“By human standards of beauty? I suppose that's a compliment?”
“Personally I like long whiskers, and fur with a pleasing alternation of orange and yellow stripes, among other things. Four nicely shaped teats help, too, and muscular haunches, not to mention the right smell. But be alert.”
Marcus Augustus halted them, glanced at the sky, took a step to the side, and disappeared.
Ginger's ears opened like Chinese parasols. The man had walked inside a tree.
No; a colony of trees, grown together.
It was a really tight fit getting in. Warrgh-Churrg very likely didn't know about this; an uninvited kzin entering here would not be seen again, except possibly as a rug.
“We kept records,” Marcus Augustus said, “and the Jotoki gave us better books than scrolls and wooden boards for writing on. Our ancestors were the Ninth Legion, the Hispania. You don't seem surprised.”
“I guessed it might be that,” said Perpetua. “The legion that marched north into Scotland—ah, Caledonia—from Hadrian's Wall and was never seen again.”
“You know that!” Marcus Augustus jumped forward, clasping Perpetua's arms with both hands. “But… with time-dilation effects… from Earth's point of view… I'm not sure, but it must have been thousands of years ago!”
“About two thousand five hundred years, almost.”
“Then—Does Rome still stand? Our battles were not in vain? We led the felines away?”
“She is still a great city, but much has changed.”
“Was Rome conquered?”
“Not by the kzinti. Only by other humans. And the Human Empire in space that defeated the kzinti is the heir of the empire of Rome. You see I know your language.”
“I suppose Earth has got old.”
“Old enough to build spaceships of her own. We come from a colony at Earth's nearest star.”
“That is good to hear. And the felines?”
“We fought long wars. We won. Now some, like my companion here, are foederati. Didn't your people recruit Germans? But you spoke of time dilation. You know how time is related to the speed of light?”
“Of course. The Jotoki taught our ancestors… How could you have traveled so far?”
“We travel faster than light.”
“It cannot be done!”
“It is how we beat the kzinti. They were a great empire when the leading edge of their wave of conquest reached Earth and its colony worlds and attacked them. We almost perished. Then the hyperdrive came to us.”
“I cannot think you are lying. If you were but a kzinti puppet you would not know so much about us.”
“So what happened?”
“Do you wish to hear the story firsthand?”
“Firsthand?”
“I told you. We—and the Jotoki—have good records.”
He led them to another room in the underground complex, inviting Perpetua to recline on a human-sized couch. Other couches were pushed together for Ginger. Somehow well-used libraries have something of the same atmosphere in every culture. He touched a panel and a screen came to life.
“Behold Maximus Gaius Pontus of senatorial rank, strategos of the Hispania.”
A man with an aquiline nose, a peculiar mark burnt between his eyebrows, sat in a carved wooden chair, speaking into a camera.
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.