The Man-Kzin Wars 12

VII

This record is for posterity. Wherever that may be. At least I need not fuss with scribe and scroll, or fear that mouse or termite shall devour this disk. I will begin when I traveled north with a bulla of authority to take over the Ninth Legion at Hadrian's Wall.

It was, I thought, a remote (Ha! Remote!) and desolate place, though I traveled north toward Caledonia in some comfort. I had campaigned in far worse conditions. There were towns at first, with stone buildings. Then villages, then straggling huts, and finally just the carven milestones and tombstones beside the road. A draft of replacements, specialists, and some civilians accompanied me and my escort.

Old Crassus was a hard taskmaster to the convoy. He had to be. The civilians and women traveling with us in creaking wains were a hindrance and a peril. We did not let the emptiness of the land deceive us into thinking that we were unobserved. We knew the land was alive though it seemed desolate, and we avoided or hastened through limestone country for we knew it meant caves.

With the legionaries not only singing their usual interminable marching songs about the venereal charms of Lalarge, but with women actually present, there were potential discipline problems. Crassus routed women out of their lines when we made camp at night, stuck to our predawn starts, and generally made himself exceptionally hated even for a ducenarius. He was as tough an old stick of gnarled vinewood as his own cudgel, and I had little to do but look impressive. I also began dictating an account for the old man to Publius, my secretary.

We saw nothing really strange, apart from moving lights in the northern sky: some like drifting stars, some larger and nearer, one huge like a second moon. Sometimes they formed patterns. No one, including the veterans and merchants who knew this country, had seen anything like them before, but at that time they did not trouble us. We were more concerned with robbers and broken men nipping at our heels, or even attacking in force if there were enough of them or if the Scots had landed to encourage them against us. But we reached the wall at Borcovicus with little trouble, apart from a few arrows fired into the camp one night.

Winter is the defining fact about the wall. The climate is even worse than the rest of Britain, with its cold drizzling rain so many days. On the wall you have wind-driven sleet month after month, and dream of walking in the sun under a purple sky in the olive-groves and vineyards of Tuscany, or quaffing the wine of Melita amid the bee-pastures of its flowers (though I have seen more than purple skies since then). Troops from Germany regard it as a soft billet after the winters they have there, but for Spaniards like the Ninth it was very much a hardship posting. They had done their best to modify it with baths and barbers and brothels, but they wore padded woolens under their armor and shivered.

Still, the bathhouses were a credit to several generations of military engineering, and the Principia was well lined with woven rugs. Further, the day after our arrival was actually fine, with blue skies and wide views. Those rolling hills of red and brown heather had a kind of beauty under the sun.

The prefect, Bassus Septimus, was the type I expected: weather-beaten and wind-bitten, eyes permanently narrowed from squinting across heather and into sleet, an old sandal-leather man. He had a keen eye for his own comfort but he was a competent veteran who knew the land. I had seen plenty of the type in Gaul. The officers and senior centurions I met were much the same. Some think our officers are fops and amateurs, but these of the frontiers were not, and those who think that way might find it difficult to explain how we have ruled an empire of four thousand cities and forty-four provinces with swords, spears, and animal power.

The men were legionaries, and when you have said that you have said all. They were the drilled, disciplined troops of an empire that was an island of civilization in a world that was a welter of barbarism. They were versatile soldiers and engineers, who could fight barbarians or other Romans by land or sea, build walls and siege engines which I then thought gigantic, drain marshes, drive roads and bridges through wilderness, calculate to a fraction what pay they were owed, fight fires in multistory tenements, plow the land to feed themselves in any climate or distribute food in a famine. Versatile.

I thought that then. How much more do I think it now!

Some said we ruled the world, but we senior officers knew better: We had silks from China and merchants' tales from further yet. The Greeks had measured the sphere that is the world and we knew the size of it. That helped me understand much later, but for the moment, if forty-four provinces sounded large, and it was, the Barbaricum, we knew, was larger.

I tried from the start, as they were presented to me, to remember as many names as I might but knew it would take some time to tell the centurions apart: they looked as if they had been hammered from the same metal in the same mold by the same smith; as indeed they had been. Our army was full of such. I knew that later they would become individuals to me. Sooner rather than later, if we saw action.

Bassus took me to the wall. He was worried, which was part of his job, but he was also more bewildered than I had often seen such a one.

"Patrols have disappeared before," he said. "They go too far and the Picts suddenly decide they would like the armor and weapons of the metal men. Or they run into a few boatloads of those cursed Gaels from Hibernia. But sooner or later we always hear from our spies what happened.

"Anyway, the local Picts are on their way to being civilized-we've sent enough punitive expeditions to teach them that attacking the metal men was not a good idea, and I can drink with the local chiefs without all of us keeping our hands on our swords or even needing a poison-taster. It's become not much more than a bit of sport for us to fire arrows at each other when they come to steal blades from the ditch.

"Now, nothing. No patrols returned, no spies, and no Picts. We have a frontier scout force beyond the wall and no word from that either, though of course it's sometimes gone for weeks at a time. That wolf pack hardly drills like Praetorians-I commanded an ordo of them a long time ago-but they know the country and they fear nothing in it. If it was an attack by the Caledoni they'd report it as such. That's what they're there for. This is something different.

"Also, the spymasters and political officers who work among the Northern tribesmen know their business. They don't last long otherwise.

"Look!"-he gestured across the vast sweep of heather-"not a wisp of smoke anywhere. There are Pictish villages beyond those hills. Normally on a day like this you can see the smoke of their fires. But they've cleared off. No word. I don't know why, unless the tribes are gathering in the highlands for some sort of mass descent."

"Would they be capable of such organization?"

"Did Varus ever wonder such a thing?"

I had spoken of Varus with the old man and I wondered now that his name still seemed to keep cropping up after more than a century. Perhaps it haunted every frontier commander. I wondered how often it was mentioned on the Rhine, or in those distant red deserts of sand where our legions wait for the Parthians or Persians.

