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.