Star of the Sea

By day Niaerdh roamed among the seals and whales and fish she had made. From her fingertips she cast gulls and spindrift onto the wind. At the rim of the world her daughters danced to her song, which called rain from heaven or sent light ashiver across the waters. When darkness flowed out of the east, she sought her bed that it blanketed yonder. But often she rose early, long before the sun, to watch over her sea. Upon her brow shone the morning star.

Then once Frae rode to the strand. “Niaerdh, I call you!” he shouted. Only the surf gave answer. He put the horn Gatherer to his lips and blew. Cormorants flew shrieking from the skerries. Last he drew sword and with the flat of it smote the flanks of the bull Earthshaker whereon he sat. At the bellow that sounded forth, wells spouted and dead kings woke in their barrows.

Thereat Niaerdh sought him. Angered, she sailed on an iceberg, herself clad in the fog and bearing in one hand the net in which she takes ships. “Why have you dared trouble me?” she flung at him, words like hailstones.

“I would wed you,” he told her. “From afar, the light shining off your breasts blinded me. I have sent my sister away. Earth sickens and all growth withers in the heat of my longing.”

Niaerdh laughed. “What can you give me that my brother does not?”

“A high-roofed house,” he said, “rich offerings, warm flesh in your trencher and hot blood in your cup, sway over sowing and reaping, over begetting and birth and old age.”

“Those things are great,” she yielded him, “but what if I still turn from them?”

“Then life will die from the land and, dying, curse you,” he warned. “My arrows will fly to the horses of the Sun Car and slay them. When it falls aflame, the sea will boil; afterward it will freeze beneath a night that has no dawn.”

“No,” she said, “for first I will bring the waves in over your kingdom and drown it.”

They were silent a while.

“We are both strong,” she said at last. “Best that we not wreck the world between us. I will come to you in springtime with my dowry of rain, and together we will fare about the land to bless it. Your gift to me shall be the bull that you are riding.”

“That is too much,” said Frae. “In him is the might to fill earth’s womb. He scatters the foe, gores and tramples them, lays waste their fields. Rock shudders beneath his hoofs.”

“You may keep him ashore and use him as aforetime,” answered Niaerdh, “save when I have need for him. But mine he shall be, and in the end I will call him to me forever.” After another while she went on: “Each autumn I will leave you and go back to my sea. But in spring I will come again. This shall be the year and every year henceforward.”

“I had hoped for more,” said Frae, “and I think that if we sunder our doings, the gods of war will rove more free than erstwhile. Yet it is foredoomed that you will have it thus. I will await you when the sun turns north.”

“I will come to you on the rainbow,” Niaerdh plighted.

So it was. So it is.

1

Seen from the ramparts of Old Camp, nature was terrifying enough. Eastward, in this drought year, the Rhine gleamed shrunken. The Germans crossed it with ease, while supply vessels bound for the outposts along its left bank ran often aground and, before they could escape, might well fall into enemy hands. It was as if the very rivers, the ancient defenses of the Empire, were deserting Rome. Where forest on the farther side, woodlots on this, rose out of the plain, parched leaves were already browning and dropping. Farm plots had been sere until war made them not mud, but dust beneath a brazen sky, to gray the ash and charcoal of houses.

Now that soil bore a new crop, dragon’s teeth sprouted, a barbarian horde. Big blond men surged around emblems brought from sacred groves and bloody rites, poles or litters that held skulls or rude carvings of bear, boar, wisent, aurochs, elk, stag, wildcat, wolf. Sunset light flashed on spearheads, shield bosses, the occasional helmet, rarely a coat of ring mail or a cuirass taken off a slain legionary. Most went unarmored, in tunic and close-fitting trousers or stripped to the waist, perhaps with the skin of a beast shaggy above. They growled, barked, shouted, roared, stamped, a sound akin to ongoing distant thunder.

Distant indeed. Peering past the shadows stretched toward them, Munius Lupercus made out long hair knotted at the temple or atop the head. That was the style of the Suebian tribes in the heart of Germany. It wasn’t common, those must be small bands who had followed adventurer captains here, but it showed how far the word of Civilis had gone.

The majority braided their manes; some dyed them red or soaped them into spikes, in the manner of Gauls. They were Batavi, Canninefates, Tungri, Frisii, Bructeri, others native to these parts—and more to be feared, less because of their numbers than because they had knowledge of Roman ways. Hoo, there went a squadron of Tencteri, galloping on their ponies as flowingly as centaurs, lances and pennons aloft, axes at saddle bows, cavalry for the rebels!

“We’ll have a busy night,” Lupercus said.

“How can you tell, sir?” The orderly’s voice was not quite steady. He was just a boy, hastily picked for the job after experienced Rutilius fell. When five thousand soldiers had been driven off the field and into the nearest fort, with two or three times as many camp followers, you grabbed what you could.

Lupercus shrugged. “One gets a feeling for their moods.”

Not all the signs were subtle. Beyond the river and behind the male tumult on this side, smoke curled past kettles and spits. Women and children of the region had come along to egg their men on to battle. Now again the keening had begun among them. It spread and strengthened while he listened, saw—edged, with an underlying beat, ha-ba-da ha-ba, ha-ba-da-da. More and more ears turned toward it, more and more of the chaos eddied its way.

“I shouldn’t think Civilis would want action,” said Aletus. Lupercus had detached the veteran centurion from the fragments of his command that survived, to be staff officer and counselor. Aletus gestured down the palisade topping the earthworks. “The last couple of attacks cost him plenty.”

Corpses sprawled, bloated, discolored, amidst entrails and clotted blood, broken weapons, ruins of crude testudines under which the barbarians had tried to storm the gates. In places they filled the ditch. Mouths gaped around tongues that ants and beetles were eating. Crows had plucked out many of the eyes. Several birds still pecked away, tucking in a supper before nightfall. Noses had gotten used to the stench, except when a breeze bore it straight at them, and the eventide cooling had damped it.

“He has plenty to spare,” Lupercus said.

“Still, sir, he’s no fool, nor ignorant, is he?” the centurion persisted. “He marched with us twenty years or more, I’ve heard, clear down into Italy, and got as much rank as an auxiliary can get. He must know we’re short of food and everything. Starving us out makes better sense than charging at regulars and their machines.”

“True,” Lupercus agreed. “I daresay that’s been his intent since he failed to break in. But he hasn’t got Roman control over those wild men, you know.” Wryly: “Not that our legions haven’t been known to kick over the traces of late, eh?”

His gaze sought a center of steadiness around which the enemy weltered. Metal gleamed in arrays where men rested beneath the standards of their units; horses, tethered, fed quietly on oats brought them; newly built, its wood raw but solidly carpentered, a two-story siege tower waited on its wheels. Yonder lay Claudius Civilis, who formerly served Rome, and the tribesmen who had campaigned and learned beside him.

“Something’s set the Germans afire again,” the legate went on. “Some news or inspiration or whim or . . . whatever. I’d like to know what. But I repeat, we’ve a busy time ahead of us. Let’s make ready.”

He led the way back down from the watchtower. It was almost a descent into peace. In the decades since its establishment, Old Camp had enlarged, become a kind of settlement, not everywhere in military gridiron fashion. At the moment it was choked with fugitives as well as the remnants of his expeditionary force. But he had gotten order imposed, soldiers properly quartered and posted, civilians assigned to useful work or at least out from underfoot.

Quietness dwelt in the shadows; for a moment he could close his ears to the savage chant. His mind flew free, across miles and years, over the Alps and south along blue, blue sea to the bay and majestic mountain, nestling town, house and its courtyard of roses, Julia, the children . . . Why, Publius must be shooting up toward manhood, Lupercilla quite the young lady, and had Marcus overcome those problems of his with reading? . . . Letters arrived so infrequently, so irregularly. How were they doing, how was it for them at this exact hour in Pompeii?

Dismiss them. I have my own business to handle. He went about it, inspecting, planning, issuing instructions.

Night fell. Fires leaped huge around the fort, where warriors sat at feast and drink. They had plundered countless amphorae of wine. Presently they started their hoarse war songs. In the background, their women shrilled like hawks.

One by one, gang by gang, they lumbered to their feet, took arms, and dashed themselves against the walls. In the dark, their spears, arrows, and throwing-axes clove only air. The Romans saw them plainly by the light of their fires. Javelin, sling, catapult picked them off, the gaudiest and bravest first. “An Egyptian bird hunt, by Hercules!” Aletus exulted.

“Civilis sees it too,” Lupercus replied.

In fact, after a couple of hours sparks whirled high and blinked into nothing, rakes spread wood and coals apart, boots and blankets obliterated flames. The precaution seemed to madden the Germans further. The night was moonless and a haze had blurred stars. Fighting turned well-nigh blind, hand to hand, strike where you heard a noise and spied a deeper darkness coming at you. Still the legionaries kept their discipline. From the walls they tossed stones and iron-shod stakes as well as they could aim. Where the racket told them of a ladder brought up, they pushed it back with shields, and javelins followed. In those men who reached the top, they sheathed their swords.

Sometime after midnight, combat faded away. For a space there was near silence, not even the sounds that the dying make. The Germans had found and borne off their wounded, regardless of any danger, and the Romans’ lay by lamplight under care of the surgeons. Lupercus remounted his observation post to listen. Soon he heard a voice haranguing, then shouts, then again the death chant. He shook his head. “They’ll be back.” He sighed.

First light showed him the siege tower rocking toward the praetorian gate. It went slowly, sweated along by a score or two of warriors while the rest milled impatient behind and Civilis’s elite waited aside. Lupercus had ample time to study the situation, make his decisions, get his men positioned and his military engines deployed. He had kept both soldiers and refugee artisans at the task of building those.

The tower approached the gate. Fighters climbed into it, brandishing weapons, hurling missiles, poising to spring down from above. The legate spoke. Romans on the wall brought poles and beams to the entry point. Under cover of shields and their slingers, they shoved, battered, hacked. They beat the tower to a standstill and began smashing it apart. Meanwhile their companions sallied from both sides and attacked the surrounding enemy.

Civilis led his veterans in aid. Roman engineers extended a crane arm over the top of the wall. Iron jaws at the end of a chain swung through an arc, closed on a man, plucked him off his feet. Gleeful, the engineers shifted counterweights. The arm swiveled around, the jaws opened, the captive fell to earth inside the camp. A squad awaited him.

“Prisoners!” Lupercus shouted. “I want prisoners!”

The crane reached forth again, and yet again. That was a device slow and clumsy, but also new and weird, demoralizing. Lupercus never knew how much it did toward throwing dismay into the foe. Most likely nobody could say. The destruction of the tower and the assault by trained, coordinated infantry were amply bad.

Good troops would have stood their ground, enveloped the outnumbered men of the sortie, and cut them to pieces. In the packs of the barbarians, nobody had clear command save over his immediate followers, nor any way of knowing what went on anywhere else. Those who encountered deadliness got no reinforcement. They were weary after their long night, many had lost blood, neither comrades nor gods came to their help. The heart went from them and they ran. Avalanche-like, the rest of the horde tumbled after.

“Shouldn’t we pursue, sir?” wondered the orderly.

“That would be fatal.” A part of Lupercus wondered why he explained, why he didn’t simply tell the boy to shut up. “They aren’t in real panic. Look, they’re coming to a halt by the river. Their chiefs will rally them and Civilis will bring them more or less to their senses. However, I don’t expect he’ll allow any further such attempts. He’ll settle down to blockade us.”

And try to seduce his countrymen among us, the legate’s mind added. But at least now I can get some sleep. How tired he was. His skull felt full of sand, his tongue like a strip of leather.

First he had duties. He went downstairs and along the pomoerium lane to the spot where the crane had dumped its prey. A pair lay killed, whether because they resisted too hard or the squad grew overexcited. One moaned and writhed feebly on the dust. His legs never stirred, he must have a broken back, best cut his throat. Three slumped bound under the eyes of their guards. The seventh, also with wrists tied and ankles hobbled, stood straight. The outfit of a Batavian auxiliary covered his broad frame.

Lupercus stopped before him. “Well, soldier, what have you to say for yourself?” he asked quietly.

Beard was growing around the lips and the Latin they uttered bore a guttural accent, but it came firmly. “You’ve got us. That’s all you’ve got, though.”

A legionary half lifted his sword. Lupercus waved it aside. “Mind your manners,” he advised. “I’ll have some questions for you fellows. Cooperate, and you won’t suffer the worst that can happen to traitors.”

“I’ll not betray my lord, whatever you do,” said the Batavian. His own exhaustion made the defiance toneless. “Woen, Donar, Tiw be witness.”

Mercury, Hercules, Mars. Their main gods, or so we Romans identify them. No matter. I think he means it, and torture won’t break him. We have to try, of course. Maybe his comrades will be less resolute. Not that I really believe any of them knows anything useful. What a waste all around.

Hm, one thing, A faint eagerness prickled the legate’s skin. He might well be willing to say this. “Tell me, anyhow, what possessed you? It was crazy, rushing us. Civilis must have torn his hair out.”

“He wanted to stop it,” the prisoner admitted. “But the warriors got out of hand, and he—we—could only try to make them effective.” A canine grin. “Maybe now they’ve learned their lesson and will go about the business right.”

“But what set the attack off?”

Suddenly the voice throbbed, the eyes kindled. “They were wrong about the tactics, yah, but the word was true. It is true. It came through the Bructeri who joined us. Veleda has spoken.”

“Uh, Veleda?”

“The sibyl. She’s called on every tribe to rise. Rome is doomed, the goddess tells her, and ours shall be the victory.” The Batavian squared his shoulders. “Do what you like to me, Roman. You’re a dead man, you with your whole stinking Empire.”

2

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a minor export-import business fronted for the Amsterdam office of the Time Patrol. Its warehouse, with attached office, was in the Indische Buurt, where exotic-looking people drew scant attention.

Manse Everard’s timecycle appeared in the secret part of the building early one May morning. He had to wait a minute or so at the exit when the door indicated that somebody was passing by on the other side who shouldn’t see that it wasn’t merely a wainscot—doubtless an ordinary employee of the company. Then it opened to his key. The arrangement seemed a bit clumsy to him, but he supposed it suited local conditions.

He found his way to the manager, who was also chief of Patrol operations throughout this corner of Europe. Those were usually routine, or as routine as is possible when you deal with traffic up and down the lanes of history. This wasn’t milieu headquarters, after all. It hadn’t even appeared to be overseeing an especially important sector, till now.

“We weren’t expecting you yet, sir,” said Willem Ten Brink, surprised. “Shall I call Agent Floris?”

“No, thanks,” Everard replied. “I’ll meet her later as arranged. Just thought I’d first look around the city a little. Haven’t been here since, uh, 1952, when I spent a few days on a vacation trip. I liked it.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy yourself. Things have changed, you know. Do you wish a guide, a car, any kind of assistance? No? What about facilities for your conference?”

“No need, I think. Her message said she could best explain matters, at least to start with, at her place.” Despite the other man’s obvious disappointment, Everard let forth no hint of what the matters were. They were plenty delicate without leaking information to anybody who didn’t require it and didn’t work outside his birth era. Besides, Everard wasn’t quite sure what did threaten.