"Anyway, they're gone without a word," he continued. "After the patrols we'd lost I wasn't taking any chances. I sent a strong force to investigate, with orders to turn back at the first suspicion of trouble and not to march north beyond sight of our beacons. They reported the Pictish villages deserted. Nothing else, except those lights in the sky."

"I thought you always saw them in these parts," I said.

"That's the aurora borealis, the northern glow. The further north you go in Caledonia the more you tend to see it, in winter anyway, but it's nothing like these. These moving stars are new."

"Pictish gods?"

"I've been a soldier a long time. I've never seen gods like that." He too had the brand of Mithras on his brow and knew the mysteries. "We have all sorts of religions here, even Jews and the fish-worshipping Christians. Gods from Spain and Syria and Melita and places only the gods themselves know. But no one has a god that is a light traveling in the sky. Some of them are frightened, I think, and they'd show it, if they weren't more frightened of me and their centurions."

I didn't like the idea of a legionary frightened by anything but his own superiors. It should be what the philosophers and logicians call a contradiction in terms. "So what do you think?"

"Since it's futile to speculate about gods, I speculate about men, which may be just as futile. I think what I told you: that the tribes are gathering for a massive attack southwards. If they breach the wall, there's nothing to stop them before Eboracum. And that's not much more than a shell, now that we've brought the Ninth here. They'd take it. Then they'd either straggle back to Caledonia with their booty or they'd go on. I think they'd go on."

"Why?"

"You don't fire siege ballistas at a hare in a field. An attack to punch through the wall isn't just to plunder the northern marches and return. They'd be aiming for Londinium and the channel-to chuck us right out of Britannia. It would be more than brigandage and piracy, it would be politics. If the Gauls cooperated with them, and the Germans…" He made an eloquent gesture.

"The Britons tried it themselves once," I reminded him. "It didn't do them any good. Two legions brought them to bay and wiped them out."

He had been in Britain longer than I and knew more of its history.

"They were disunited and had bad leaders," he said. "Another attack may be better led. And they know us now. They're not going to flee in panic at the sight of a Testudo, and they know better than to close against a legion with short swords in the field.

"Even if we could beat them in a pitched battle, that wouldn't solve it. If I commanded them, my tactic would be to dodge our field army, and wear down our supply trains with ceaseless harassment. They can live off the land better than we can. Nip off isolated forts and garrisons and ambush the relief forces. Then melt back into the forests and dare us to follow them. Only this time they would be taking cities, not mile castles. Harassment happens all the time in wild country, of course, but think of it on a far bigger scale. Then, when we're scattered and worn down and Londinium says the money's running out and we can't pay our auxiliaries, they launch a main-force attack."

He waved again to left and right, at the miles of wall marching across the hills and valleys to east and west and out of sight. Here and there the helmets of pacing sentries shone as they caught the sun, seeming to slide atop the stonework. It was new, almost unweathered, and majestic. A colossal statement of the might of Rome.

"Look at the wall itself. Our garrison is stretched from sea to sea, from Luguvallium in the west to Segedunum in the east. Our problem here is the problem of the Empire in miniature: they can attack when and where they choose. We have to try to be strong at all points at once and we can't be. Where is our central reserve?

"We have better tactics and discipline, but we have to spread the grease on the bread very thinly. This wall looks impressive but it's largely a bluff. See that sentry?" He pointed to the glittering bead of a helmet visible above the rampart of the next mile castle. "Twenty men and a decurion are sometimes all we've got in a castle, along with their women and camp followers. We rely on our spies and scouts to warn us when an attack is coming so we can concentrate our forces to meet it. But one real punch, delivered without warning, could go through a weakly garrisoned section like wet parchment. Especially if they had help from the other side-we can't watch all the coast to know what landings may take place beyond our lines. This wall is trying to do something too big for it."

"And once they were through?"

"We'd attack them from east and west, of course. Cut their communications. We can handle a big attack. But not an all-out attack by all the tribes, and not at too many points simultaneously. I'm not saying they would inevitably throw us out of Britannia if they tried-you know how good our boys are-but they could do a lot of damage, and leave us that much weaker when they've bred up enough to try again."

"So what do you recommend?"

"Find out whatever is happening and nip it in the bud. One thing on our side is the fact that these tribesmen take a long time to assemble. Not just their people. Even some barbarian chiefs know now that you've got to get a commissariat together for a serious war far from home. That puts a delay on them.

"We've wasted a lot of time already, but I'd say hit them now, at once, with everything we're got. You've got the Ninth Legion. And we're not Picts and Scots. We can march in strength at short notice. Break the back of the thing with one quick stroke. Kill and return.

"Whatever happens," he went on, "don't let the Caledonians make a massed charge from close by. A long-distance charge across the rocks and heather you can break up with javelins and artillery, perhaps-and we have put a lot of emphasis on making sure the scorpions and other light artillery can be worked quickly. But get a horde of the screaming red-haired devils leaping at you from a quarter-mile away-and they like to hide in ditches and wait for you-and you're in real trouble. More than one Roman formation has come to grief at the wrong end of a Caledonian charge. Men and women, shrieking, half-naked, foam on their mouths. Between you and me-" he lowered his voice, as though we might be overheard in that windy, empty place "-enough of them, and they might give a full legion a hard time."

"And the flying lights?"

"Maybe they've stuck swans' wings on chariots. I don't know. But I'm sure they're not ready to attack yet. Otherwise we'd see them now. They aren't good at patience. But if we find the tribes mustering and break up an attack before it's delivered, then it's a Triumph for you."

From the way he said "Triumph" I knew he meant it in the particular as well as the general sense. That could lead to other things. He probably thought that I, like so many of my rank, felt a bit more purple would look well on my cloak and toga; and perhaps he wasn't wrong.

"And if we don't find the tribes mustering?"

"We come home. We've given these loafers of ours a good exercise and we've shown the Picts the reach of civilization."

