. The same will happen to you and your troops. Pack up now, Roman. Go home, while you still can.”

Those eyes, those frightful eyes, were bright with contempt.

“Save yourselves,” Olaus said. “Go.”

“Impossible,” said Drusus. “We are Romans.”

“Then it will be war. And you will be destroyed.”

“I serve the Emperor Saturninus. He has laid claim to these lands.”

Olaus let out a diabolical guffaw. “Let your Emperor claim the moon, my friend! He’ll have an easier time of conquering it, I promise you. This land is mine.”

“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 Consul. “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 defense 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.

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 weakened. 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.

Content

Robert Silverberg
The Second Wave