Equipped with a map, a walletful of gulden, and a few practical cues, he strolled off. At a tobacconist’s he bought refills for his pipe and a strippenkart for the public transit system. He hadn’t had Dutch instilled, but everybody he encountered possessed excellent English. Footloose, he drifted.

Thirty-four years was a long absence. (Longer than that on his personal world line, of course. He had meanwhile joined the Patrol and become an Unattached agent and snaked around through the ages, across most of the planet. Now the London of Elizabeth the First or the Pasargadae of Cyrus the Great stood him nearer than did the streets he would walk today. Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?) He half dreaded what he might find.

The following hours relieved him. Amsterdam had not become the sewer that some people nowadays called it. From the Dam to the Central Station, it pullulated with scruffy youth, but he saw no one making trouble. In alleys directly off the Damrak you could idle a delightful while in a sidewalk café or a small bar with a huge beer selection. The sleaze shops were at fairly wide intervals, tucked in among ordinary businesses and extraordinary bookstores. When he took a canal tour and the guide insouciantly pointed out the red-light district, what Everard saw was more of the centuried houses that dignified the entire old part of town. He’d been warned about pickpockets but had no need to take precautions against muggers. He’d breathed worse smog in New York and dodged more dog droppings around Gramercy Park than in any residential section here. For lunch he found a friendly little place where they cooked a mean dish of eel. The Stedelijke Museum was a letdown—as regarded modern art, he admitted being an unreconstructed philistine—but he lost himself in the Rijks, forgetting all else, till closing time.

By then he was soon due at Floris’s. The hour had been his suggestion, in their preliminary phone conversation. She hadn’t demurred. A field agent, Specialist second class, ranked fairly high, but still didn’t normally argue with an Unattached. It wasn’t too eccentric a time of day anyhow, when you could hop straight to it from whenever you were. Probably she’d skipped uptime shortly after breakfast.

For his part, this relaxed interlude hadn’t dulled alertness. On the contrary. Also, by giving him some slight acquaintance with her hometown, the background whence she sprang, it started him on a knowledge of her. He needed that. They might be working very closely together.

His route afoot from the Museumplein took him along the Singelgracht and down through part of Vondelpark. Water gleamed, leaves and grass glowed with sunlight. A boy paddled a hired canoe, his girl in the bow before his eyes; a gray-haired couple walked hand in hand under trees with more years than themselves; a band of bicyclists swept by him in a storm of shouts and laughter. He harked back to the Oude Kerk, the Rembrandts, yes, the Van Goghs he hadn’t yet seen, all the life that pulsed in the city today and in past and future, everything that begot and nourished it. And he knew their whole reality for a spectral flickering, diffraction rings across abstract, unstable space-time, a manifold brightness that at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been.

No! He must never let himself brood so. It would merely shake him in his duty, which was to get on with whatever pragmatic, prosaic operations were necessary to safeguard this existence. He lengthened his stride.

The apartment building he sought was one of a row on a quiet street, handsome relics from around 1910. A directory in the entry told him that Janne Floris lived on the fourth floor. It gave her profession vaguely as bestuurder, administrator; for purposes of maintaining a local persona, she was on the payroll of Ten Brink’s company.

Otherwise Everard knew only that she did field research in the Roman Iron Age, that period when the archaeology of northern Europe began fitfully merging with recorded history. He’d been tempted to call up her service record, which he had authority to do within limits. That was surely no easy milieu for a woman of any kind, let alone a scientist from its future. He’d decided against it, at any rate till they’d talked. Better that his first impression be direct. Also, the business might turn out not to be a real crisis. Maybe investigation would show nothing worse than some kind of mistake or misunderstanding, with no corrective action required.

He found her door and pushed the bell. She opened it. For a moment they stood mute.

Was she taken aback too? Had she expected the Unattached agent to be something more impressive than a big, homely guy with a battle-dented nose and still, after all he’d been through, “Midwesterner” written upon him? He’d certainly not awaited as goodly a sight as this tall blonde in her elegantly understated gown.

“How do you do,” he managed in English. “I am—”

She smiled, broad mouth baring large teeth. Snub-nosed, heavy-browed, her features weren’t conventionally pretty, apart from eyes of changeable turquoise, but he admired them, and her figure could have belonged to an athletic Juno. “Agent Everard,” she finished for him. “An honor, sir.” The tone was warm without being subservient and she shook hands as if with an equal. “Welcome.”

Passing close as he entered, he saw that she wasn’t really young. That clear complexion had known much weather; fine lines crinkled around eyes and lips. Well, she couldn’t have accomplished what she must have to earn her rank in any few years of lifespan, and longevity treatment didn’t expunge every trace.

In the living room he glanced around. It was furnished plainly and comfortably, like his, though her things weren’t battered or faded and she displayed no souvenirs. Maybe she didn’t care to explain them away to mundane visitors—and lovers? On the walls he recognized a copy of a Cuyp landscape and an astronomical photograph of the Veil Nebula. Among books in a floor-to-ceiling case he spied stuff by Dickens, Mark Twain, Thomas Mann, Tolkien. A shame that Dutch titles conveyed nothing to him.

“Please sit down,” Floris urged. “Smoke if you wish. I have made coffee, or tea can be ready in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, coffee will be fine.” Everard took an armchair. She brought pot, cups, cream, sugar from the kitchen, put them on a low table, and settled on the couch opposite him.

“Do you prefer we use English or Temporal?” she asked.

He liked her approach, straightforward yet not brusque. “English for now,” he decided. The Patrol speech had a grammar capable of handling chronokinesis, variable time, and the associated paradoxes, but when it came to human things was as weak as artificial languages generally are. (An Esperantist who hits his thumb with a hammer will not likely yell, “Excremento!”) “I’m after a sketchy, preliminary understanding of what this is about.”

“Why, I thought you would arrive prepared. What I have here that is not at the office is—oh, pictures, small objects, the kind of things one brings back from missions, things that have no particular value to science or anyone else but hold memories. Doesn’t one?” Everard nodded. “Well, I thought if I took them from their drawer they might help give you a better feel for the milieu, or remind me of observations I made that you may find useful.”

He sipped. The coffee was the way he preferred it, hot and strong. “Good thinking. We’ll look them over later. But whenever it’s practicable, I’d rather start by hearing about a case in direct, first-hand terms. The precise details, the scholarly analysis, the broad picture, those mean more to me afterward.” In other words, I’m not an intellectual, I’m a farm boy who became first an engineer and then a cop.

“But I have not been on the scene either,” she said.

“I know. None of the corps have yet, have they? However, you’ve been informed of the problem in some circumstantiality, and I’m sure you’ve given it much thought in the light of your experience, your particular expertise. That makes you the closest thing to an observer we’ve got.”

Everard leaned forward. “Okay,” he went on, “what I can tell you is this. The Middle Command asked me if I’d investigate. They’d received a report of inconsistencies in a chronicle of Tacitus’s, and it has them worried. The events concerned evidently center on the Low Countries in the first century A.D. That happens to be your field, and you and I are more or less contemporaries”—a generation between our births, is it?—“so we should be able to cooperate more or less efficiently. That’s why I’m the Unattached agent they contacted.” Everard gestured at David Copperfield. He’d show her the two of them had something more in common. “Barkis is willin’. I called Ten Brink and then you almost immediately, and followed close behind. Maybe I should first have studied my Tacitus. I’d read him, of course, but quite a while ago on my world line and it’s gotten vague. I did glance over the material again, but just a glance, and he gets sort of convoluted, doesn’t he? Go ahead and fill me in from the ground up. If you repeat something I already know, what harm?”

Floris smiled. “You have a most disarming manner, sir,” she murmured. “Is it on purpose?” Momentarily he wondered if she was being flirtatious; but she tautened and proceeded, businesslike, well-nigh academic:

“You are certainly aware that both the Annals and the Histories came down to later centuries incomplete. Of the Histories, the oldest copy that survived contained only four books of the original twelve, and part of the fifth. That part broke off in the middle of describing what we have become troubled about. Naturally, when time travel is developed, an expedition will in due course go to his era and recover the lost sections. They are much desired. Tacitus is not the most reliable chronicler who ever wrote, but he is a notable stylist, a moralist—and for some occurrences, the single written source of any importance.”

Everard nodded. “Yeah. Explorers read the historians for clues to what they should look for and look out for, before they set off to chart what really happened.” He coughed. “Why am I telling you your business? Pardon me. Mind if I light a pipe?”

“Not at all,” Floris said absently before she continued. “Yes, the complete Histories, as well as the Germania, have been among my principal guides. I found countless details are different from what he wrote, but that is to be expected. In broad outline, and usually in particulars, his account of the great rebellion and its aftermath is trustworthy.”

She paused, then, stubbornly honest: “I have not done my research alone, you realize. Far from it. Others are busy in hundreds of years before and after my special period, in areas from Russia to Ireland. And there are those, the truly indispensable ones, who sit at home to assemble, correlate, and analyze our reports. But it chances that I operate in and around what are now the Netherlands and the nearby parts of Belgium and Germany, during the time when the Celtic influence was dying away—after the Roman conquest of Gaul—and the Germanic peoples were beginning to develop truly distinctive cultures. It is not much we have learned, either, set beside everything we do not know. We are too few.”

Too few indeed, Everard thought. With half a million years or more to guard, the Patrol’s forever undermanned, stretched thin, compromising, improvising. We get some help from civilian scientists, but most of them work out of civilizations millennia uptime; their interests are often too alien. And yet we’ve got to uncover the hidden truths of history, to have an inkling of what the moments are when it could too easily be changed. . . . From a god’s-eye viewpoint, Janne Floris, you’re probably worth more to the cause of preserving the reality that brought us into being than I am.

Her rueful laugh pulled him back from his recollections. He felt grateful; they kept recurring to plague him. “How professorish, no?” she exclaimed. “And how shopworn obvious. Please believe I generally talk better to the point. Today I am nervous.” Humor faded. Did she shiver? “I am not used to this. Confronting death, yes, but oblivion, the nothingness of everything I ever knew—” Her mouth firmed. She sat straight. “Forgive me.”

Having stoked his pipe, Everard struck a match and sent the first pungency across his tongue. “You’ll find you’re plenty tough,” he assured her. “You’ve proved it. I want to hear about your field experiences.”

“Later.” For an instant she looked away. He thought he saw hauntedness. Her gaze returned to him, her words became crisp. “Three days ago a special agent had me in for a long consultation. A research team had obtained their own text of the Histories. You heard?”

“Uh-huh.” Brief though his briefing was, Everard had been told. Sheer happenstance; or was it? (Causality can double back on itself in strange ways.) Sociologists studying Rome, early second century A.D., found on short notice that they needed to know what the upper classes thought of the Emperor Domitian, who died a couple of decades earlier. Did they really remember him as a Stalin, or concede that he’d done a few worthwhile things? The later sections of Tacitus eloquently expressed the negative view. It seemed easier to borrow his work from a private library and surreptitiously duplicate it than to send uptime for a data file. “They noticed differences from the standard version as they remembered it—if it is the standard version—and comparison showed the differences are radical.”

“Far beyond copyist’s errors, author’s revisions, or anything else reasonable,” Floris emphasized. “Detective work proved it was not a forgery, but an authentic copy of a manuscript by Tacitus himself. And, while the phrasing varies between them, as one would expect if they led toward two separate endings—the chronicle as such, the narrative line, does not split until the fifth book, very soon after the scene where the copy that survived breaks off. Is this coincidence?”

“I dunno,” Everard replied, “and better we pass that question by. Kind of spooky, huh?” He forced himself to lean back, cross shank over thigh, drain his cup, trail out a slow streamer of smoke. “Suppose you give me a synopsis of the story—the two stories. Don’t be afraid of repeating what’s elementary to you. I confess what I remember is simply that the Dutch and some of the Gauls rose against Roman rule and gave the Empire a stiff fight before they were put down. Afterward they, their descendants, were placid Roman subjects, eventually citizens.”

Starkness responded. “Tacitus goes into detail, and I have—we have—confirmed that on the whole he reports it fairly well. It began with the Batavi, a tribe living in what is now South Holland, between the Rhine and the Waal. They, with a number of others in this area, had not formally been brought under the Empire, but they had been made tributaries. All furnished soldiers to Rome, auxiliary troops, who served their terms with the legions and retired on nice pensions, whether they settled down where they were at discharge or returned to the homeland.

“But under Nero the Roman government became more and more extortionate. For instance, the Frisii were supposed to furnish a certain amount of leather every year for making shields. Instead of the hides of the dwarfish domestic cattle, the governor now demanded the much bigger and thicker hides of wild bulls, which were growing scarce, or the equivalent. It was ruinous.”

Everard grinned on the left side of his face. “Tax collection. Sounds familiar. Go on.”

Floris’s tone intensified. She stared before her, fists clenched on her lap. “You remember, at the overthrow of Nero, civil war broke out. The year of the three emperors—Galba, Otho, Vitellius—then, in the Near East, Vespasian—devastating the Empire as they contended. Each raised what forces he could, any kind, anywhere, by any means, including conscription. The Batavi, especially, saw their sons haled off, and not only to fight in a war that was meaningless to them. Some Roman officials had an appetite for comely youths.”

“Yeah. Give government an inch, and that’s what it’ll do to the people every time. Which is why the founding fathers of the United States tried to limit federal powers. Too bad their success was temporary. Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Well, there was a Batavian family of noble birth-property, influence, descent claimed from the gods—which had supplied Rome with a number of soldiers. Prominent among them was a man who had taken the Latin name Claudius Civilis. At home, we have learned, he was Burhmund. He distinguished himself in many actions through a long career. Now he called the tribes to arms, the Batavi and their neighbors. He was no naïve rustic, you understand.”

“I do. Half civilized, and doubtless a smart, observant sort.”

“Ostensibly, he declared for Vespasian as against Vitellius, and told his followers that Vespasian would give them justice. That made it easy for Germanic troops elsewhere to set their orders aside and come join him. He scored several major victories. Northeastern Gaul took fire. Under Julius Classicus and Julius Tutor, the Gallic auxiliaries went over to Civilis, while they proclaimed their province an empire in its own right. In the Germanic tribe of the Bructeri, a prophetess called Veleda predicted the fall of Rome. It inspired the natives further, to heroic efforts, and their aim also became an independent confederation.”

That too sounds familiar to an American. We started in 1775 fighting for our rights as Englishmen. Then one thing led to another. Everard refrained from speaking.

Floris sighed. “Well, Vespasian’s cause prevailed. He himself remained in the Near East several months, having much on his hands there, but he wrote to Civilis requiring an end of hostilities. He was refused, of course. After that he dispatched an able general, Petillius Cerialis, to take charge in the North. Meanwhile the Gauls and the Germanic tribes quarreled, could not coordinate, bungled what opportunities came to them. You see, unified command was something outside their mental horizon. The Romans reduced them in detail. Finally Civilis agreed to meet with Cerialis and discuss terms. It is a dramatic scene in Tacitus—a bridge across the Ijssel, from which workers first removed the middle—the two men stood each at an end of the broken span and talked—”

“I remember that,” Everard said. “It’s where the manuscript ended, till the rest was recovered. As I recall, the rebels got a pretty fair offer, which they accepted.”