So we talked. I repeat this talk because I remembered its arguments many times in later days. I inspected the men as we prepared, and met some of the scouts as they came in. Gaunt, keen-eyed frontier wolves they were, battered and scarred by weather almost as much as by battle, they made me think uneasily on what the philosophers had written, of how luxury and soft living could corrupt, of how Rome was allegedly going soft at the heart. Still, we were its hard edge yet. I thought of the pleasant villas and smiling vales of the south, even here in Britain, of the farms of Tuscany, and reflected that civilized men must be guarded by less civilized ones.

Still, I felt no guilt about relaxing with my officers in the bathhouse that night. We would not, we knew, enjoy them again for some time.

Normally, despite the prefect's bravado, it took a legion time to prepare for a march. Six thousand fighting men and their auxiliaries are not easily uprooted. But the Ninth had only just arrived. It was rested but not settled down, and anticipating any possible siege the granaries and warehouses behind the wall were kept filled (crucifixion was a deterrent to pilfering). It could be quickly resupplied from them.

So once again, a few days later, it was our usual predawn start. A whole legion this time, the aquilifer with the Eagle and the significers in their leopard skins bearing the legion's battle honors at the front of the column. (Though not quite at the front of the force-we had scouts ahead of us. Unlike Varus.)

The wall appeared even more imposing looking back at it from the north, without the straggle of civilian dwellings along its southern side: a grim, hard rampart of civilization. New as it was, it seemed to have been standing since time began. And Mithras knows, a legion marching with its Aquila and its standards going before was a sight to see!

The country looked superficially the same as the hills and heather moors to the south, but felt different. There was, if you allowed it to get to you, a feeling of nakedness, knowing that we were outside the wall, beyond the Roman World. Even that column of armored men looked small in the vast purple heather country, under that sky. It had been different in Gaul, where there was no such obvious rampart, though perhaps crossing the Rhine would have felt like this. For a moment the sight of the wall marching east and west to the distant hilltops and out of sight filled me with pride, as when, a boy on my first visit to Rome, I had seen the great buildings of the capitol. And again I felt, as I had then, a sudden stab of feeling like despair and death, a feeling the poetry of Virgil echoed for me: "Man can do no more!" The god of the Jews was gaining converts in Rome now, I had heard, and I thought I knew why. We had need of a god to save the world, more powerful than our little godlings of sanitation and so forth, our pantheon of deceased emperors… I set my head to the north, and I think I betrayed nothing in my face.

We were in Britannia Barbara, part of the encircling, ever-threatening Barbaricum, where anything might happen.

But nothing did, for the rest of that day. We passed the Pictish villages, with their cold hearths, some dead livestock around and a few hungry dogs and wildcats scavenging. I was interested to see that the Caledonian wildcats, great fanged things, easily kept the dogs at bay. Crassus said it was odd the Picts had abandoned their livestock. Our scouts looked for tracks, but too much rain had fallen for anything to be made out apart from their general route further into the north and the hills. We had the scouts, both on foot and mounted, and the auxiliaries, spread out far and wide. We saw and heard nothing human.

We didn't have to entrench ourselves that night. There was hard-standing for a camp a long day's march north of the Wall. (Though calculating a day's march was fiendishly difficult in that country, where the sun seemed to shine almost all night in summer and was gone as soon as it had arisen in winter. As a worshipper of Sol Invictus I had wondered sometimes why that happened. Now I know!) There was a ditch and walls ready for our use if we supplied the stakes for the palisades and our soldiers used their entrenching tools to repair the erosion. There were a few sheep grazing inside it, and in that uncanny emptiness and silence we were glad to see them as tokens of the world we knew. The cooks soon had them on spits.

It grew dark. The night sentries were posted. A nearly full-strength legion and its auxiliaries, six thousand fighting men, plus a well-trained and armed servant for every four men and a straggle of camp followers who could also heft arms if necessary, need not normally fear attack-rather anything in the rest of the world should fear them-but if the Caledoni attacked in force, who knew? And I thought again of Varus.

With Crassus, the other senior officers, and the pilus primus I inspected the lines. Scouts from outlying pickets came and went. We had brought extra scorpions and set them up around the camp.

The Picts attacked at dusk. There was a shower of arrows and confused shouting and screaming from an outlying picket. The men were standing to and ready. Three cohorts went for them and drove them into a prepared killing ground. They charged-they always charge-straight into our scorpions and as they floundered in the ditch we poured bolts and arrows into them.

I did not, I thought, have Varus's problem. It was no overwhelming force that attacked us, but an ill-armed, ill-commanded rabble from several different tribes. When I had some of the survivors brought before me and questioned, they seemed confused and terrified. They claimed we had attacked them, and carried off their people. They had attacked an entrenched legion because they were desperate. They must, I thought, be desperate indeed. It made no sense. Still, a couple of crucifixions would do them no harm and the rest would earn something in the slave market. Then the prefect pointed.

For a moment I thought it was a fiery serpent. Then I realized it was but a line of torches carried by men: but a long line. The Caledoni had crept upon us in the dark in force while a few of their number created a diversion.

I gave thanks that we were prepared, and by no means taken by surprise. But no battle against a wolfish people like the Caledoni, fighting at a time and place of their choosing, is a certain thing. And as a strategos should not, I fretted myself at that moment with fears about events I could no longer control. What if this was but a greater diversion, while other barbarians attacked the wall?

I looked impassive enough, as I rode forward through the camp with my staff officers and gallopers. Drums were rattling with the trumpets now, and as missiles and bolts began to fly I saw the shields going up as a testudo was formed. I gave thanks again for those centurions who needed no more than a word of command. The testudo would give protection from the arrows, spears, and the lighter missiles.

Then Roman and Caledoni stopped together.

The stars had changed again. Great lights moved in the sky, forming strange designs. Across a drifting cloud there appeared the picture of a Roman soldier in full armor. It was projected, I know now, by an ordinary sword-light, but the effect on all may be imagined. The gods themselves, both sides thought, had intervened. We Romans accepted this with pleasure and surprise, but also as something no more than our right, and certainly not as something to break discipline over. I knew Mithras was a good god for soldiers and was gratified. The Caledoni, as might be expected, too terror-stricken to run, stood wailing.

