“You are Brikanti,” Stef said carefully. “I understand that Brikanti is a distinct nation. Independent of the Romans and their Empire.”
Eilidh looked at her sideways. “You really do know nothing of us. Yes, Brikanti is an independent nation. The heartland is Pritanike, an island separated from the mainland of Europa, and therefore from the Romans’ ancient holdings.”
Stef hazarded, “An island the Romans called Britannia?”
“Well, they still do, in their arrogance. For most of our history we’ve traded with Rome peaceably enough. The Romans are the better soldiers; we are the better sailors. We build on the expertise of our Scand cousins, who have always been expert shipbuilders, back to the days of longships with their wooden hulls and woollen sails. When the Scand first burst from their northern fastnesses—they had run out of land to parcel out to too many sons—they were pirates and raiders, and the Brikanti and the Romans made a rare show of unity to beat them back. But it was the Brikanti in the end who forged alliances with the Scand. We had far-seeing leaders in those days—unlike the current lot—who were able to see the potential of this new nation of warriors and traders. There was a kind of revolution of the heart. With Scand ships and their expansive spirit, Brikanti stopped being a rather defensive ally of the Empire and began to forge its own global ambitions.
“Now our own northern empire stretches across the reaches of Europa, and also Asia, where we have a long frontier with the Xin. We are one of the three great powers, I suppose you might say, who dominate Europa, Asia, Africa between us. And we battle over the spoils of the Valhallan continents to the west, much to the chagrin of the native inhabitants.” She tapped her heavy soldier’s belt. “But Valhalla is an arena useful for developing military capabilities.”
Stef said, “And you are able to work with the Romans.”
“Yes. At this time we are officially at peace; the two of us are closer to each other than either of us is to the Xin… In other ages the pattern changes, though the underlying relationships endure.”
“Your culture is different from the Romans in other ways,” Stef said. “Women are stronger.”
Eilidh grinned. “Well, the Romans have strong women too, but they are powers behind the throne—the wives and mothers and sisters of emperors and generals. Our culture has a history of strong women, going back to Kartimandia, who saved us from the Romans.” She looked at Stef. “Is this a story you know? It is two thousand years old; every Brikanti child could tell it.”
Stef shrugged.
“You see, Julius Caesar had already set foot on our island, and had planted the dream of conquest in the Romans’ empty heads. Fifty years later Kartimandia, queen of a realm in the north, was informed that the time had come, that the legions were massing in Portus Itius on the coast of Gaul for the invasion. It was she who traveled in person to Rome, she who managed to persuade Emperor Claudius that there was much greater glory to be gained if he turned his legions north, into Germania transrhenus, which even his glorious predecessor Augustus had failed to conquer. Continental provinces would be easier to consolidate for the Romans, and besides, she pledged to become an ally of Rome so that the invasion was unnecessary. She made a good case, it was said, much to the surprise of many Romans. But, despite the Romans’ prejudice at the time—and despite what Caesar said about us—we were no hairy savages, and Kartimandia was sophisticated and wily.
“Well, it was Outer Germania that felt the tramp of the legionaries’ boots and not the fields of Pritanike. Kartimandia, with some Roman help, went on to consolidate her hold on the whole of southern Pritanike, and her successors made themselves valuable allies of Rome by becoming a secure exporter of grain, wool and leather to supply the Empire’s continental armies. The Brikanti have never forgotten the achievements of Kartimandia. And forever since, Brikanti women have won positions of power.”
Stef and Yuri had quietly talked over some of this with the ColU, as they speculated how this history had diverged from their own. In the account lodged in the ColU’s memory, at the time of the invasion of Britain, a woman Roman historians knew as Cartimandua had indeed ruled a kingdom in the north of Britain, called by the Romans “Brigantia.” And northern Germany, meanwhile, had never been conquered by Rome after the disastrous loss of three legions in the Teutoberg forest a generation earlier. Not so here. Stef supposed that even if they could figure out how history had diverged to deliver this strange new outcome, there was a deeper question of why. Why this history—why the change now? And how had she and her companions survived the transformation of human destiny?
Eilidh, evidently sharply intelligent, was watching her. “Much of this is unfamiliar to you, isn’t it? Someday we must explore our differences fully. Yet, whoever you are, wherever you come from, I see your soul. Watching you at the Hatch, I saw the wonder in your eyes.”
Stef shrugged. “Guilty as charged. In my—home—I was a philosopher, as the Romans would say. I studied the kernels, and later Hatches, because I wanted to understand how it all worked.” That had been her goal since she was eleven years old and she’d stood with her father on Mercury, and watched a kernel-driven manned spacecraft drive like a spear of light into the heavens. “Where do the kernels get their energy from? How do the Hatches work? What are they for? Why are they here? How was it I and my companions came walking out of that thing ourselves? And, frankly, I’m fascinated by what you’ve done here. On this world you’ve gone beyond anything my people ever achieved. You’ve built a Hatch…”
Eilidh grinned. “We have, haven’t we?”
Eilidh had the cetus pause over the Hatch construction site: the dull sheen of the Hatch installation itself at the center, the land shattered and melted for a wide area around that central point, and a loose cordon of bored-looking legionaries playing knucklebones with fragments of broken rock.
Eilidh and Stef sipped Xin tea. There was no coffee to be had, one miracle of globalization that evidently hadn’t translated to this timeline. Yuri had joked about going into business cultivating the stuff once they got back to Earth. But Yuri’s health was worsening; he’d been in a continual decline since they’d emerged from the Hatch…
Stef tried to concentrate on what Eilidh was telling her.
“To create a Hatch is like mating wild boar: a simple act to understand but dangerous in practice, especially if you get in the way… You take kernels. You arrange them in a spherical array, with all their mouths directed inward, to a single point in space. And at that center you place one more kernel, its mouth tightly closed. You understand that kernels can be handled with etheric fields?”
By which, Stef had learned, she meant electromagnetic fields. “Of course. We too first found kernels on Mercury. You can position them, even close or open their mouths to control their energy output.”
Eilidh frowned. “Some of your terms are unfamiliar, but clearly we agree on the essence. Well then, with sufficient kernels, held with sufficient precision, there is an inward blast of energy. You can only watch this from a distance, and many lives were spent in determining that distance precisely.
“The configuration holds for only a splinter of time before the arrangement is blown apart. The land, the air all around is shattered, melted, by an outpouring of heat and shock waves—well, you see the result here. But if you get it right, when the glowing gases and the rain of liquid rock and the shocked air have all passed, and you can go back in to see—when all that is done, what is left is a brand new Hatch in its neat installation, just as you see here.”