Floris nodded. “Yes. An end to outrages, guarantees for the future, and amnesty. Civilis retired to private life. Veleda—Tacitus does not say, except that she apparently helped arrange the armistice. I would like to find out what became of her.”

“Any ideas?”

“A sort of guess. If you go to the museums in Leiden and in Middelburg on Walcheren you will see stones from the second or third centuries, altars, votive blocks, carved and inscribed in Latin—” Floris shrugged. “No matter, probably. The fact is that those ancestors of us Dutch became provincial Romans, reasonably well content.” Her eyes widened. She clutched at the border of her cushion. “The fact was.”

Stillness dropped over them. How fragile the late afternoon sunlight and rustle of traffic seemed, beyond the windowpanes.

“That’s Tacitus One, right?” Everard said low after a while. “The version we’ve always used, and that I skimmed yesterday. I’m not quite clear on Tacitus Two. What does it tell?”

Floris answered no louder. “That Civilis did not yield, in large part because Veleda preached against peace. The war went on for another year, till the tribes were wholly subjugated. Civilis killed himself rather than go in chains to Rome for a triumph. Veleda escaped into free Germany. Many followed her. Tacitus-Two-remarks near the end of the Histories that the religion of the wild Germans has changed since he wrote his book about them. A female deity is becoming prominent, the Nerthus he described in his Germania. Now he compares her to Persephone, Minerva, and Bellona.”

Everard tugged his chin. “The goddesses of death, wisdom, and war, eh? Strange. The Anses or Aesir or whatever you call them—the male sky-gods—should’ve long since reduced the old chthonic figures to second place. . . . What does he have to say about happenings in Rome itself and elsewhere?”

“Essentially the same things as in the first text. The phrases often vary. Likewise do conversations and a number of incidents; but ancient and medieval chroniclers freely invented those, you know, or drew on traditions that might have drifted considerably from the facts. These variations do not prove that actual events changed.”

“Aside from in Germany. Well, it was the boondocks. Whatever happened there, for the first several decades, wouldn’t particularly touch the high civilizations. The long-range consequences, though—”

“They were not significant, were they?” Floris’s words trembled. “We are still here, we still exist, don’t we?”

Everard pulled hard on his pipe. “So far. And ‘so far’ is meaningless in English or Dutch or whatever. But let’s not go to Temporal yet. What we’ve got is an anomaly that needs investigation. I daresay it escaped notice earlier—yes, ‘earlier’ is meaningless too—because of its dates. Nearly all attention is elsewhere.”

Annis Domini 69 and 70. Those weren’t just the years of the Northern revolt. Nor were they just when Kwang Wu-Ti was nailing down the rule of the Later Han dynasty, or the Satavahanas were overrunning India, or Vologaeses the First was struggling against rebels and invaders of his own in Persia. (I checked the records before leaving for here. Nothing ever quite happens in isolation.) It wasn’t even when Rome was ripping itself apart, after the legions had discovered that emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome. No, it was the time of the Jewish War. That was what detained Vespasian and his son Titus after their victory over Vitellius. The rising of the Jews, the bloody suppression of it, the destruction of the Third Temple—with everything that that was to mean for the future, Judaism, Christianity, the Empire, Europe, the world.

“A nexus, then, is it not?” Floris whispered.

Everard nodded heavily. Somehow he preserved outward calm. “Patrol units are concentrated on guarding Palestine. You can well imagine what emotions are engaged, through how many centuries. Fanatics or freeboaters who want to change what took place in Jerusalem, researchers crowding in and multiplying the chances of a fatal blunder, and the situation itself, the near-infinity of causes radiating into that episode and effects radiating out from it. . . . I don’t pretend to understand the physics, but I can sure believe what I’ve been taught, that the continuum is especially vulnerable around such moments. As far away as barbarian Germany, reality is unstable.”

“But what could have shifted it?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out. Could be somebody taking advantage of the Patrol’s preoccupation. Or could be accident, could be—I don’t know. Maybe a Danellian could spell out the possibilities. Our job—” Everard drew breath. “Since they don’t have some improbable but safe explanation, like a forgery, these two variant texts are . . . a warning. An early sign, a ripple of change, something that may have had consequences which caused history to flow into a different channel till at last you and I and everything around us never existed—unless we heed the warning and take steps to see that this did not happen—Oh, Lord, we had better talk Temporal.”

Floris stared into her cup. “Can that wait?” she asked, barely audibly. “I need to think about this, to assimilate it. It was never more than theory to me. I did my fieldwork like, oh, a nineteenth-century explorer in darkest Africa. There were precautions to take, yes, but I was told that the pattern of events is not easily disturbed and that whatever I did, within reason, would ‘always’ have been a part of the past. Today it is as if earth dissolved beneath my feet.”

“I know.” How nightmarishly well I know. The Second Punic War—” Sure, take your time.” Time! “Collect your wits.” His smile surprised him by its genuineness. “Mine are still kind of scattered too. Look, suppose we relax and gab freely, whether about the subject on hand or anything else. In a while, let’s go out for a drink and dinner, enjoy ourselves, start getting acquainted. Tomorrow we can buckle down in earnest.”

“Thank you.” She passed a hand over the thick yellow braids coiled around her head. He recalled that ancient Germanic tribes women wore their hair long. As if she felt that magic which folk around the world laid to the human mane, strength rang anew: “Yes, tomorrow we shall cope.”

3

Winter brought rain, snow, rain again, flogged by harsh winds, weather that raged on into the springtime. Rivers ran gorged, meadows flooded, swamps overflowed. Men doled out what grain they still had stored, killed more of their huddled and shivering livestock than they wished, went hunting oftener and with less gain than they had been wont. They wondered whether the gods had wearied of last year’s drought but not of harrowing earth.

Maybe it was a hopeful sign that the night when the Bructeri met at their halidom was clear, though cold. Rags of cloud flew on the wind, ghost-white next to the full moon that sped among them. A few stars flickered wan. Trees of the grove were huge darknesses, formless save where boughs nearly bare tossed against heaven. Their creakings went like an unknown tongue, answers to the skirl and snarl of the wind.

The balefire roared. Flames leaped red and yellow from its white heart. Sparks whirled aloft to mock the stars and die. Light barely touched the great boles around the glade and made them seem to stir, uneasy as the shadows. It gleamed off the spears and eyeballs of the gathered men, brought grim faces forth out of gloom, but lost itself in their beards and shaggy coats.

Behind the fire loomed the images, rough-hewn from whole logs. Woen, Tiw, and Donar were cracked and gray, begrown with moss and toadstools. Nerha was newer, freshly painted to shine beneath the moon, and the skill of a slave from the Southlands had gone into the carving of her. In the restless glow, she might have been alive, the goddess herself. The wild boar roasting over the coals had been killed more to her than to the others.

They were not many, the men, nor were any but a few young. All who could had followed their chiefs across the Rhine last summer, to fight with Burhmund the Batavian against the Romans. They were there yet, and sorely missed at home. Wael-Edh had sent word around that the heads of households among the Bructeri should meet this night, make offering, and hear her.

The breath soughed between their teeth as she trod into sight. Her garb was moon-white, trimmed with dark fur, a necklace of raw amber aglow over her bosom. The wind made waves in her skirts and her cloak fluttered like great wings. Who knew what thoughts laired within its hood? She raised her arms, the gold rings coiled upon them shimmered snakish, and every spear dipped to her.

Heidhin, who had led in readying the boar, stood nearest the fire, apart from the others. He drew his knife, lifted blade to lips, sheathed it again. “Welcome, lady of ours,” he greeted. “Behold, they are come as you bade, they who speak for the folk, that through you the gods may speak to them. If you will, say forth.”

Edh lowered her hands. While not loud, her voice struck to its mark past the noises of the night. More than Heidhin’s, it kept an outland tone, a rise and fall like surf beating on some far shore. Maybe from this came a little of the awesomeness that forever enwrapped her.

“Hear me, sons of Brucht, for great are my tidings. The sword is aloft, the wolves and ravens eat well, the witches of Nerha fly free. Hail to the heroes!

“Let me first give you the older truth. When I called you hither, my wish was only to hearten you. The time has been long, homes guest hunger, and still the foe has stood fast. Many among you begin to wonder why we are allied with our kin beyond the river. We have shames to avenge but no yoke to cast off. We have a kingdom to build together with them but cannot if they fail.

“Yes, tribes among the Gauls have risen too, but they are a flighty lot. Yes, Burhmund has ravaged among the Ubii, those dogs of Rome, but the Romans have wasted the country of our friends the Gugernes. Yes, we have laid Moguntiacum and Castra Vetera under siege, but from the first we had to withdraw and the second has held out month after month. Yes, we have had our victories on the field, but we have had our defeats too, and always our losses were heavy. Therefore would I renew my promise to you, that Rome shall fall, the bones of the legions lie strewn and the red cock crow on every Roman roof—the vengeance of Nerha. We have but to fight on.

“Then, only today, surely by the will of the goddess, a rider reached me from Burhmund himself. Castra Vetera, the Old Camp of the enemy, has yielded. Vocula the legate, victor of Moguntiacum, is dead, and Novesium, where he died, has likewise surrendered. Colonia Agrippinensis, proud city among the Ubii, asks for terms.

“Nerha keeps faith, sons of Brucht. This is the beginning of the pledge she will wholly redeem. Rome shall fall!”

Their yells tore at the sky.

She harangued them longer, though not much longer, and ended quietly: “When at last your warriors come home, Nerha will bless their loins and they will father men to bestride the world. Now feast before her, and tomorrow bring hope to your women.” She lifted a hand. Once more they lowered their spears. She took a brand from the fire to light her way and departed into the darkness.

Heidhin led them as they pulled the offering off the grill, carved it, and devoured the smellsome flesh. However, he said little while they talked into each other’s mouths of the wonder told them. Often such a silent spell came upon him. Folk had grown used to it. Enough that he was Wael-Edh’s trusty man and, in his own right, a shrewd, swift leader. He was lean, with narrow features, white streaks in the blackness of hair and close-trimmed beard.

When the bones were cast aside onto the midden and the fire was guttering low, on behalf of everyone he bade the gods good night. Men sought the lodge nearby, where they would rest before starting back in the morning. Heidhin went a different way. His torch helped him along a dim trail until he came out from under the trees to a broad clearing, where he dropped it to die. Here the moon ran above western woodland, amidst the wind and the witchy clouds.

Before him hunched a house. Frost glistened on thatch. Within it, he knew, kine slept along one wall, folk along the other, mingled with their stores and tools, as they might anywhere else; but these served Wael-Edh. Her tower hulked beyond, heavy-timbered, iron-bound, raised for her to dwell in alone with her dreams. Heidhin walked onward.

A man stepped into his path, slanted spear, and cried, “Halt!”—then, peering through the moonlight: “Oh, you, my lord. Do you want a doss?”

“No,” Heidhin said. “Dawn’s nigh, and I’ve a horse at the lodge to bear me home. First I would call on the lady.”

The guard stood unsure. “You’d not wake her, would you?”

“I do not think she has slept,” Heidhin said. Helpless, the man let him go by.

He knocked on the door of the tower. A thrall girl woke and drew the bolt. Seeing him, she held a pine splinter to her clay lamp and used it to light a second, which he took. He climbed the ladder to the loft-room.

As he awaited—they had known one another so long—Edh sat on her high stool, staring into the shadows cast by her own lamp. They wavered big and ill-formed among the beams, the chests, the pelts and hides, the things of witchcraft and the things brought along from her wanderings. In the chill she kept her cloak wrapped around her, the hood up; when she looked his way he saw her face nighted. “Hail,” she said low. A wraith out of her lips glimmered in the dull light.

Heidhin sat down on the floor, leaning back against the panel of the shut-bed. “You should rest,” he said.

“You knew I could not, this soon.”

He nodded. “Nevertheless, you should. You grind yourself thin.”

He thought he glimpsed a half smile. “I have been doing that for many years, and am still above ground.”

Heidhin shrugged. “Well, then, sleep when you can.” It would be fitfully. “What have you been thinking of?”

“Everything, of course,” she said wearily. “What these victories mean. What we should do next.”

He sighed. “I thought so. But why? It is clear.”

The hood crinkled and uncrinkled, shadowful, as she took her head. “It is not. I understand you, Heidhin. A Roman host has fallen into our hands, and you believe we should do what warriors of old did, give everything to the gods. Cut throats, break weapons, smash wagons, cast all into a bog, that Tiw be slaked.”

“A mighty offering. It would quicken the blood in our men.”

“And enrage the Romans.”

Heidhin grinned. “I know the Romans better than you, my Edh.” Did she wince? He hastened on: “I mean, I have dealt with them and theirs, I, a war chieftain. The goddess says little to you about such everyday things, does she? I say the Romans are not like our kind. They are coldly forethoughtful—”

“Therefore you understand them well.”

“Men do call me cunning,” he said, unabashed. “Then let us make use of my wits. I tell you a slaughter will rouse the tribes and bring new warriors to us, more than it will set the foe on vengeance.” He donned gravity. “Also, the gods themselves will be glad. They will remember.”

“I have thought on this,” she told him. “The word from Burhmund is that he means to spare their men—”

Heidhin stiffened. “Ha,” he said. “Thus. He, half Roman.”

“Only in knowing them still better than you. He deems a butchery unwise. It could well enrage them into bringing their full strength against us, whatever that costs them elsewhere in their realm.” Edh raised a palm. “But wait. He also knows what the gods may want—what we here at home may think the gods want. He is sending a headman of theirs to me.”

Heidhin sat straight. “Well, that’s something!”

“Burhmund’s word is that we may kill the man in the halidom if we must, but his rede is that we stay our hands. A hostage, to swap for something worth more—” She was still for a bit. “I have spent this while mutely calling on Niaerdh. Does she want yon blood or no? She has given me no sign. I believe that means no.”

“The Anses—”

Seated above him, Edh said with sudden stiffness: “Let Woen and the rest grumble at Niaerdh, Nerha, if they like. I serve her. The captive shall live.”

He scowled at the floor and gnawed his lip.

“You know I am foe to Rome, and why,” she went on. “But this talk of bringing it down in wreck—more and more, as the war wears on, I come to see that as mere rant. It is not truly what the goddess bade me say, it is what I have told myself she wants me to say. I must needs utter it again tonight, or the gathering would have been bewildered and shaken. Yet can we really win anything but Roman withdrawal from these lands?”

“Can we gain even that much if we forsake the gods?” he blurted.

“Or is it your hopes of power and fame that we may have to forgo?” she snapped.

He glared. “From none but you would I brook that.”

She left the stool. Her voice went soft. “Heidhin, old friend, I am sorry. I meant no hurt. We should never lie at odds, we twain.”

He rose too. “I did swear once . . . I would follow you.”

She took both his hands in hers. “And well you have. How very well.” When she threw her head back to look at him, the hood fell off and he saw her face lamplit. Shadows filled the furrows in it and underlined the cheekbones but masked the gray in the brown tresses. “We’ve fared far together.”

“I did not swear I would blindly obey,” he muttered. Nor had he done so. Sometimes he went dead against her wishes. Afterward he showed her he had been right.

“Far and far,” she whispered as though she had not heard. Hazel eyes sought the murk behind him. “Did we end here, east of the great river, because the years and miles had worn us out? We should have wandered on, maybe to the Batavi. Their land opens onto the sea.”