The testudo moved upon them, then dissolved into men with flickering swords. Rank upon rank, the legionaries advanced like the vast single-minded engine they were. They cheered and at the command surged forward. But it was a disciplined surge. The javelins of the front ranks flew in a dark mass, their swords flickered stabbing like the tongues of vipers. Crassus had not had them blacken the blades for night work, thinking the enemy ought to see the steel, and Crassus had been right.

As the Picts went down squealing, I thought: "This will buy peace south of the wall, peace for Eboracum and Londinium. I have vindicated Hadrian's decision to build the wall." Hadrian was reported dead but his successor might appreciate my contribution to the imperial numen.

Then the Jotoki ships began to descend. With their double torsion, scorpion bolts can penetrate iron armor, if not the molecularly bonded ceramics the Jotoki used. The Jotoki were forbearing. They burned the bolts in flight with sword-lights until we had no ammunition left, then began to talk to us. They fired a plasma jet to emphasize their words.

The Jotoki had done this, or something like this, before. They picked up a fair number of our womenfolk, and civilians, specialists, and other auxiliaries from the wall, and some Pictish villagers.

They say there are Roman soldiers garrisoning forts in China, who found their way there after their detachments were cut off by the Persians. It is easy to change masters when you have no choice in the matter.

Perpetua held up a hand. Marcus Augustus paused the film.

"This makes no sense," she said. "I have been searching the records in our ship's library. It's had all the major encyclopedias read into it. We know the Ninth Legion, the Hispania, marched north of the wall-it was newly built then-into Caledonia and was never seen again. But we know nothing of Jotoki raids along Hadrian's Wall."

"What should we expect a primitive Earth historian to say?" asked Ginger. "That giant starfish came from the sky and picked them up? He'd be kept in a little room at the top of the castle. House, I mean."

"True enough. Perhaps it does make a kind of sense. Hadrian's Wall was suddenly extended and fortified about the time the Ninth Legion is said to have marched north. Then, after quite a short time, it was abandoned, and another work, the Antonine Wall, was built further north again. That was abandoned, too, after quite a short time, and the Romans fell back on Hadrian's Wall.

"The Romans put a huge effort into fortifying it and manning it-for about three hundred years. I gather scholars still disagree as to why. Maybe somebody did say something. And what of all the magic surrounding Arthur? Merlin and the flying dragons? And the Celtic myths? Flying, enchantments, magic weapons? Chesterton wrote in his history: 'Suddenly the soldier of civilization is no longer fighting Goths but Goblins.' After wars and invasions and race migrations, centuries of near-illiteracy, changes of languages, in a couple of non-technological millennia, what else might you expect to remain by way of memory of a Jotoki recruitment effort?"

"Millennia," said Marcus to Perpetua. "Two and a half thousand Earth years, you said."

"Yes."

"About nine hundred have passed for us, as far as we can tell. We traveled fast."

"Then you didn't come directly here?" Ginger broke in. Marcus glanced at him but did not deign to reply.

"That is why your language has changed so little," said Perpetua quickly. "That and the fact you had no tongues of human invaders to overlay it. On Earth, six hundred years after your ancestors left, there were still fragments of the Western Empire extant in France. Latin was long the language of government and scholarship-where there was government and scholarship-and of the Church in Europe. The ruler in Ravenna still styled himself 'King of Rome, Emperor of the West,' and the Eastern Empire still had centuries of life ahead. You are almost contemporaries of Boethius."

"We are still Romans! However far we have traveled! In the Mithraeum the Mysteries are still enacted. We honor our various gods. There are Jews in our ranks still, and fish-worshippers, but we have kept faith with Rome."

The picture resumed.

You to whom I leave this story will know much of the ships that travel between worlds. I need not tell you of our awe and amazement, our initial disbelief, our wild thoughts that we were dead and in a Hades unlike any we had imagined, as we were taken aboard the great warship that the Jotoki named the Hard Bargainer, and its consort, the Shrewd Merchant, while about us flew as escort the Five Arms of the Wise Trade Councilor. These things you may imagine. But Roman or Caledonian, we were warriors, and we behaved as warriors. The centurions maintained discipline among our legionaries and civilians. The Caledonians wailed and howled in the manner of barbarians, but when they saw it availed them nothing they became tractable.

It was great good fortune that our political officers already knew the Caledonian chiefs and we could speak together. Thinking I had knowledge in the matter the Caledonian chiefs agreed, grudgingly enough, to place themselves under my direction. They, being barbarians, were of course far more overawed than we. But we saw that we were all human and that bound us together. The gold the Jotoki gave us helped, and the glass and beads and mirrors for the women, both Roman and Caledonian.

Meanwhile, we were heading away from Terra, our world, at a speed which the Jotoki told us was close to the speed of light itself, to do battle. The Jotoki had shown us representations of our enemies: great beasts like lions or Indian tigers, but armed as the Jotoki themselves were armed, with weapons of flame, and traveling like the Jotoki through the skies.

We had little love for the Jotoki then, though they fed us and clothed us and spoke to us in our own language (though at first only through images, not daring to confront us in the flesh). But then we realized that something the Jotoki told us many times was true:

Better we fight these felines far away than have them fall upon Terra.

The Jotoki told us first they were taking us to a new world to train us with new weapons and tactics to fight creatures which menaced them and which, if unchecked, would conquer our own world and Rome itself. After the campaign they would, if they were able, return us to our homes. We obviously had no choice but to believe them and obey.

Before we were placed in the chambers of deep sleep the Jotoki began to teach us of the heavens. They explained that they were traders and had taught other races before us. Once, said Jegarvindertsa, who talked to me most, they had tried to spread civilization among the stars.

" 'Civilization is our business.' Those were the old governor's words, when we marched north to the wall," I recalled.

"You defend civilization now," said Jegarvindertsa. "This is but Rome writ large. It has been said there is only one civilization, and all civilized beings are a part of one another, almost as we Jotoki are compound entities. Are you afraid?"

"When I campaigned in Gaul and Caledonia we had short swords and javelins, and our armor was iron and leather. Now…why should I be afraid?" I had seen and tried some of the Jotoki weapons then, and certain of our centurions and other instructors had begun practicing with them.

"Yes, your weapons and armor are very different. But so are your enemies."

I knew those enemies now. The Jotoki had shown me holographic eidolons of them. We fought for the gold the Jotoki gave us, and we fought because they had really given us no choice. We could hardly march home! But we were also more than mercenaries and slaves. How small and provincial our skirmishes against Germans and Gauls and Picts seemed now!

"Let's get at them!"

"You and your people have learnt a lot in a short time," said Jegarvindertsa. "If we had found you earlier things might have been very different. As it is, we still might turn the tide. But we have a long way to go. We are close to the speed of light, but still you must pass time in sleep. As you sleep you will learn more."

I thought then, with my newly acquired way of looking at things, that the Jotoki use of the word "tide" showed they had once been wide-ranging sailors on their own world before they went into space. It was not long since we Romans had come to know of tides. Caesar himself had not understood, during the first Roman expedition to Britannia, the difficulties and opportunities a tidal beach on Oceanus Atlanticus presented. Well, that was not surprising.

Did we sleep long or short? There was a period of black nothingness, and then the chambers that enclosed us were opened, and the Jotoki assembled us on the great deck of the ship. As the men were mustered, Jegarvindertsa led me to the pilot's tower.

There was a jump and a flickering in the image. Centuries had corrupted some of the data.

"This is the story of our forebears' first great battle with the kzinti," Marcus said. "It is told to all our children. When the Jotoki awoke our fathers from sleep they told them that feline ships were closing upon them." The picture resumed.

"I think they will board us," he said.

"Then stop them."

"That will not be easy. If we were part of a proper fleet, and if we had not lost so many Jotoki in battles already, ship-to-ship battle would be right and proper. But there are too few of us to fight this ship properly. We might engage one or two enemy ships, but if we looked like winning the others would simply use missiles or beams against this ship and we should all perish."

"What do you intend to do, then?"

"Let them board. We shall not resist them in space with the heavy weapons. Jufadirvanlums might think differently, but they sleep still. We shall not waken them."

"And then? You would surrender to these monsters?" For a moment I thought it strange that I should be calling other creatures monsters to a Jotok, but I had become used to Jotoki appearance now.

"No. You and we will fight them. We do not like it but we see no other choice. Their numbers are not great and their discipline is not good. We will fire but a few weapons at first, lest they suspect a trap. All, we think, will board, eager for loot."

"Yes! The new weapons! The plasma jets and beam-rifles!"

"A few. But used inside a spaceship at maximum power they would do too much damage. I know a couple of squads have begun training with them and we will use them on low power, but most of your men must fight them as they know how to fight."

The sketchy Jotoki resistance at the airlocks was hardly heard as we deployed the troops. I heard one legionary complaining to a centurion: "I thought only condemned criminals fought lions and tigers in the arena."

And the centurion's answer: "These are not lions or tigers, this is not the arena, and we are not criminals. Now stand firm or feel the weight of my cudgel!"

The ship we traveled in was vast. I thought that the felines who attacked it did not lack courage. It dwarfed their own vessels. They did not know how few Jotoki it contained.

But they did not know it contained the Ninth Legion, either.

Beside me Jegarvindertsa pointed to a screen that monitored their progress.

"See now why I made the resistance so light! They think the few Jotoki that died at the airlock or fled before them were all the armed Jotoki aboard."

"Explain."

"They are slinging their weapons. They look forward to slaying the rest of us with fangs and claws alone."

"They can unsling them again."

"Yes. And they will do it quickly. But perhaps not quickly enough. This is no open plain where they can watch an enemy approach."

I had seen many images of the ferocious ones and liked them no better as I watched them on the screen now, marking their approach through the ship's corridors. Like tigers, but larger, heavier, with strange pink tails and mouths full of long fangs. Our trumpets began to sound, and the standards went up. Forward went the aquilifer, bearing the Eagle of the Ninth.

They burst into the troop deck. Trained to count enemy in battle, I saw there were not many more than a hundred, but as they poured in their sheer size and hideous appearance made their numbers seem more than they were.

The sight of our legion, drawn up in armor, halted them. Our trumpets screamed, and a shower of javelins hurtled through the air at them. They moved fast, but not a few of the javelins found their marks. But there was no time for conventional battle tactics. Even as the javelins were still in the air, the legionaries were rushing them.

Few had begun to train with the Jotoki fire-weapons and these, set to the lowest possible charge, they plied manfully against the creatures, filling the ship with black choking fumes and the smell of burnt feline flesh. A full charge of those plasmajets would have destroyed man, Jotok, feline, and probably ship alike.

The battle was terrible. The first rank of legionaries died to a man. I have seen men fight beasts, even lions and tigers, once or twice in the arena, but it was never like this, heads and limbs torn from torsos and flung into the air like rubbish by demons twice the height of men, whose claws flashed like lightning, rending and unstoppable! But the legion and whatever gods they worshipped had taught them to die aright, and they took some felines with them. They stopped the rest from drawing their weapons before the second rank struck. The men of the third rank threw their second javelins into the feline ranks and advanced at the rush. Orders were futile, lost in the screams and roars of men and felines. I thought, even at that moment, that we must have the Jotoki build amplifiers so orders might be given in the chaotic din of battle with such creatures.

Some javelins struck the felines and rebounded broken from their armor and garments. Others, not armored, were pierced by them but came on as unmindful of their wounds as Assyrian lions or German savages. But the javelins bent as they were meant to, and their trailing butts impeded the enemy even as the points tore about within their wounds and made the purple and orange blood spurt. The sheer horror of their appearance and their deafening screams and roars might have made the bravest quail, had they not been legionaries who faced them. I have heard wounded lions snarl and roar to shake the very air but nothing like this.

Then, screaming their battle cries, blood-maddened, the Caledonians poured in. If the kzinti had been beginning to get the measure of Roman tactics, this savage onslaught caught them off-balance. Their claws slashed, sending red human blood up in fountains as they went down, but go down they did.