“The Bructeri made us wholly welcome. They did everything for you that you asked.”

“Oh, yes. I was thankful. I am. But someday—a single kingdom of all the tribes—and I shall again watch the star of Niaerdh shine above the sea.”

“No such kingdom can be unless first we bleed Rome dry.”

“Do not talk of that. Later we shall have to. Now let us remember gentle things.”

Sunrise reddened heaven when he bade her farewell. Dew sheened on the mud outside. Black above it, he passed the holy grove, bound for the lodge and his horse. Peace had been on her brow, she was ready for sleep, but his fingers drew taut around the hilt of his knife.

4

Castra Vetera, Old Camp, stood near the Rhine, about where Xanten in Germany did when Everard and Floris were born. But the whole of this land in this age was Germany—Germania, reaching across upper Europe from the North Sea to the Baltic, from the River Scheldt to the Vistula, and south to the Danube. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the German state would arise out of it in the course of almost two thousand years. Today it was wilderness broken here and there by cultivation, grazing, villages, steadings, held by tribes that came and went in war, migration, eternal turbulence.

Westward, in what would be France, Belgium, Luxembourg, much of the Rhineland, the dwellers were Gauls, of Celtic language and Celtic ways. With a high culture and military capability, they had dominated the Germans with whom they were in contact—though the distinction was never absolute, and blurred in the border country—until Caesar conquered them. That was not so long ago, assimilation was not yet so far along, that memory of the old free days had died out of everyone.

It had seemed the same would befall their rivals to the east; but when Augustus lost three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, he decided to draw the frontier of the Empire at the Rhine rather than the Elbe, and only a few German tribes stayed under Roman rule. For the outermost of these, such as the Batavi and Frisii, it was not actual occupation. Like native states in India of the British Raj, they were required to pay tribute and, in general, behave as the nearest proconsul directed. They furnished a good many auxiliary troops, originally volunteers, lately conscripts. It was they that first rose in revolt; then they got allies from among their kindred to the east, while southwest of them Gauls took fire.

“Fire—I hear of a sibyl who prophesies that Rome itself shall burn,” said Julius Classicus. “Tell me about her.”

Burhmund’s bulk shifted uneasily in the saddle. “With words like that, she brought the Bructeri, Tencteri, and Chamavi to our cause,” he acknowledged, with somewhat less enthusiasm than might have been expected. “Her fame has overleaped the rivers to lay hold on us.” He glanced at Everard. “You must have heard of her too as you fared. Your trail would have crossed hers, and yon tribes have not forgotten. Warriors of theirs have been coming to us because they learned she was here, calling for war.”

“Certainly I heard,” lied the Patrolman, “but I did not know what to make of those stories. Do tell more.”

The three sat mounted under a gray sky, in a bleak breeze, near the road from Old Camp. It was a military road, paved and arrow-straight, running south along the Rhine to Colonia Agrippinensis. The Roman legions had been here that many years. Now those remnants of them that had held this fortress through fall and winter moved under guard toward Novesium, which had yielded much more quickly.

They were a sorry lot to behold, ragged, dirty, skeletally thin. Most shambled empty-eyed, making no attempt to form ranks. They were mainly Gauls, both regulars and auxiliaries, and it was to the Empire of Gaul that they had surrendered and pledged allegiance, according to the demands and cajolements of Classicus’s spokesmen. Not that they could have stood off a determined attack, as they had done again and again early in the siege. The blockade had brought them down to eating grass and whatever cockroaches a man might catch.

Their escort was nominal, a handful of fellow Gauls, well fed and smartly outfitted, soldiers themselves before they became followers of Classicus and his colleagues. More men kept watch over the ox-drawn wagons that lumbered behind, laden with spoils. Those were Germans, a few legionary veterans officering backwoodsmen armed with spears, axes, and long swords. It was plain to see that Claudius Civilis—Burhmund the Batavian—had limited faith in his Celtic associates.

He frowned. He was a big man, blunt-featured, his left eye blind and milky from an infection in the past, the right coldly blue. Since disavowing Rome he had let his beard grow, brown shot with white, and had his hair, also unclipped, dyed red in barbarian wise. But ring mail rustled about his body, a Roman helmet shone on his head, and at his hip hung a legionary blade meant for stabbing, not hewing.

“It would take the whole day to speak of Wael-Edh—Veleda,” he said. “Nor am I sure it would be lucky. That’s a strange goddess she serves.”

“Wael-Edh!” whispered in Everard’s hearing. “Her proper name, then. Latin speakers would naturally change it a little—” The three men were using the language of the Romans, the one they had in common.

Startled in his tension, Everard involuntarily glanced up. He saw only cloud cover. Above it, Janne Floris hovered on a timecycle. A woman could not very well have ridden into the rebel camp. Though he could have explained her presence away, the risk of trouble was idiotic to assume, on a mission dicey enough. Besides, she was most useful where she was. Her instruments pierced the deck, ranged widely, magnified or amplified when she desired. Through the electronics in his ornamental-looking headband, she saw and heard what he did, while bone conduction brought her words to him. Should he get into serious difficulties, she might be able to rescue him. That depended on whether she could do it without creating a sensation. No telling how these people would react—even the most sophisticated Roman believed in omens, if nothing else—and the object of the game was to preserve history. If necessary, you let your partner die.

“Anyhow,” Burhmund went on, obviously anxious to dismiss the subject, “her fierceness is lessening. Perhaps the goddess herself wants an end to the war. What gain in it, after we’ve won what we began it for?” His sigh gusted in to the wind. “I too, I’ve had my fill of strife.”

Classicus bit his lip. He was a short man, which may have fueled the ambition that blazed in him, though an aquiline countenance betokened the royal descent he claimed. In Roman service he had commanded the Treverian cavalry, and it was in the city of that Gallic tribe, Trier to be, that he and others first conspired to take advantage of the German uprising. “We have dominion to win,” he snapped, “greatness, wealth, glory.”

“Well, I’m a man of peace myself,” Everard said on impulse. If he could not stop what was to happen this day, he must at least, in so small and futile a way, protest it.

He sensed skepticism in the looks upon him. He’d better fend it off. He, a pacifist? His persona was that of a Goth, come from lands that would one day be Poland, where his tribe still dwelt. Everard Amalaric’s son was among its king’s—its war chief’s—numerous progeny, thus of a social standing that entitled him to speak freely to Burhmund. Born too late for any inheritance worth mentioning, he went into the amber trade, personally conducting the costly ware down to the Adriatic, which was where he acquired his accented Latin. Eventually he quit and struck off westward because he felt adventurous and had heard rumors of fortunes to be made in these parts. Also, he hinted, some trouble at home needed a few years to cool down.

It was an unusual but not unbelievable story. A large and formidable man, who carried little worth robbing, might well travel by himself without ever being assaulted. Indeed, he would be welcome most places, a break in monotony, a bearer of news and tales and songs. Claudius Civilis had been glad to receive Everard when the wanderer arrived. Whether or not Everard had anything helpful to tell, he offered a bit of distraction from the long campaigning.

But it was not believable that he had never fought, or that he lost any sleep after having cut a human being apart. Before he should be suspected as a spy, the Patrolman said fast, “Oh, I’ve had my share of battles, and single combats too. Whoever calls me coward will feed the ravens before nightfall.” He paused. I’ve a notion I can appeal to something in Burhmund, make him open up to me a little. We need an idea of how he, the key man in all this, thinks, if we’re to discover how it is that the time stream forks—and which is the right course, which the wrong one, for us and our world. “But I’m sensible. When you can do it, trade is better than war.”

“You will find rich commerce among us in future,” Classicus declared. “The Empire of Gaul—” Pensively: “Why not? Bring the amber straight west, overland as well as by sea. . . . I will think about that when I have time.”

“Hold,” Burhmund interrupted. “I’ve a task.” He put heels to horse and trotted off.

Classicus’s regard followed him warily. The Batavian rode to the line of surrendered troops. The tail of the sad procession was just passing by. He drew alongside a man, almost the only one, who walked erect and proudly. Ignoring practicality, the man had wrapped a toga, clean and pipe-clayed, around his starveling frame. Burhmund leaned over and spoke to him.

“What’s gotten into his head?” Classicus muttered. Immediately he turned his own and glowered at Everard. He must have remembered the newcomer would overhear. Friction between allies should not be displayed to outsiders.

I’ve got to divert him, or he may well order me begone, the Patrolman considered. Aloud: “The Empire of Gaul, did you say? Do you mean that part of the Roman Empire?”

He foreknew the answer. “It is the independent nation of all the Gallic peoples. I have proclaimed it. I am its emperor.”

Everard acted duly impressed. “I beg your pardon, sir! I hadn’t heard, being so lately arrived.”

Classicus smiled sardonically. There was more to him than vainglory. “The empire itself is very lately founded. It will be a while before I reign from a throne instead of a saddle.”

Everard drew him out. That was easy. Uncouth and uninfluential, this Goth was nevertheless somebody to talk to and, after all, an impressive figure of a man, who had seen a lot, whose interest therefore held a subtly unique flattery.

Classicus’s dream was fascinating in detail, and by no means insane. He would detach Gaul from Rome. That would cut off Britain. Thinly garrisoned, its natives restive and resentful, the island should presently fall to him. Everard knew Classicus grossly underestimated Roman strength and determination. It was a natural mistake. He could not tell that the civil wars were over and Vespasian would henceforward rule competently, unchallenged.

“But we require allies,” he admitted. “Civilis shows signs of wavering—” He clipped his mouth shut, again realizing he had said too much. “What are your intentions, Everard?” he demanded.

“I am only rambling around, sir,” the Patrolman assured him. Get the tone right, neither humble nor arrogant. “You honor me by sharing your plans. The trade prospects—”

Classicus made a dismissive gesture and looked away. Hardness settled on his face. He’s thinking, he’s reaching a decision that he may have been brooding on. I can guess what. Chill went along Everard’s backbone.

Burhmund had completed his brief discussion with the Roman. He issued an order to a guard, who accompanied the prisoner from the train toward the crude wattle—and-daub shelters the Germans had made for themselves during the siege. Meanwhile Burhmund rode over to a score of bully boys who sat mounted ten or fifteen yards off, his household troops. He addressed the smallest and slenderest of them. The lad nodded obedience and hurried toward the abandoned encampment himself, overtaking the Roman and escort. Some Germans were there yet, to keep an eye on the civilians left in the fortress. They had extra horses, supplies, and equipment he could claim.

Burhmund returned to his companions. “What was that about?” Classicus asked sharply.

“A legate of theirs, as I thought he must be,” Burhmund said. “I had resolved I would send one such to Veleda. Guthlaf goes ahead, my fastest rider, to let her know.”

“Why?”

“I have heard grumbles among my men. I know folk at home feel the same. We have had our victories, but we have suffered our defeats as well, and the war drags on. At Ascibergium—I will be honest—we lost the flower of our army, and I suffered injuries that kept me days disabled. Fresh soldiers have been reaching the enemy. Men say it’s high time we gave the gods a blood-feast, and here is this herd of foes dropped into our hands. We should slay them, wreck their gear, offer everything to the gods. Then we shall overcome.”

Everard heard a gasp from high above.

“If it will satisfy your followers, you can.” Classicus sounded more eager than cool, though the Romans had weaned the Gauls away from human sacrifice.

Burhmund cast him a steely one-eyed stare. “What? Those defenders surrendered to you, they gave you their oath.” It was clear he had disliked that idea and had gone along with it only because he must.

Classicus shrugged. “They’ll be worthless till we’ve fed them up, and afterward unreliable. Kill them if you wish.”

Burhmund stiffened. “I do not wish. And it would provoke the Romans further. Unwise.” He hesitated. “However, best we make a gesture. I am sending Veleda that dignitary. She can choose what to do with him, and persuade the people it’s the right thing.”

“As you will. Now, for my part, I have business of my own. Farewell.” Classicus clucked to his horse and cantered southward. Rapidly he passed the wagons and prisoners, dwindled in sight, disappeared where the road entered a thick stand of forest.

Yonder, Everard knew, most of the Germans were camped. Some had recently come in Burhmund’s train, some had lain outside Castra Vetera for months and were sick of huts grown filthy. Though still thinly leaved, the woods provided windbreak; they were clean and alive, like the woods of home; the wind in their treetops spoke with the voices of the darkling gods. Everard suppressed a shudder.

Burhmund squinted after his retreating confederate. “I wonder what,” he said in his native tongue. “Hm.” It could not have been a conscious idea, just a vague hunch, that made him wheel about, ride after the man in the toga and his keeper, gesture at his bodyguards. They hurried to meet him. Everard ventured to join them.

Guthlaf the courier emerged from among the huts, riding a fresh pony and leading three remounts. He trotted to the river and boarded a waiting ferry. It shoved off.

Approaching the legate, Everard got a good look at him. From his appearance, swarthily handsome despite the haggardness, he was of Italian birth. He had stopped upon command and waited with antique impassivity for whatever might befall him.

“I want to take care of this at once, lest something go awry,” Burhmund said. To the Gaul, in Latin: “Go back to your duty.” To a pair of his warriors: “You, Saeferth, Hnaef, I want you to bring this fellow to Wael-Edh among the Bructeri. Guthlaf’s barely gone, carrying word of it, but that’s as well. You’ll have to fare much easier lest you kill the Roman, the shape he’s in.” Half kindly, he told the captive in Latin: “You are going to a holy woman. I think you will be well treated if you behave yourself.”

Awe upon them, the designated warriors hustled their charge toward the former encampment to prepare for the journey. Floris’s voice trembled in Everard’s head. “Ach, nie, de arme—That must be Munius Lupercus. You know what will happen to him.”

The Patrolman subvocalized his answer. “I know what will happen all around.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

“Not a God damned thing. This is written. Hang tough, Janne.”

“You look grim, Everard,” said Burhmund in his Germanic tongue.

“I am . . . weary,” Everard replied. Knowledge of the language had been instilled in him before he left the twentieth century (as well as Gothic, just in case). It was akin to what he had used in Britain some four centuries futureward, when the descendants of tribesmen on these North Sea shores were invading it.

“I too,” Burhmund murmured. For an instant he seemed oddly, endearingly vulnerable. “We’ve both been long on the trail, eh? Let us rest while we may.”

“Your path has been harder than mine, I think,” Everard said.

“Well, a man fares easiest alone. And earth clings to the boots when blood has made it muddy.”

A thrill drove his forebodings from Everard. This was what he’d hoped for, had been working toward since he arrived here two days ago. In many ways the Germans were childlike, unreserved, devoid of any concept of privacy. More than Julius Classicus, who simply displayed his ambitions, Claudius Civilis—Burhmund—yearned to speak into a sympathetic ear, unburden himself to somebody who laid no claims on him.

“Listen close, Janne,” Everard transmitted to Floris. “Tell me whatever questions occur to you.” In their short but intense time of ready making, he had found she was quick to understand people. Between them they might gain insight, a feel for what was going on and what it could lead to.

“I will,” she agreed jaggedly, “but I had better also keep watch on Classicus.”

“You fought for Rome since you were a youth, did you not?” Everard prompted in Germanic.