Oh! the felines proved hard to kill. And oh! the Caledonians died, but what a way to die! How I wished the effete fools who pay to see criminals torn to pieces by beasts had been here! Better still, if they had been thrown into the first rank of the front line!

I saw a knot of legionaries about the aquilifer with the Eagle that swayed above the mass. The kzinti must have sensed it for what it was, for a group of them leapt upon it. The Eagle fell. As commander I knew it was not yet my place to fight hand-to-hand-my job was to direct the battle and to die well if all was lost-but it was hard to hold myself back at that moment. Legionaries in plenty rushed into the slashing claws, their own swords slashing, and a great shout went up from all the ranks as we saw the Eagle of Rome rise above the press again!

The legionaries lacked nothing in death-defying courage, but the Caledonian charge simply passed through them. The felines had their own beam-weapons out now, and one beam-weapon, wielded by a ferocious beast at close quarters, is the equal of many swords and axes. But on the human sides there was ferocity too, and those of our own who had the new weapons flinched no more than did those who had the ancient steel of our fathers.

In the way of all fights, I do not know how long it lasted, but end at last it did. The deck ran deep in blood. Humans, even armored legionaries, had been torn limb from limb. Legionaries lay dead in dozens, Caledonians in hundreds-more than half their men were gone. But all the felines were dead or dying, and their purple and orange blood mixed with the red of the humans. I have always had one weakness: I weep and shake a little after a battle, I know not why. But I wiped the tears away.

The Jotoki mechanisms whined and roared as they strove to clear the air. Our legionary doctors hurried forward to tend the wounded, and so did certain Jotoki.

Other Jotoki hurried to secure the kzinti craft.

"Twenty times five kzinti dead," said Jegarvindertsa. The Jotoki counted strangely, but any might see that our human dead outnumbered the kzinti several times. "Also we have captured four kzinti spacecraft. There are tadpoles in this fleet's few breeding ponds who will live to join together and grow sentient because of this victory today. Strong and valiant are the legions. Yes, and your barbarians, too."

"We lost too many. It was a Pyrrhic victory," I said. The one saving grace, I thought, was that the Caledoni had lost far more than the legions, partly because they had charged into battle without armor. There would be a supply of red-polled widows to keep our men happy.

"You will not have to fight again without modern weapons and armor," Jegarvindertsa said. "That was the misfortune of war. Be proud that you conquered at all."

There was no more time for talk then. As always after a battle, my duty was among the wounded, raising their spirits (and indeed with the medicines and physicians of the Jotoki, much more could be done for them than I would ever have believed possible), cheering the surviving legionaries with promises of promotion and decorations, inventorying the stores with the quartermasters, and consoling widows and orphans. We had had a shortage of women previously. Now we had a surplus. I suspected that with our next battle the surplus would grow larger. I also noticed that some of the Caledonian women, now that they had been washed and decently dressed, some in the Romano-British style, were by no means uncomely, with their red hair and their muscles and bodies hardened in their hard country. The first mothers of Rome must have been women like these. The Caledonian chiefs had, sensibly, taken the comeliest women for themselves. A number of these were now among the widows.

I had much to do and learn, and it was some time before I had a chance to talk at leisure with Jegarvindertsa again.

"Next time they board, use gravity traps," I told him. "Direct them into spaces on the ship where you have previously hidden gravity engines, then activate them and crush them. It will save us men and Jotoki."

"Did you think of that by yourselves?"

"By myself, yes."

"We are astonished. We did not think of that. We sorrow we found you so late. We hope we have not found you too late.

"You are warriors yet administrators too. And for primitives you have a remarkable capacity for abstract thought. Who else in a culture with your technological level would have a god of excrement disposal? And a military system with NCOs as its hinge, specialized engineering corps, and books of strategy? To say nothing of the systematized disaster-relief that first interested us in you."

"We are the heirs of Troy, so Virgil tells us. The Hero Aeneas founded Rome."

"Yes, that is odd, too. Your art. Something gave your kind more brain than you had any obvious need for. That is true of all spacefaring races, of course. It is one of the Great Mysteries. But you are mystery beyond mystery. In shape and physiology, you are like the kzinti. But in some aspects of mind you are more like us. Our kinds have both tried to be bearers of civilization in a Barbaricum. We are an old race, but we have found traces of other civilizations that rose and perished long ago, across a waste of time which you could not conceive. We did not intend to follow them into oblivion. We had poets and thinkers, once, who wrote of the Jotoki Mission, and celebrated the Jotoki who died to bring civilization to barbaric planets. We thought well of ourselves. We brought happiness and prosperity to many worlds."

"Where are those worlds now? Will they not come to our help?"

"The kzinti have them for hunting territories and their inhabitants as slaves or prey. We unleashed huge evil on the galaxy. It would be better if we had never been."

"You did not know."

"We should have. We had the science, the civilization. We should have had the foresight. There is a great virtue for traders: strict attention to business. And there is a great vice of traders: too little attention to anything else. We learned too late that in our way we were as unbalanced as the kzinti."

"But now you know better?"

"Yes. Too late. We have lost too many. We fight a rearguard action without hope as the kzinti devour all we created… We did not do it all for ourselves, you know, though profit was the engine that drove us. Yes, we wanted wealthy and prosperous customers and trading partners-was that evil? Prosperous customers rather than slaves? We lifted species from savagery and barbarism, added a cumulative total of countless billions of years to the lives of individuals alien to us, created security and happiness…our mistake was to assume that given knowledge and instruction, the kzinti would be the same as other species."

"What can one legion and the people of a few Pictish villages do against such an enemy?"

"You are an…experiment. Some of us wanted no more alien mercenaries. If you are good enough soldiers to beat the kzinti, and faithful, we may recruit more of you."

"Raid Earth again, you mean? To enslave more?"

"No. We are not slavers, however we may seem to you. We recruited you as we did because we had little choice in the matter. When we return to your Earth we will release you from our service with fair pay-enough to make you more than rich for life-and trust you to recruit for us. We know that enslaved conscripts do not fight as well as freely enlisted men."