Burhmund barked a laugh. “Aye, and marched, drilled, built roads, barracked, squabbled, diced, whored, got drunk, got sick, yawned through endless dullness—the soldier’s life.”

“Yet I’ve heard you have a wife, children, landholdings.”

Burhmund nodded. “It wasn’t all pack and hike. For me and my close kinsmen, less than for the ruck of the men. We were of the kingly house, you see. Rome wanted us as much for keeping our folk quiet as for soldiering. So we made officer fast, and often got long furloughs when our units were stationed in Lower Germany. Which they were, mostly, till the troubles began. We’d go home on leave, take part in the folkmoots, speak well of Rome, besides seeing our families.” He spat. “What thanks our services gained us!”

Recollection flowed from him. The exactions of Nero’s ministers had kindled increasing anger among the tributaries, riots broke out, tax collectors and other plague dogs got killed. Civilis and a brother of his were arrested on charges of conspiracy. To Everard Burhmund said that they had merely protested, albeit in strong words. The brother was beheaded. Civilis went in chains to Rome for further interrogation, no doubt under torture, probably to be followed by crucifixion. The overthrow of Nero stalled proceedings. Galba pardoned Civilis, among various goodwill gestures, and sent him back to his duties.

Very soon Otho in turn cast Galba down, while the armies in Germany hailed Vitellius emperor and the armies in Egypt elevated Vespasian. Civilis’s debt to Galba almost got him condemned again, but that was forgotten when the Fourteenth Legion was withdrawn from Lingonian territory, taking along the auxiliaries he commanded.

Seeking to secure Gaul, Vitellius entered Treverian lands. His soldiers looted and murdered in Divodurum, Metz to be. (That helped account for the instant popular support Classicus obtained when he rebelled.) A brawl between the Batavi and the regulars could have become catastrophic but was quelled in time. Civilis took the lead in bringing matters under control. With Fabius Valens for their general, the troops marched south to aid Vitellius against Otho. Along the way Valens took large bribes from communities to keep his army from sacking them.

When he ordered the Batavi to Narbonensis, southern Gaul, to relieve beleaguered forces there, his legionaries mutinied. They cried that this would deprive them of their bravest men. The disagreement was composed and the Batavi went on as before. After he crossed the Alps and word came of another defeat for their side, at Placentia, the soldiers mutinied again, this time at his inaction. They wanted to go help.

Burhmund chuckled, deep in his throat. “He obliged us.”

The two warriors rode from the huts. The Roman was between them, clad for travel. Remounts loaded with food and gear came behind. They went down to the Rhine. The ferry was back. They boarded.

“The Othonianists tried to stop us at the Po,” Burhmund said. “That was when Valens found the legionaries had been right to keep us Germans. We swam across and cut a foothold, which we kept till the rest could follow. Once we’d forced the river, the enemy broke and fled. Great was the slaughter at Bedriacum. Shortly afterward, Otho killed himself.” He grimaced. “But Vitellius had no stronger rein on his troops. They ran wild through Italy. I saw some of that. It was ugly. This wasn’t an enemy land they’d taken, it was the land they were supposed to defend. Wasn’t it?”

That might have been part of the reason why the Fourteenth grew restless and snarly. A riot between the regulars and the auxiliaries nearly became a pitched battle. Civilis was among the officers who got things quieted. The new Emperor Vitellius ordered the legionaries to Britain and attached the Batavi to his palace troops. “But that wasn’t good either. He had no grasp of how to handle men. Mine got slack, drank on duty, fought in barracks. At last he returned us to Germany. He could do naught else, unless he wanted blood spilled, which could have included his precious own. We were sick of him.”

The ferry, a broad-beamed scow with oars, had crossed the stream. The travelers debarked and vanished into the forest.

“Vespasian held Africa and Asia,” Burhmund went on. “His general Primus now landed in Italy and wrote to me. Aye, by then I had that much of a name.”

Burhmund sent word around to his widespread connections. A feckless Roman legate agreed. Men went to hold the passes of the Alps; no Vitellianist Gauls or Germans would cross northward, while the Italians and Iberians had plenty to engage their attention where they were. Burhmund called an assembly of his tribe. Vitellius’s conscription had been the last outrage they would take. They clashed blade on shield and shouted.

Already the neighboring Canninefates and Frisii knew what was afoot. Their folkmoots yelled for men to rally to the cause. A Tungrian cohort left its base and joined. German auxiliaries, bound south for Vitellius, heard the news and defected.

Two legions moved against Burhmund. He smashed them and drove the remnants into Castra Vetera. Crossing the Rhine, he won a clash near Bonna. His couriers urged the defenders of Old Camp to come forth on behalf of Vespasian. They refused. That was when he proclaimed secession, open war for the sake of freedom.

The Bructeri, Tencteri, and Chamavi entered his league. He dispatched couriers far and wide through Germany, Adventurers flocked from the wilds to his banners. Wael-Edh foretold the doom of Rome.

“And then the Gauls,” Burhmund said, “those of them Classicus and his friends could raise. Just three tribes thus far—What’s the matter?”

Everard had started at a scream that he alone heard. “Nothing,” he said. “I thought I spied a movement, but it was nothing. Weariness does that, you know.”

“They are killing them in the forest,” Floris’s voice choked. “It is ghastly. Oh, why did we have to come to this day?”

“You remember why,” he told her. “Don’t watch it.”

They could not take years to feel out the whole truth. The Patrol could ill spare that much lifespan of theirs. Moreover, this segment of space-time was unstable; the less they from the future moved about in it, the better. Everard had decided to start with a visit to Civilis several months downtime from the split in events. Preliminary scouting suggested the Batavian would be most easily accessible when he accepted the surrender of Castra Vetera; and the occasion would add a chance to meet Classicus. Everard and Floris had hoped to get sufficient information and depart before that happened which Tacitus related.

“Did Classicus instigate it?” he asked.

“I can’t be sure,” Floris said around a sob. He didn’t blame her. He would have hated witnessing the massacre himself, and he was case-hardened. “He is among the Germans, yes, but the trees interfere with seeing and the wind with sound pickup. Does he speak their language?”

“Little if any, as far as I know, but some among them know Latin—”

“Your soul is elsewhere, Everard,” Burhmund said.

“I do feel a . . . foreboding,” the Patrolman replied. Might as well give him a hint I’ve got a bit of foresight, a touch of elflore. It could come in handy later.

Burhmund’s visage was stark. “I too, though for reasons more earthly. Best I gather my trusty men. Hold aside, Everard. Your sword is keen, yes, but you’ve not marched with the legions, and I think I’ll have need of tight discipline.” The last word was Latin.

The truth reached them, borne by a horseman a-gallop out of the woods. In a suddenly rising, roaring mob, the Germans had fallen on the prisoners. The few Gallic guards scrambled out of the way. The Germans were butchering every unarmed man and smashing the treasures. They would give the gods their hecatomb.

Everard suspected Classicus had egged them on to it. That would have been simple. Classicus wanted them committed beyond the possibility of making a separate peace. No doubt Burhmund shared the suspicion, as furious as the Batavian was. But what could he do about it?

He could not even stop his barbarians when they swarmed kill-crazy from the woods into Old Camp. Fire leaped up behind the walls. Shrieks mingled with the stench of burning human flesh.

Burhmund wasn’t actually horrified. This kind of thing was common in his world. What maddened him was the disobedience and the underhandedness that had brought it on.

“I will hale them to a weaponmoot,” he growled. “I will flay them with shame. That they may know I mean it, in their sight I will cut this hair of mine, Roman-short again, and wash the dye from it. As for plighting faith to Classicus and his empire—if he mislikes what I’ll have to say about that, let him dare take arms against me.”

“I think best I go,” Everard said. “I would only be underfoot here. Maybe we will meet anew.”

When, in the unhappy days ahead of you?

5

Wind rushed bitter, driving low clouds like smoke before it. Spatters of rain flew slantwise past unrestful boughs. Hoofs splashed puddles in the trail where horses plodded, heads drooping. Saeferth rode first; Hnaef came after, leading the laden relief animals. Between them, hunched in a sodden cloak, was the Roman. With hand-signs and the like when they stopped to eat or rest, the Batavi had learned his name was Lupercus.

From around a bend appeared a group of five, surely Bructeri, for the wayfarers had reached that land. They were, however, still in the belt where nobody lived, which German tribes liked to keep around themselves. He at the forefront was gaunt as a ferret, black as a crow save where the years had strewn whiteness over hair and beard. His right hand gripped a spear. “Hold!” he cried.

Saeferth reined in. “We come peacefully, sent by our lord Burhmund to the wise-woman Wael-Edh,” he said.

The dark man nodded. “We have had word of this.”

“That can be but a short while ago, for we left well-nigh on the heels of his messenger, though we must needs fare slower.”

“Aye. Now the time has come to act swiftly. I am Heidhin, Viduhada’s son, Wael-Edh’s foremost man.”

“I recall you,” Hnaef said, “from when my lord visited her last year. What would you of us?”

“The man you bring,” Heidhin told them. “He is the one Burhmund gives to Wael-Edh, is he not?”

“Yes.”

Aware that they talked about him, Lupercus tightened. His glance went from face to face while the guttural words rolled around his head.

“She in her turn gives him to the gods,” Heidhin said. “I have watched for you that I may do the deed.”

“What, not in your halidom, with a feast to follow?” wondered Saeferth.

“I told you there is need of haste. Several great men among us would liefer keep him in hopes of ransom, did they know. We cannot afford to aggrieve them. Yet the gods are wrathful. Look about you.” Heidhin swept his spear athwart the drenched and moaning forest.

Saeferth and Hnaef could not well gainsay him. The Bructeri outnumbered them. Besides, everybody knew how he had been with the wise-woman since leaving their faraway birthland. “Witness, all, that we fully meant to seek her, and are taking your word that this is her will instead,” Saeferth spoke.

Hnaef scowled. “Let’s get it finished,” he said.

They dismounted, as did the others, and beckoned Lupercus to do likewise. He required help, though that was because he remained weak and shaky from starvation. When they bound his wrists behind him and Heidhin uncoiled a rope with a noose, his eyes widened and he drew one sharp breath. Thereafter he steadied himself on his feet and murmured what might be something to his own gods.

Heidhin looked heavenward. “Father Woen, warrior Tiw, Donar of the thunder, hear me,” he said slowly and weightily. “Know this offering for what it is, the gift of Nerha to you. Know she was never your foe nor any thief of your honor. If men have lately given you less than erstwhile, what she received was ever on behalf of all the gods. Stand again at her side, mighty ones, and bestow on us victory!”

Saefeth and Hnaef grasped Lupercus’s arms. Heidhin trod forward to him. With the spearpoint he marked on the Roman’s brow the sign of the hammer; on his breast, slashing the tunic, he cut a fylfot. Blood welled shoutingly red into the gray air. Lupercus kept silent. They led him to the ash tree Heidhin chose, tossed the rope over a branch, laid the noose about his neck. “Oh, Julia,” he called softly. Two of Heidhin’s men hauled him aloft while the rest beat sword on shield and howled. He kicked the wind until Heidhin drove the spear into him, up the belly to the heart.

When the rest had been done that should be, Heidhin said to Saeferth and Hanaef, “Come along. I will guest you at my hall ere you go back to lord Burhmund.”

“What shall we tell him about this?” asked Hnaef.

“The truth,” answered Heidhin. “Tell the whole host. At last the gods have gotten their rightful share as of old. Now they ought wholeheartedly to fight for us.”

The Germans rode off. A raven flapped around the dead man, perched on his shoulder, pecked and swallowed. Another came, and another, and another. Their cries rang hoarse through the wind that rocked him to and fro.

6

Everard allowed Floris two days at home for rest and recovery. She was no weak sister, but she was a civilized person with a conscience, who had been witness to horror. Luckily, she hadn’t known any of the victims; there should be no survivor’s guilt to overcome. “Ask for psychotech help if the nightmares won’t go away,” he suggested. “Of course, we also have to think things over, in the light of what we’ve now directly observed, and figure out a program for ourselves.”

Toughened though he was, he too welcomed a respite in which to come to terms with the sights and sounds and smells of Old Camp. He walked the Amsterdam streets for hours on end, bathing in the decency of the twentieth-century Netherlands. Otherwise he was at the Patrol office retrieving data files—history, anthropology, political and physical geography, everything available—and having the most essential-looking items imprinted.

His advance preparation had been on the cursory side. Not that he now acquired an encyclopedic knowledge. It wasn’t available. Germanic prehistory drew few investigators; they scattered across a vast stretch of miles and centuries. So much else appeared to be so much more interesting and important. Hard information was sparse. Nobody besides him and Floris had personally researched Civilis. The rebellion hadn’t seemed worth the considerable hazards of fieldwork, when nothing came of it but a change for the better in Roman treatment of a few obscure people.

And maybe that is all, Everard thought. Maybe those variations in text have a safe origin that the Patrol detectives missed, and we’re chasing shadows. Certainly we have no evidence of anybody trying to monkey with events. Well, whatever the answer, we’ve got to find it.

On the third day he phoned Floris from his hotel and proposed dinner, as they had had on their first meeting. “We’ll relax, talk small talk, touch on our mission lightly if at all. Tomorrow we’ll lay our plans. Okay?” At his request, she named the restaurant and met him there.

The Ambrosia dealt in Surinam-Caribbean food. On Stadthouderskade, in a quiet neighborhood near the Museumplein, it was intimate, right on a canal. Besides the pretty waitress, the black cook came forth to discuss their meal with them beforehand in fluent English. The wine was just right, too. Maybe the sense of evanescence, this warmth and light and savor no more than a moment in an unbounded darkness, something that could come to never having been, gave depth to pleasure.

“I will walk back,” said Floris at the end. “The evening is so beautiful.” Her place was a mile or two distant.

“I’ll see you to your door, if I may,” Everard replied gladly.

She smiled. Her hair shone against the dusk in the windows like remembered sunlight. “Thank you. I hoped.”

They went out into mild air. It smelled of spring, for rain had cleansed it earlier and traffic was rather thin, mostly a background pulsing. A canal boat chugged by, wake a-glisten. “Thank you,” she repeated. “That was delightful. Exactly what would cheer me up.”

“Well, good.” He took tobacco pouch from pocket and started filling his pipe. “Though I’m sure you’d have rebounded quite fast in any case.”

They turned from the water and passed between old facades. “Yes, I have met terrible things before,” she assented. The mood at dinner, which they had both carefully maintained carefree, was slipping off, though her tone stayed level and her expression calm. “Not violence on that scale, no, but men dead or wounded after fights, and mortal sickness, and—many cruel fates.”

Everard nodded. “Yeah, this era of ours has seen all hell let out for noon, but scarcely more than others. The main difference is, nowadays they imagine it could be better.”

Floris sighed. “At first it was romantic, the living past, but then—”

“Well, you did pick a mighty rough milieu. At that, though, the real guignol was in Rome.”

She gave him a close look. “I cannot believe you harbor any illusions about the barbarians being nature’s noblemen. I soon lost mine. They were every bit as ruthless. They were simply less efficient.”

Everard struck match to bowl. “Why did you choose them for your specialty, if I may ask? Sure, somebody had to do the job, but with your capabilities you could have taken your pick of a lot of societies.”