That was true enough. It was one of the principles on which Rome had built her Empire.

"Besides the gold, you will have the products of our science and medicine. And I think I can promise that you will be rich in stories to tell your children."

That was worth pondering too. Rome with Jotoki weapons would be invincible indeed! Providing-and here a thought came to chill the heart-providing its enemies were no more than men! But I thought of another matter.

"By the time we see Earth again, we will be too old to make sense," I said.

"We trust not. First, you will spend time in deep sleep if needs be, and will not age. Second, we travel at near the speed of light. There is an effect at such speeds so that time seems to change. You will find when you set your feet on Terra again that less time has passed for you than might seem… Now, we must leave this region before kzinti reconnaissance returns."

But when we spoke again things had changed. There was news of other battles, more feline victories. It seemed that we would not be going home yet. When I spoke with Jegarvindertsa a few weeks later there was a change in their manner. There was less talk of possibilities of victories, or even of prolonging the war, now, more talk of fleeing. "We found you too late," they said. "There is nothing left on the ledger but to try to save some last poor remnant of our kind. We do not know if we can keep faith with you."

I showed no feeling or emotion. I had my sword by my side, and it occurred to me that the best policy would to plunge it into them then and there. Some of us had learnt something of spaceflight by then, and I thought that with a scratch crew we might still be able to get the ship back to Earth. Take the consorts by surprise and destroy them without warning.

Men had achieved such things before. I remembered the Greek story of Xenophon's march to the sea, of Odysseus and his wanderings, fighting perils and monsters. Better to die trying to get home than be lost in the stars forever. But I would try to learn a little more before I struck.

"Where will you go?" I asked.

"The universe is big."

"So I have learned. Would they follow?"

"We can accelerate to near light-speed. But so can the kzinti. The longer start we have the better."

"Where will you go ultimately? Would you head for another star cluster? Another galaxy?" I talked of these things easily now.

"It would take too long. Even if we put ourselves into hibernation, as we usually do, the air would gradually leak out through the hulls, atom by atom. Our automatics would fail, micrometeorites and free hydrogen atoms would erode hull material at last. In any event, our life systems would eventually disintegrate. So would our bodies, in hibernation or not. And so, at last, would the hulls of our ships. We can travel far, but there is a limit."

"Where will you go?" I pressed them.

"Our friend, if we do not tell you, you cannot reveal it under torture."

"I am a Roman still. I do not fear torture."

"Forgive us, but you have not experienced kzinti torture. In a matter as important as that they would not hesitate a moment. Also you know they have telepaths-think what it means to be tortured by a telepathic race, and pardon us if we do not entrust you with our most priceless secret. But perhaps we are not clear yet ourselves. We must seek among the stars for the furthest that it is practical for us or our tadpoles' tadpoles to reach."

"You will go and leave us here? To fight the kzinti alone and without hope?"

"No. Only a few of us will go. Enough, just, to crew the ships and care for the tadpoles. The rest remain to delay the kzinti."

"I see. Like Horatius."

"Who?"

"A hero of our people."

"If we defeat the kzinti, we buy not only the survival of our kind, but also the survival of your kind, perhaps. Conquer them, and you will have the ships to go where you will. Back to your own planet, perhaps. The kzinti will strike your kind sooner or later, but if it is late enough, perhaps your kind will have science enough to fight them."

"You really believe that?" I thought of the onagers and javelins of the legions and of Rome attacked by kzinti weaponry. Hannibal and his elephants had been hard enough to subdue. And the cold hand that had touched my heart at a certain vision touched it again-kzinti falling upon Earth, upon the towns and cities of the Empire, of legions marching out with eagles and trumpets and small swords and javelins to fight sword-lights and plasma cannon. All the Empire, all Terra, turned into a vast arena for humans to be hunted by beasts. Forever. Delay them, he said. But could we delay them or divert them long enough?

"All things are possible," Jegarvindertsa said. "You have barely begun to discover metal alloys, but your military and civil organization are amazingly advanced-we traded with many primitive races and we know potential when we see it."

Their strange eyes with their pupils like crosses looked deep into my eyes. Somehow-perhaps Mithras Himself spoke to me-I knew that I stood at one of those moments when the decision of a soldier may change all the world. Mithras had been a soldier.

"You have seen the star maps and you know we speak truth." Jegarvindertsa said. "Your world, your Terra, lies that way. We intend to flee. We think the kzinti will pursue us. We will draw them away from your Terra, a sector of space which they would otherwise reach within a few generations real-time."

"But you have shown us how the kzinti advance everywhere."

"In some directions faster than others. But the longer the kzinti are delayed, the better the chance we will have of escape. Which means leading their empire away from your Earth. That is also buying time for your kind to develop defenses of your own."

"Spaceships? Beam-weapons?"

"One day, perhaps. Why not? Your kind have the brain for arches and aqueducts, maps and mathematics and even a bureaucracy. That means, we think, you have the brain to build spaceships. We do not know why the gods gave your kind-plains-dwelling apes-so much brain, though they also gave it to us, colonial amphibians, and to the cursed cats. There is more brain in each of us than you-or we, or they-ever needed for mere survival. But if it happened once, if can happen again. Perhaps it is a condition of amphibianism."

"But we are not amphibians! We are not frogs or sea creatures!"

"You have poetry, art, philosophy, as well as arches and aqueducts and armies. You have religion. That makes you amphibians. That is why we argued against Jufadirvanlums that you be recruited."

"The felines appear to have all those things too."

"Yes. That is a part of the mystery. Those barbarians have a glimmering of something else as well. We have tried to civilize them and failed. Now nothing remains for us but to fight to ward off our final destruction by them. We, and the species we brought forward into the light, are doomed to be but their slaves and prey. And yet, perhaps, one day far beyond our vision, you may be the agent that…" They stopped, and their strange eyes took on a yet stranger cast, as though they were focused upon some faraway light.

"Yes?"