She smiled. “They tried to persuade me of that, after I graduated from the Academy. One agent spent hours telling me how I would like his Duchy of Brabant. He was sweet. But I was stubborn.”

“How come?”

“The more I think back, the less clear to me my motives are. It seemed at the time that—Yes, if you don’t mind, I would like to tell you.”

He held his arm toward her. She took it. Her stride easily matched his and was more supple. His free hand cradled the little hearth of his pipe. “Please do,” he said. “I haven’t pried into your records beyond the indispensable minimum, but I can’t help feeling curious. They wouldn’t contain the true explanation anyway.”

“I suppose it goes back to my parents.” She was gazing beyond them both, the tiniest line between her brows. Her voice flowed almost dreamily. “I am their only child, born in 1950.” And by now a good deal older, along your world line, than the calendar shows, he knew. “My father grew up in what was the Dutch East Indies. Do you recollect, we Dutch founded Jakarta, and our name for it was Batavia? He was young when first the Nazi Germans invaded the Netherlands, then later the Japanese overran Southeast Asia. He fought them as a sailor in what navy we had left. My mother, at home, a schoolgirl, was involved with the resistance, the underground press.”

“Proud people,” Everard murmured.

“My parents met and married after the war, settled in Amsterdam. They are still alive, retired, he from his business, she from teaching history, Dutch history.” Yes, he thought, you return from each expedition to the day you left, because you don’t want to miss time you can see them in before they die, never knowing what you truly do. Bad enough that they’re disappointed of grandchildren. “They did not boast about their parts in the war. But I was . . . was bound? . . . yes, bound to live always with the knowledge of it, and with the whole past of my country. Patriotism? Call it what you like. These are my folk. What made them what they are? What seed, what roots? The origins fascinated me, and at the university I studied to be an archaeologist.”

Everard knew that already, as well as the fact that she had been an athlete at close to championship standards and had traveled off the tourist routes into a couple of difficult, somewhat dangerous places. It caught the attention of a Patrol recruiter, who got her to take the tests and, when she passed, revealed their meaning. His induction had gone similarly.

“Just the same,” he said, “you elected a culture where a woman is badly hampered.”

She responded a little sharply. “You must at least have seen a résumé showing that I managed. You must know about Patrol disguises.”

“Sorry. No offense. They’re fine for short visits.” It wasn’t far uptime from this year that things like whiskers and vocal registers could be faked to near perfection. Coarse, baggy fabrics, suitably padded, hid curves. Hands might be a giveaway, but hers were big for a woman and if she claimed youthfulness, their shape and lack of hair need not excite comment. “But—” Occasions could too readily arise when clothes should come off among companions, as when bathing. Or something like a fight could, perhaps brought on by a countenance that remained inescapably muliebral-effeminate, barbarians would think. No matter how well trained, a woman, in a situation where high-tech weapons were forbidden, lacked the upper-body musculature and surge strength of a man.

“Limited uses,” she admitted. “It was often frustrating. I actually considered—” She broke off.

“Changing your sex?” he inquired gently after half a minute.

Her nod was stiff.

“It needn’t have been permanent, you know.” Future operations didn’t involve surgery or hormone shots; they took place at the molecular level, rebuilding the organism from the DNA up. “Of course, it’s a pretty big deal. You’d only do it for a mission years long, at a minimum.”

Her glance challenged him. “Would you?”

“Hell, no!” he exclaimed. Thereupon he thought, Was that too strong a reaction? Intolerant? “But remember, I was born in Middle America, 1924.”

Floris laughed and squeezed his arm. “I doubted my mind, my basic personality, could change. Male, I would be a complete homosexual. In that society, a worse handicap than being a woman. Which, furthermore, I like.”

He grinned. “That’s been obvious right along.”

Down, boy. No personal involvement on the job. It could prove lethal. Intellectually, I wish she were a man.

Her feeling must have corresponded, for she shied off as well and they went on a while without speaking. It was a companionable silence, though. They were crossing the park, greenness fragrant around them, lamplight falling through leafage to dapple the path, when he broke it:

“In spite of this, I gather, you’ve carried out a major project. I didn’t pull the file on it, expecting you’d rather tell me yourself, which would be better.” He had hinted a time or two, but she had avoided, or evaded, the topic. That wasn’t hard, when they had such a heap of material to cover.

He heard and saw her drew breath. “Yes, I must,” she agreed. “You need to know what experience I have. A long story, but I could make a start here.” She hesitated. “I have come to feel more easy with you. At first I was terrified. I, to work with an Unattached agent?”

“You hid it well,” he drawled around a puff on his pipe.

“One learns in the field to hide emotions, no? But tonight I can talk freely. You are a, a comfortable kind of man.”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

“I lived fifteen years with the Frisii,” she told him.

He caught the pipe before it hit the pavement. “Huh?”

“From A.D. 22 to 37,” she continued earnestly. “The Patrol wanted knowledge, more than a sketch, of life at the far western end of the Germanic range, in the period when Roman influence was replacing Celtic. Specifically, they were concerned about the upheavals among the tribes that followed the murder of Arminius. The consequences were potentially large.”

“But nothing alarming turned up, eh? Whereas Civilis, whom the Patrol figured it could safely ignore—Well, it’s staffed by fallible humans. And, of course, a detailed report on a typical society is valuable in a lot of different contexts. Go on, please.”

“Colleagues helped me establish myself. My persona was a young woman of the Chasuarii, widowed when the Cherusci attacked. She fled to Frisian territory with some possessions and a pair of men who had served her husband and stayed faithful to her. The headman of the village we found received us generously. I did bring in gold as well as news; and to them, hospitality was sacred.”

Didn’t hurt that you were, are, almighty attractive.

“Before long, I married a younger son of his,” Floris said, resolutely matter-of-fact. “My ‘servants’ excused themselves to go on a ‘venture’ and were never heard of again. Everybody supposed they had come to grief. How many ways there were to perish!”

“And?” Everard watched her profile. Vermeer might have summoned it from the surrounding twilight, under its cap of gold.

“Those were hard years. I was often homesick, sometimes in despair. But then I would think how I was learning, discovering, exploring a whole universe of ways and beliefs, knowledge, skills, people. I became very fond of the people. They were good-hearted in their rough way—within the tribe, that is—and my Garulf and I . . . we grew close. I bore him two children, and secretly made sure they would live. He hoped for more, naturally, but that was another thing I saw to, and it was common for a woman to go barren.” Her mouth bent ruefully upward. “He had his others by a farmhand girl. She and I got along, she deferred to me and—Never mind. It was a normal, accepted thing, no slur on me, and . . . I knew that someday I would be gone.”

“How did that happen?” Everard asked low.

Her voice flattened. “Garulf died. He was hunting aurochs, and a bull gored him. I grieved, but it did simplify matters for me. I should have left well before, disappeared like my attendants, but he and our children—boys in their early teens, which meant they were nearly men. Garulf’s brothers would see to their welfare.”

Everard nodded. His studies had taught him that the ancient Germans hallowed the relationship between uncle and nephew. Among the tragedies Burhmund, Civilis, endured was a break with a sister’s son, who fought and died in the Roman army.

“Nevertheless it hurt to leave them,” Floris ended. “I said I was going away for a while to mourn alone, and let them wonder ever afterward what became of me.”

And you wonder what became of them, and no doubt always shall, Everard thought. Unless, scanning from afar, you’ve followed their lives till their deaths. But I expect you’re wiser than that. So much for the adventure and glamour of service in the Time Patrol.

Floris gulped. Swallowing a few tears? Forlorn gaiety followed. “You can imagine what a cosmetic rejuvenation I needed when I returned! And hot baths, electric lights, books, shows, airplanes, everything!”

“Not least, being equal again,” Everard added.

“Yes, yes. Women had a high standing, they were more free than they would be later until the nineteenth century, but still—oh, yes.”

“It seems Veleda was out—and-out dominant.”

“That was different. She spoke for the gods, I think.”

We need to make sure.

“The mission was terminated several years ago on my personal world line,” Floris said. “My subsequent efforts have been less ambitious. Until now.”

Everard bit hard on his pipestem. “M-m, we do have that problem of sex. I don’t want to fool around with disguises, except maybe briefly. Too many limitations.”

She halted. Perforce he did. They were close to a lamp. It gave her eyes a cat-gleam. She raised her voice. “I will not merely sit in the sky and watch you, Agent Everard. I will not.”

A bicyclist sibilated past, threw them a look, continued on his way.

“It’d be useful, having you with me on the ground,” Everard granted. “Not constantly. You must agree it’s often best if one partner stays in reserve. But when we get down to the real Sherlock Holmes work, then you, with your experience—The question is, how can we?”

Turning from angry to eager, she pressed her advantage. “I will be your wife. Or your concubine or handmaiden or whatever suits the circumstances. It is not unheard of among the Germani, that a woman accompanies a man when he travels.”

Damnation! Do my ears actually feel hot? “We dare not complicate matters for ourselves.”

Her gaze caught his and held fast. “I am not worried about that, sir. You are a professional and a gentleman.”

“Well, thanks,” he said, relieved. “I guess I can mind my manners.”

If you mind yours!

7

Suddenly springtime billowed over the land. Warmth and lengthening days lured forth leaves. Grass glowed. The sky filled with wings and clamor. Lambs, calves, foals rollicked through meadows. Folk came from the gloom of houses, the smoke and stink of winter; they blinked in the brightness, breathed the sweetness, and set to work readying for summer.

Yet they were hungry after last year’s niggard yields. Many a man was at war beyond the Rhine, and already few of them would ever come back. Edh and Heidhin still bore frost in their hearts.

They walked about her grounds, heedless of light or breeze. Workers in her fields saw how she went and dared not hail or come question her. Though the woods westward shone beneath the sun, the holy grove in the offing eastward seemed dark, as if her tower had cast its shadows that far.

“I am wrathful with you,” she said. “Oh, I should send you from me forever.”

“Edh—” His voice had gone harsh. Knuckles whitened above his spearshaft. “I did what I must needs do. It was clear you would have spared that Roman. The Anses had enough of a grudge against us.”

“So fools have babbled.”

“Then most of the tribe are fools. Edh, I go among them as you cannot, for I am a man, and only a man, not the chosen of a goddess. Folk tell me what they would quail to say straight to you.” Heidhin paced on while he gathered his words together. “Nerha has been taking too much of what formerly went to the sky gods. I mind well what you and I owe her, but it is otherwise for the Bructeri, and even we twain owe much to the Anses also. If we do not make our peace with them, they will withdraw victory from us. I have read this in the stars, the weather, the flight of ravens, the bones I cast. And what if I am mistaken? The fear itself is real in men’s hearts. They will begin to hang back in battle, and the foe will break them.

“Now I, in your name, have given the Anses a man, no mere thrall but a chieftain. Let this news go abroad, and see how hope comes to fresh birth among the warriors!”

Edh’s look struck at him like a sword. “Ha, do you think your one little slaying will reck aught to them? Know, while you were gone, another messenger from Burhmund found me. His men killed everyone and destroyed everything at Castra Vetera. They glutted their gods.”

The spear jerked in Heidhin’s grip before he locked his face shut. A time went by. At last he said slowly, “How could I foresee that? It is well.”

“It is not. Burhmund was enraged. He knows it is bound to stiffen Roman will. And now you, you have robbed me of a captive who might have been a go-between for us.”

Heidhin clenched his jaws. “I could not have known,” he muttered. “And what use would one man be, anyhow?”

“You have robbed me of yourself, too, it seems,” Edh went on bleakly. “I had thought you would go to Colonia for me.”

Surprised, he twisted his neck around to stare at her. The high cheekbones, long straight nose, full mouth stayed forward-aimed, away from him. “Colonia?”

“That was in Burhmund’s message too. From Castra Vetera he is going on to Colonia Agrippinensis. He thinks they may yield. But once they hear of the slaughter—and they will ere he reaches them—why should they? Why not fight on, in hopes of relief, when they have nothing to lose? Burhmund wants me to lay my curse, the withering wrath of Nerha, on whoever breaks the terms of surrender.”

His wonted shrewdness returned to Heidhin and calmed him. “Hm, so.” His free hand stroked his beard. “Yes, that may well sway them in Colonia. They must know of you. The Ubii are Germans, for all they call themselves Roman. If your avouching was spoken aloud to Burhmund’s host, near the wall where the defenders could see and hear—”

“Who shall utter it, now?”

“Yourself?”

“Hardly.”

He nodded. “No, that’s right. Best you hold aloof. Few outside the Bructeri have seen you. There is more awesomeness in a tale than in flesh and blood.”

Her laugh was wolfish. “Flesh and blood which must eat, drink, sleep, rid itself of wastes, maybe catch cold, surely grow weary.” The tone dropped. She lowered her head. “Indeed I am weary,” she whispered. “Liefest would I be alone.”

“That may well be wise,” Heidhin said. “Yes. Withdraw for a while into your tower. Make known that you are thinking, brewing witchcraft, calling the goddess to you. I will bear your word into the world.”

She straightened. “So I thought,” she snapped. “But after what you did, how can I trust you?”

“You can. I’ll swear to it”—Heidhin’s voice stumbled a bit—“if our years together are not enough.” At once he donned pride. “You understand you have no better spokesman. I am more than the first among your followers, I am a leader in my own right. Men heed me.”

She was long silent. They walked by a paddock where a bull stood, Tiw’s beast, his horns mighty beneath the sun. At last she asked: “You will give forth my words unwarped, and work in good faith to have their meaning carried out?”

He shaped his answer with skill. “It hurts that you should mistrust me, Edh.”

Then she looked at him. Her eyes thawed. “All these years-dear old friend—”

They stopped where they were, on a muddy track through the swelling grass. “I would have been more than friend to you, had you let me,” he said.

“You knew I never could. And you honored it. How can I do other than forgive you? Yes, go to Colonia for me.”

Sternness came upon him. “I will, and wherever else you may send me, serving you as best I can, if only you do not tell me to break the vow I made on the shore of the Eyn.”

“That—” Color flowed and ebbed in her face. “It was long ago.”

“To me it is as if I swore it yesterday. No peace with the Romans. War while I live, and after I am dead I will harry them on their way down hell-road.”

“Niaerdh could release you from it.”

“I could never release myself.” Like a heavily striking hammer, Heidhin bade her: “Either send me from you this day, for always, or swear that you will never ask me to make peace with Rome.”

She shook her head. “I cannot do that. If they offer us, our kinfolk, all of us, our freedom—”

He turned that over in his mind before he said unwillingly, “Well, if they do, take it of them. I daresay you would have to.”

“Niaerdh herself would want it. She is no bloodthirsty Ans.”

“Hm, aforetime you said otherwise.” Heidhin grinned. “I do not await the Romans will gladly let the western tribes and their scot to them go. But should they, then I will take me off, with whatever men will follow me, and raid them in their lands till I fall under their blades.”

“May that never be!” she cried.

He laid his hands on her shoulders. “Swear to me—bring Niaerdh to witness—that you will call for war without end until the Romans leave these lands or . . . or, at the least, I am dead. If you do this, then I can work for anything else you wish, yes, even for the sparing of what Romans we catch alive.”

“If you will have it thus.” Edh sighed. She stepped back from him. Command rang: “Come, then, let us seek the halidom, mingle our blood on the earth and our words in the air, to fasten this bond. I want you riding to Burhmund tomorrow. Time is on our heels.”

8

Once the city had been Oppidum Ubiorum, or so the Romans called it. Otherwise Germans did not build towns; but the Ubii, on the left bank of the Rhine, were under heavy Gallic influence. After Caesar’s conquest, they soon came into the Empire and, unlike most of their kinsmen, were content with this, the trade, the learning, the openings to the world outside. In the reign of Claudius the town was made a Roman colony and named for his wife. Eagerly Latinizing themselves, the Ubii changed their own name to the Agrippinenses. The city waxed. It would be Köln—Cologne, to French and English speakers—but that was far in the future.

On this day the ground below its massive Roman-built walls seethed. Smoke rose from a hundred campfires, barbarian standards reared above leather tents, pelts and blankets lay spread about where those slept who had brought no shelter along. Horses neighed and stamped. Cattle lowed, sheep bleated in the wattled pens that held them until they were butchered for the army. Men milled to and fro, wild warriors from beyond the river, Gallic rabble from this side. Quieter were the armed yeomen of Batavia and its near neighbors; disciplined were Civilis’s and Classicus’s veterans. Apart huddled the dispirited legionaries who had been marched here from Novesium. Along the way they had endured such taunts that at last a cavalry troop of theirs said to hell with it, repudiated the pledge of allegiance given the Empire of Gaul, and struck south to rejoin Rome.

A small set of tents stood by itself near the stream. No rebel ventured within yards of it unless he had cause, and then he approached most quietly. Bructerian men-at-arms kept watch at the corners, but only as an honor guard. What warded it was a sheaf of grain to which was tied several apples, atop an erected pole—from last year, dried and faded, yet emblems of Nerha.

“Whence came you?” asked Everard.

Heidhin peered at him. The answer hissed. “If you trekked hither out of the east as you say, you know. The Angrivarri remember Wael-Edh; the Langobardi do, the Lemovii, and more. Did none among them ever say aught of her to you?”

“She passed through years ago—”

“I know they remember, for we hear from them through traders, landloupers, and the fighters lately come to Burhmund.” A cloud shadow swept over the men where they sat, on a rude bench before Heidhin’s pavilion. Darkening his visage, it seemed to whet the piercing stare. Wind bore a puff of smoke, a clang of iron. “Who are you truly, Everard, and what would you here in our midst?”

This is one smart cookie, and a fanatic to boot, the Patrolman realized. Quickly: “I was about to say, it struck me how her name lives on among tribes far away, long after she passed by.”

“Hm.” Heidhin relaxed a trifle. His right hand, which had strayed close to his sword hilt, drew the black cloak more snugly against the wind. “I wonder why you trailed Burhmund, when you have no wish to go beneath his banner.”

“It is as I told you, my lord.” Heidhin didn’t rate the honorific from Everard, who had not sworn him fealty, but it didn’t hurt. And in truth Heidhin had become an important man among the Bructeri, a chieftain with lands and holdings, married into a noble family, above all the confidant and frequent spokesman of Veleda. “I called on him at Castra Vetera because I had heard of his fame and am seeking to learn how things are in these countries. On my way elsewhere I heard that the wise-woman was bound hither. I hoped to meet her, or at least see and hear her.”

Burhmund, who made Everard welcome, had explained that the sibyl sent her representative instead. The Batavian’s hospitality was perfunctory, though, as busy as he was. When he saw a chance, Everard sought Heidhin out on his own hook. A Goth was unusual enough to be received, but the conversation went awkwardly, Heidhin’s thoughts on other matters until abruptly suspicion awoke.

“She has withdrawn into her tower to be alone with the goddess,” he said. Belief burned in him.

Everard nodded. “So Burhmund told me. And I listened to your speech yesterday, at the gate of the city. My lord, let’s not plow the same soil over again. What I asked was merely—whence came you and holy Wael-Edh? Where did you begin your wanderings, and when and why?”

“We come of the Alvarings,” Heidhin said. “Belike most men in this host were unborn when we left. Why did we? The goddess called her forth.” Intensity gave way to brusqueness: “I have better work on hand than enlightening a stranger. If you will abide among us, Everard, you will hear more, and maybe you and I can talk further. Today I must bid you farewell.”

They stood up. “Thank you for your time, my lord,” the Patrolman said. “Someday I will go back to my folk. Should you or kin of yours ever seek to the Goths, that man shall have good guesting.”

Heidhin did not let the routine courtesy go by. “It may be,” he replied. “Nerha’s messengers—but first is this war to win. Fare you well.”

Everard walked through the surrounding turbulence to a pen near Civilis’s headquarters, where he claimed his horses. They were shaggy German ponies; his feet dangled just inches above ground when he mounted. But then, he was big even among these men, and they would have wondered too much about him had he lacked animals to bear him and his possessions. He rode north. Colonia Agrippinensis fell from sight behind him.

Evening light sheened golden on the river. Hills were nearly as he recalled them from his home era, but the countryside lay marred by weed-grown fields and ruined buildings where Civilis had ravaged it months before. Here and there he glimpsed bones, some human.

Desolation served his purpose. Nevertheless he waited till dark to tell Floris, “Okay, send down the truck.” He mustn’t be seen departing the road, and a vehicle capable of accommodating horses was more noticeable than a timecycle. She dispatched it by remote control, he led the beasts aboard, and in an instant overleaping of space he reached their camp. She joined him a minute later.

They could have sprung back to Amsterdam’s comforts, but it would have wasted lifespan, not in the shuttling but in the commuting to and from quarters there, the shucking and redonning of barbarian garb, perhaps most the changes back and forth of mind-set. Let them rather dwell in this archaic land, become intimate not only with its people but with its natural world. Nature—the wilderness, the mysteries of day and night, summer and winter, storm, stars, growth, death—pervaded it and the souls of the folk. You could not really understand them, feel with them, until you had yourself entered into the forest and let it enter into you.

Floris had chosen the site, a remote hilltop overlooking woodlands that reached to every horizon. None but a rare hunter ever saw it, and quite likely none had ever climbed to the bare ridge. Northern Europe was so thinly populated; a tribe numbering fifty thousand was large, and spread over a wide territory. Another planet would have been less alien to this country than was the twentieth century.

Two one-person shelters rested side by side in soft radiance, and savory odors drifted from a cook unit, technology futureward of his and her birthtime. Just the same, after he had gotten his horses settled by hers, Everard kindled firewood he had prepared earlier. They ate in musing silence, then turned off the lamp. The cook unit became another shadow, unobtrusively cleaning up. They sat down on the grass by the flames. Neither had said anything about it; they simply knew, in some blind way, that this was right for them.

A breeze wandered chilly. Now and then an owl hooted, low, as if asking a question of an oracle. Treetops glimmered like a sea beneath the stars. The Milky Way stretched hoar above them in the north. Higher gleamed the Great Bear, which men here knew as the Wain of the Sky Father. But what do they call it in Edh’s home country? wondered Everard. Wherever that is. If Janne didn’t recognize the name “Alvaring,” then it’s so obscure that nobody in the Patrol has heard of it.

He lit his pipe. The fire crackled, gave him its own smoke, brought Floris’s face out of the dark in flickery highlights across the braids she had uncoiled and the strong bones. “I think we’ve got to search pastward,” he said.

She nodded. “These last few days, they have confirmed Tacitus, have they not?”

Throughout them, he had necessarily still been the operative on the ground, she observing from on high. But her role had been as active as his. He was confined to his immediate vicinity. She scanned widely, and then dispatched her minute robotic spies by night to lurk unseen and relay what went on beneath selected roofs.

They witnessed—The senate of Colonia knew its position was desperate. Could they get terms of surrender less than disastrous, and would those be honored? The tribe of the Tencteri, living across the Rhine from them, sent envoys proposing unity independent of Rome. Among their demands was that the city walls be razed. Colonia demurred; it would accept only a loose league, and unhindered passage over the river only by daylight, until usage had bred more trust. It also proposed that the mediators of any such treaty be Civilis and Veleda. The Tencteri agreed. About then, Civilis-Burhmund and Classicus arrived.

Classicus would as soon, or sooner, have Colonia given to sack. Burhmund was reluctant. Among other reasons for that, the city held a son of his, taken for a hostage in the ambiguous period last year when he was still ostensibly fighting to make Vespasian emperor. Despite everything that had happened since, the boy was well treated, and Burhmund stood to get him back. Veleda’s influence could make a negotiated peace possible.

It did.

“Yeah,” Everard said. “I guess the rest will go according to the book too.” Colonia would yield, suffer no harm, and join the rebel alliance. It would, however, get new hostages, Burhmund’s wife and sister and a daughter of Classicus. That those men would lay so much on the line spoke of more than realpolitik, the value of the agreement; it spoke of Veleda’s power.

(“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Stalin would gibe. His successors would find it had never mattered. In the long run, humans live mainly by their dreams, and die by them.)

“Well, we are not at the divergence point yet,” Floris said needlessly. “We are exploring the background of it.”

“And we’re stiffening our notion that Veleda is a key to it all. Do you think we—meaning you, I suppose—could approach her directly and get acquainted?”

Floris shook her head. “No. Especially not now, when she has isolated herself. Probably she is in a state of emotional, perhaps religious crisis. An interruption could bring on . . . anything.”

“Uh-huh.” Everard puffed on his pipe for a minute. “Religion—Did you hear Heidhin’s speech to the army yesterday, Janne?”

“In part. I knew you were there, taking note.”

“You’re not an American. Nor are you any of your Calvinist ancestors. I suspect you don’t appreciate what he was doing.”

She held her hands toward the fire and waited.

“If ever I heard a stem-winding, hellfire—and-damnation revival sermon, throwing the fear of the Lord into the meeting, Heidhin delivered it,” Everard said. “Almighty effective, too. There won’t be any more Castra Vetera atrocities.”

Floris shivered. “I should hope not.”

“But . . . the whole approach. . . . I realize it wasn’t unknown to the Classical world. Especially after Jews were living everywhere around the Mediterranean. The prophets of the Old Testament came to have their influence even on paganism. But up here, among the Nordics—wouldn’t a speaker have appealed to their machismo? At most, to their obligation to abide by a promise?”

“Yes, of course. Their gods are cruel, but, well, tolerant. Which will make them, the people, vulnerable to the Christian missionaries.”

“Veleda seems to have hit the same unshielded spot,” Everard said thoughtfully, “six or seven hundred years before any Christian missionaries reach these parts.”

“Veleda,” Floris murmured. “Wael-Edh. Edh the Foreign, Edh the Strange. She has borne her message, whatever it is, across Germany. Tacitus Two says she will carry it back there after Civilis falls—and the faith of the Germans will begin to change—Yes, I believe we must follow her spoor through the past, to wherever she began.”

9

The months toiled on, slowly grinding down Burhmund’s victory.

Tacitus would record how it happened, the confusions and mistakes, dissensions and treacheries, while the weight of Roman reinforcement inexorably mounted. Already then, memory would have blurred or lost much and any single man staring at the wound from which his life drained would be quite forgotten. Such details as did survive are of interest, but for the most part unnecessary to understanding the end result. A sketch suffices.

At first Burhmund continued to enjoy success. He occupied the country of the Sunici and recruited intensively among them. At the Moselle River he defeated a band of Imperialist Germans, took some into his host, and chased the rest and their leader south.

That was a bad error. While he struggled through the Belgic woods, Classicus sat idle and Tutor was fatally slow to occupy the defenses of the Rhine and the Alps. The Twenty-first Legion took advantage, crossing into Gaul. There it linked with its auxiliaries, including a cavalry troop commanded by Julius Briganticus, nephew and implacable enemy of Civilis. Tutor was beaten, his Treveri routed. Before then, a rebel attempt on the Sequani had met disaster, and Roman units had begun moving in from Italy, Spain, and Britain.

Petillius Cerialis was now in overall charge of the Imperial effort. Though worsted nine years before by Boadicea in Britain, this relative of Vespasian had since redeemed himself by taking a major part in the capture of Rome from the Vitellianists. At Moguntiacum, Mainz to be, he sent the Gallic conscripts home, declaring that his legions would be ample. The gesture practically completed the pacification of Gaul.

Thereupon he entered Augusta Treverorum, Trier to be, city of Classicus and Tutor, birthplace of the Gallic rebellion. He gave a general amnesty and took those units that had defected back into his army. Addressing an assembly of Treveri and Lingones in bleakly reasonable style, he convinced them that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by further insurgency.

Burhmund and Classicus had regrouped their scattered forces, minus a substantial contingent that Cerialis had trapped. They sent a herald to him, offering him the imperium of Gaul if he would join them. He merely passed the letter on to Rome.

Busy with the political side of the war, he was not well prepared for the onslaught that followed. In a hard-fought battle, the rebels captured the bridge over the Moselle. Cerialis personally led the assault that took it back. Rallying his cohorts when the barbarians were in his very camp, he caught them in disarray, plundering, and put them to flight.

Northward down the Rhine, the Agrippinenses—Ubii that were—had made their treaty with Burhmund reluctantly. Now they surprised and massacred the German garrisons among them, and appealed to Cerialis for help. He advanced by forced marches to relieve their city.

Despite some minor reverses, he got the capitulation of the Nervii and Tungri. When fresh legions had doubled his strength, he set forth for a showdown with Burhmund. In a two-day battle near Old Camp, aided by a Batavian deserter, who guided his men in a flanking movement, he broke the Germans. The war might have ended there, had the Romans had ships on hand to block their escape across the Rhine.

Upon learning of this, the remaining Treverian rebel leaders also withdrew over the river. Burhmund retreated into the Batavian island, where the men left to him waged for a while a guerrilla campaign. Among those they killed was Briganticus. Yet they could keep no ground. The fiercest fight saw Burhmund and Cerialis pitted directly against one another. The German, trying to rally his troops as they reeled back, was recognized; missiles hailed about him; he barely got away by jumping off his horse and swimming across the stream. His boats took off Classicus and Tutor, who were thenceforward no more than disconsolate hangers-on.

Cerialis had one contretemps. After going to inspect the winter quarters being constructed for the legions at Novesium and Bonna, he was on his way back down the Rhine with his fleet. From their coverts, German scouts saw a sloppiness born of overconfidence. They gathered a pair of strong bands and, on a clouded night, attacked. Those who invaded the Roman camp cut the tent ropes and slaughtered the men within. Their companions threw grapnels on several vessels and dragged them off. The great prize was the praetorian trireme, where Cerialis should have been sleeping. As it chanced, he was elsewhere—with an Ubian woman, rumor said—and emerged groggy, nearly naked, to take charge.

It was only a hit-run action. No doubt its main result was that the Romans smartened in a hurry. The Germans towed the captured trireme up the River Lippe and gave it to Veleda.

Small though it was, that setback to the Imperial cause might later have been taken for an omen. Cerialis advanced deeper into the tribal homelands. None could withstand him. But neither could he come to final grips with his foes. Rome could spare him no more troops. Supplies grew scant and irregular. All the while, marching down upon him was the Northern winter.