"Perhaps, perhaps…one day…you will civilize them. We cannot."

"We have civilized Greeks, and Gauls, and Britons. A few Caledonians. Even a few Germans. But for how long? I do not know."

"You are physically more like the kzinti than we are."

"I am surprised you recruited us, then."

The strange mood was broken. Jegarvindertsa laughed.

"My dear Maximus, that was precisely the reason we did recruit you. That and the fact we were desperately short of mass for our fighting units anyway. But it was the argument we-that is, this five-unit of the Jotoki, comprising the group-individual that is Jegarvindertsa-put before the poor makeshift that has replaced our trade council."

The strange mood was broken. But I left my sword sheathed. I knew now what the Ninth Legion had to do. The old man had often spoken to me when I was a child, of the ultimate duty of dying for civilization. I wished my task had been so simple and easy.

Again the picture jumped.

A strategos does not lead a Legion on foot. Nor did I now. For all that had changed, and for all the Jotoki learning machines had taught us, our legionaries still remembered something of Roman tactics: scrupulous preparation, and then a thrust in the right place-use the sword for the thrust into the belly, don't waste time slashing at the armored head and chest. We dealt with the felines in the same way. The vanguard of their ships rushed at us, and we passed between them to attack from behind.

The kzinti gravity polarizers were as good as ours, as were their beam-weapons, but when the legions had fought barbarians it had been feet and hooves against feet and hooves, and swords and spears against swords and spears. When, with their scout ships and fighters smashed, we closed on their line of capital ships, it reminded me of tales of fighting in the arena.

We had learnt not to attack the heavily armored weapons turrets, or the strengthened prows, but to burn into the sides. Damage in the vacuum of space multiplies itself. The first felines I saw then were bodies flying into space when my beams tore into the semi-globular belly of a great feline warship.

We cut their line at two points, using their own speed against them and allowing their van to fly on until it could return and join the battle. By the time they did, the line was in chaos.

Human barbarians often keep attacking though it is plain they have lost the tactical upper hand, and have no concept of a fighting, strategic withdrawal, fighting instead as a furious disorganized mass, each unable to support the other. The kzinti were much the same.

There were gaps in our ranks-there always are after a battle-when we flew back to the carrier, but there was wine and women and feasting too. The Jotoki poured freshly minted gold on us, still valuable even though they had a technology for transmuting metals. I had read Caesar's Commentaries and imagined how he would have relished being here, lecturing the Jotoki on how to improve their space tactics and quietly plotting to take them over. It was then that I began to write this commentary of my own.

And we fought. Many times, crossing distances I cannot grasp even now, to strike in unexpected new places. And we won, many times.

Not always.

We must have missed a survivor once, who told the tale.

Finally we found kzinti who were ready for us.

Then, with our fleet slashed by kzinti claws, it was ground fighting again. We of the Ninth-the Caledonian cales were mostly expended by then-and what Jotoki could be spared.

A couple of the Jotoki ships, almost empty, with only the barest shadows of Jotoki crews, escaped. We bought them that chance of escape at the cost of our own. I do not know where they went. But perhaps they led the kzinti away from Terra as they promised. Perhaps they escaped and bred their little swimmers again.

We were left behind to divert and delay the kzinti like Horatius on the ground, defending the abandoned hulks of most of the Jotoki ships. Jegarvindertsa were one of the Jotoki who remained with us. The kzinti had withdrawn at last, but we knew they would soon be back, with fresh legions of their own.

Again the picture flickered and jumped.

"We have lost everything and there is no hope. We die here on a strange, cruel world. Well, we can still die like Romans. We are not strangers to hardness. I suppose we had better kill the women and children first. We will not give them to the beasts as if they were criminals in the arena."

"It may not be necessary to die at all," said Jegarvindertsa. "We still have other weapons."

"I see none. Can we fight the felines with short swords?"

"No. With gold."

"I do not understand."

"We will hide. Human and Jotok together. There is gold on this world, and we know the kzinti like gold as do so many species."

I did not understand.

"This world has underground rivers." I did not then know how he knew that, but I accepted that he did. "Many could hide in the wilderness, where kzinti believe nothing could live, for a long time."

"The felines would hunt us out. I do not want to die like criminals I have seen, fleeing and hunted by lions in pits and cellars under the arena."

"There are caves. We Jotoki might even breed there. It is unfortunate we are unlikely to have more than a little time to deepen them further."

That gave me a thought. I have seen the mines on my Sardinian estates. "Use your gravity engines, then. With them and Jotoki weapons you can break and move great masses of rock very quickly. You can enlarge the caves, join them up, and you can dump the spoil in the sea where it will not alert the enemy."

The kzinti returned in strength. We hid and fled. The kzinti hunted and captured and killed as they might. And then they began to see this world had much rich land that supported the game and hunting they craved. Perhaps they thought us all dead.

Another gap. Then a new speaker took up the story. He looked enough like Maximus Gaius Pontus to be his son-Perpetua realized he almost certainly was his son-but, like a number she had just seen, with red in his hair, that suggested something other than Latin in his parentage.

Gold was left out for the kzinti. It came to be seen that when and where gold was left out, the kzinti would take it and not attack. That was the first real victory.

There were other things we left-platinum, precious gems, carvings… slowly, the kzinti began to take it for granted that these would be left for them in certain places. A human bringing them would be unmolested, and allowed to depart in peace. It took decades. It was the first modification of total war…

"Total peace was too much to expect," said Marcus Augustus. "We settled for the best that could be hoped for: low-intensity, contained conflict along defined borders while we bought peace elsewhere.

"But there were two things to note: We brought the kzinti gold and other tribute on our terms. We were not slaves but, tacitly at least, trading partners as well as game. And slowly, slowly, as they became used to luxury, they became dependent on us, used to the luxuries we could provide, even as they hunted us. At last, it was our artisans-brave ones, those-who offered themselves as slaves and who installed hypocausts to warm their floors in the long nights. Over the centuries, we have got as far as you have seen. A fragile, unspoken, imperfect modus vivendi far too fragile ever to put to a real test."