10

Over the highlands east of the Rhine valley trekked a caravan of thousands. For the most part the hills were thickly wooded, the ways through them little better than game trails. Horses, oxen, men strained to move wagons along; wheels groaned, brush crackled, breath rasped. Mainly folk trudged afoot, dumb with weariness and hunger.

From a height two or three miles off, Everard and Floris watched the exodus as it crossed a grassy open stretch. Hand-held opticals brought it into arm’s-length view. They could have used auditory pickups as well, but the sight was hard enough to take.

Straight-shouldered yet, a white-headed man rode at the front. Mail and spearheads gleamed where his household guards walked behind. That was the only brightness, and no merriment stirred beneath the helmets. After them, some boys herded what few scrawny cattle, sheep, and pigs were left. Here and there in the line, a cart bore a wicker cage of chickens or geese. Hardtack bread and the rare piece of cured meat went more closely watched than the bundled-up clothes, tools, and other chattels—even the crude wooden idol on its wain where gold glinted meaningless. What use had any gods been to the Ampsivarii?

Everard pointed. “That old guy in the lead,” he said. “Their chief, Boiocalus, do you think?”

“As Tacitus wrote the name,” Floris replied. “Yes, surely he. Not many in this milieu reach an age like his.” Sadly: “I imagine he regrets that he did.”

“And that he spent most of his life in Roman service. Yeah.”

A young woman, a girl really, shuffled by, cradling a baby in her arms. It wailed at a breast bared for it, from which no more milk would flow. A middle-aged man, perhaps her father, using a spear for a staff, kept his free arm ready to help her when she staggered. Her husband no doubt lay slain, tens or hundreds of miles behind them.

Everard shifted in the saddle. “Let’s go,” he said roughly. “It’s a ways to the meeting place, isn’t it? Why’d you route us by here?”

“I thought we should have a close look at this,” Floris explained. “Yes, it will haunt me too. But the Tencteri have experienced it directly. We need to know well what it is, if we hope to understand their reaction to it, and Veleda’s, and theirs to her.”

“I s’pose.” Everard clucked to his horse, pulled on the tether of his spare, which at present carried his modest baggage, and picked a way downhill. “Though compassion is mighty scarce in this century. The nearest society that ever encouraged it much is in Palestine, and that one will get scattered to the winds.”

Thereby sowing Judaism throughout the Empire, of which the harvest will be Christianity. No wonder that strife and death in the North would become the barest footnote to history.

“Kin loyalty is overwhelmingly strong,” Floris reminded, “and in the face of Rome, a feeling is in embryo among the western Germans, of a basic kinship reaching past tribal borders.”

Uh-huh, Everard remembered, and you suspect Veleda has a lot to do with it. That’s why we’re tracking her back through time—to try and discover what she signifies.

They reentered forest. Summer-green arches reached high before them, above a path walled with underbrush. Sunlight struck between leaves to spatter on moss and shadow. Squirrels ran fiery along boughs. Birdsong and fragrance wove through a mighty stillness. Already nature had swallowed up the agony of the Ampsivarii.

Like a spiderweb he saw snaring brightness in a hazel, pity reached between them and Everard. He must fare a goodly ways before it stretched so far that it broke. No use telling himself that they all died obscurely eighteen hundred years before he was born. They were here, now, as real as the refugees he had seen no great distance east of this ground, fleeing west, 1945. But these would find no succor.

Tacitus apparently got the general outline of the story right. The Ampsivarii were driven from their homes by the Chauci. A land grab; people were becoming too many for their available technology to support them on ancestral acres; overpopulation is relative, as old as the famine and war it raises, and as immortally reborn. The defeated sought the lower Rhine. They knew a considerable territory lay vacant there, cleared of its former inhabitants by the Romans, who meant to reserve it for purposes of military supply and settlement of discharged soldiers. Already two Frisian tribes had tried to take it over. They were ordered out and, when they stalled, expelled by an attack that killed many and sent many more to the slave markets. But the Ampsivarii were loyal federates. Boiocalus had suffered imprisonment when he would not go along with Arminius’s revolt forty years ago. Afterward he served under Tiberius and Germanicus, until he retired from the army to become the leader of his folk. Surely Rome would grant him and his exiles a place to lay their heads.

Rome would not. Privately, hoping to avoid trouble, the legate offered Boiocalus property for himself and his family. The chieftain refused the bribe: “We may lack a land to live in; we cannot lack one to die in.” He brought his tribe upstream to the Tencteri. Before a massed gathering he called on them, the Bructeri, and any others who found the nearness of the Empire oppressive to join him in war.

While they argued about it in their disorganized quasi-democratic fashion, the legate took his legions across the Rhine into the same country. He threatened extermination unless the newcomers were evicted. Northward out of Upper Germany marched a second army, to stand at the backs of the Bructeri. In the jaws of the vise, the Tencteri bade their guests begone.

I better not feel too self-righteous. The United States will commit a worse betrayal in Vietnam, with less excuse.

The trail debouched on something vaguely like a road, narrow, rutted, maintained solely by the feet, hoofs, and wheels that used it. Everard and Floris wound over its ups and downs for hours. Spying from invisibly high above and with the help of her robot bugs, cut—and-try work, patiently fitting together scraps of possibly useful observation, she had planned their course. It was a little dangerous for a man and woman to travel thus unescorted, though the Tencteri didn’t go in much for banditry. However, they had to be seen arriving in ordinary wise. They could use stun pistols in self-defense if they were assailed and if there weren’t a bunch of witnesses whose tale might significantly affect the society.

In the event, they had no trouble. More and more travelers came onto the road, bound the same way. All were men; almost all seemed preoccupied or anxious and talked little. An exception was a large fellow with a beer belly, who introduced himself as Gundicar. He rode beside the unusual couple and chatted away, incurably cheerful. In the nineteenth or twentieth century, Everard thought, he’d have been a well-to-do grocer or baker and daily patron of the local Brauhaus. “And how came you hither unscathed, you twain?”

The Patrolman gave him a prepared story. “Hardly that, my friend. I am of the Reudigni, north of the River Elbe; you have heard of us? . . . Trading southward. . . . The war between the Hermunduri and Chatti. . . . We were swept off, I believe I alone of my band escaped alive, my goods gone save for this bit of gear. . . . A woman left widowed, bereft of kin, happy to join me. . . . Wending homeward along the Rhine and the seaboard, hoping for fewer woes. . . . Having heard of the wise-woman from the east, and that she would speak to you Tencteri. . . .”

“Ach, in truth these are fearsome times.” Gundicar sighed. “Huge fires grieving the Ubii across the river, too.” He brightened. “I think that’s the wrath of the gods for their licking Roman boots. Maybe soon an ill doom will fall on yon whole bunch.”

“Then you’d fain have fought when the legions thrust into your land?”

“Well, now, that would have been unwise, we were unready, and hay harvest well-nigh upon us, you know. But I am not ashamed to say I howled in mourning for those poor homeless. May the Mother be kind to them! I’m hoping the spaewife Edh gives us word of a morrow when we may indeed right such wrongs. Good plunder in that Colonia burn, eh?”

Floris took over most of the conversation. Woman in a frontier society normally enjoys respect, if not complete equality. She runs everything when her man is gone from the lonely steading; should the feud-foe, the Vikings, the Indians then appear, it is she who commands the defense. Still more than the Greeks or the Hebrews did the Germanic peoples believe in the sibyl, the prophetess, the female—almost shamanistic among them—to whom a god gave powers and told of the future. Edh’s reputation had run long ahead of her, and Gundicar gossiped with everybody.

“No, it’s unknown whence she came at the first. She fared hither from among the Cherusci, and I’ve heard that ere then she abode for a time with the Langobardi. . . . I think this Nerha goddess of hers is of the Wanes, not the Anses . . . unless it’s another name for Mother Fricka. And yet . . . they say Nerha is as terrible in her rage as Tiw himself. . . . There’s something about a star and the sea, but I know nothing of that, we’re inlanders here. . . . She reached us soon after the Romans withdrew. The king guests her. He bade men come and hearken. That must have been at her wish. He would hardly gainsay it. . . .”

Floris led him on. What he told would much help her plan the next step in the search. Edh herself, the Patrol agents had better avoid meeting. Until they had more knowledge of her and whatever the forces were that she was unleashing, they would be crazy to interfere.

Late in the afternoon they arrived at a cleared vale, fields and pastures, the king’s main estate. He was basically a landholder, not above joining his tenants, hirelings, and slaves in the farm work. He presided over councils and the great seasonal sacrifices, he took command in war, but law and tradition bound him as fast as anyone else; his often riotous folk would overrule or overthrow him if that was their mood, and any scion of the royal house had a claim to the post that was as good as the fighting men he could muster to support it. No wonder these Germans can’t overcome Rome, Everard reflected. They never will, either. When their descendants—Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Saxons, and the rest—take over, it’ll be by default, because the Empire has crumbled from within. And besides, it’ll have taken them over before then—spiritually, by converting them to Christianity, so that the new Western civilization comes to birth where the old Classical one did, on the Mediterranean shore, not along the Rhine or the gray North Sea.

It was a flitting thought at the back of his mind, repeating what he well knew, gone again as his attention focused ahead.

The king and his household dwelt in a long, thatch-roofed timber hall. Sheds, barns, a pair of hovels where the lowly slept, and other outbuildings formed, with it, a square. A way behind it loomed a grove of ancient trees, the halidom, where the gods received their offerings and gave their omens. Most arrivals pitched camp in front, filling a meadow. Nearby, calves and swine roasted over big fires, while servants dished up horns or wooden cups of beer for all. Lavish hospitality was essential to maintaining a lord’s reputation, on which his life might well depend.

Everard and Floris established themselves inconspicuously offside and mingled with the crowd. Passing a gap between the buildings, they got a look into the courtyard. Rudely cobbled, at present it was occupied by the horses of the important visitors, who would stay in the royal house. Amidst them stood four white oxen and the wagon they had surely drawn. It was an extraordinary vehicle, beautifully carpentered, elaborately carved. Behind a driver’s seat, windowless sides rose to a shake roof. “A van,” Everard murmured. “Got to be Veleda’s—Edh’s. I wonder, does she sleep in it on the road?”

“Doubtless,” Floris said. “To preserve dignity and mystery. I suspect an image of the goddess is in there too.”

“M-m, Gundicar mentioned several men who travel with her. She may not need an armed guard, if the tribes respect her as much as I gather, but it’s impressive, and besides, somebody has to do the chores. Though I suppose being her attendants makes them heap big medicine, and they’re putting up in the sachem’s lodge along with his braves and the local chiefs. She too, do you think?”

“Certainly not. She, to lie on a bench among a lot of snoring men? Either she will use her car or the king has arranged some kind of private room for her.”

“How does she do it, anyway? What gives her that power?”

“We are trying to learn what.”

The sun slipped below western treetops. Dusk began to rise in the vale. A wind slithered chilly. Now that the guests were fed, it smelled only of woodsmoke and forest deeps. Thralls stoked the fires; flames flickered aloft, growled, spat. Overhead winged nest-bound crows and darting swallows, runes changeably scrawled on a sky gone purple in the east, cold green in the west. The evening star trembled into sight.

Horns sounded. Warriors trod from the hall, through the courtyard, onto the trampled ground outside. Their spearheads caught the dying daylight. Before them went a man in a richly patterned tunic, gold helices entwining his arms, the king. Breath hissed in the shadowed gathering until, silent, men waited. The heart knocked in Everard’s breast.

The king spoke loudly but gravely. Everard thought that, underneath, he was shaken. To them from afar, he said, had come Edh, of whose wonderworking all had heard. She wanted to prophesy for the Tencteri. In honor to her and the goddess who fared with her, he had therefore bidden the nearest dwellers tell the next, and thus across the land. In these unhappy times, whatever signs the gods sent must be carefully weighed. He warned that the words of Edh would hurt. Bear them manfully, as one bears the setting of a broken bone. Think what it meant, and what folk could or should do hereafter.

The king stood aside. Two women—wives of his?—bore out a high, three-legged stool. Edh came forth and seated herself on it.

Everard strained through the gloaming. How he wished he could use his optical to help this uneasy firelight! What he saw surprised him. He had half expected a ragged hag. She was well clad, in a short-sleeved long-skirted gown of plain white wool, a fur-trimmed blue cloak held with a gilt bronze brooch, thin leather shoes. Her head was bare, like a maiden’s, but the long brown hair hung in braids, rather than loosely, beneath a snakeskin fillet. Tall, full-boned but thin, she moved just a little awkwardly, as if she and her body were not quite one. Big eyes glowed in a long, handsomely sculptured face. When she opened her mouth, what appeared to be a full set of teeth flashed white. Why, she’s young, he thought; and: No. Mid-thirties, I’d guess. That’s middle-aged here. She could be a grandmother, though actually they say she’s never married.

His gaze left her for an instant and, with a start, he recognized the man who had accompanied her and stood at her side, dark, saturnine, somberly garbed. Heidhin. Of course. Ten years younger than when I first saw him. He doesn’t look it, or, rather, he already looks as old as then.

Edh spoke. She made no gestures, kept hands on lap, and her voice, a husky contralto, stayed soft. It carried, though; and steel was in it, and winter winds.

“Hear me and heed ye,” she uttered, eyes turned beyond them toward the evenstar, “highborn or lowborn, still in your strength or stumbling graveward, doomed to death and dreeing the weird boldly or badly. I bid ye hearken. When life is lost, alone is left, for yourself and your sons, what is said of you. Doughty deeds shall never die, but in minds of men remain forever-night and nothingness for the names of cravens! No good the gods will give to traitors, nor aught but anger unto the slothful. Who fears to fight will lose his freedom, will cringe and crawl to get moldy crusts, his children chafing in chains and shame. Hauled into whoredom, helplessly, his women weep. These woes are his. Better a brand should burn his home while he, the hero, harvests foemen till he falls defiant and fares on skyward.

“Hoofs in heaven heavily ring. Lightning leaps, blazing lances. All the earth resounds with anger. Seas in surges smite the shores. Now will Nerha naught more suffer. Wrathful she rides to bring down Rome, the war gods with her, the wolves and ravens.”

She recalled humiliations endured, wealth paid over, dead lying unavenged. Icily she lashed the Tencteri for yielding to invaders and forsaking the kindred who called on them. Yes, it had seemed they had no choice; but what they in truth chose was infamy. Let them slaughter as much as they would in the halidoms, it could not buy them back their honor. The weregild they would pay was sorrow unbounded. Rome would gather it in.

But a day would yet dawn. Abide it, and be ready when that red sun rose.

Afterward, pondering the audiovisual they had recorded, Everard and Floris felt again a little of the spell. They had well-nigh been swept away too, humbled, exalted, with the throng that lifted weapons and shouted as Edh walked back to the hall. “Total conviction,” Floris said.

“More to it than that,” Everard answered. “A gift, a power-real leadership has a touch of mystery, something transhuman. . . . But I wonder if also the time stream isn’t bearing her along.”

“North to the Bructeri, where she will settle, and then—”

As for the Ampsivarii, they wandered year after year, sometimes briefly finding refuge, sometimes harried onward, until, Tacitus wrote, “all their young were killed in a foreign country, and those who could not fight were shared out as booty.”