To Turn the Tide

Book : Make the Darkness Light

by S. M. Stirling

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi; Time Travel

Synopsis

New time travel military adventure from New York Times best-selling novelist S.M. Stirling

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

Everyone could see it coming. But one man could do something about it. Oh, he couldn’t avert the nuclear holocaust, but a scientist in Austria, ruthlessly using billions of research dollars for his own purposes, set himself up an out: he created a time machine, and filled a warehouse with low-tech survival gear. Too bad he didn’t get to use it himself.

Instead, a team of American grad students, led by their professor, is sent back to the late Roman Empire. Even though they are experts in this time and place, they are about to realize that books and actual experience are very different things.

If they can survive, they hope to remake the world into a better place. But that’s a big “if."

Release date: August 6, 2024

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 480

Sample

 CHAPTER ONE  

Vienna, Austria

June 25th, 2032 CE

 

 

None of the five Americans spoke much as the university van took them from Flughafen Wien-Schwechat—Vienna International Airport, just southeast of the city—to the Institute of Science and Technology campus on the western outskirts of Klosterneuburg. Which was upstream of Vienna on the same south-running stretch of the Danube as the Austrian capital.

“All motorway now go out, go out only of Vienna, too much auto. Must to go through city,” the driver warned them.

Even the chaotic traffic, the lurches and tight swearing—in Ukrainian—from the driver and once the bang-crash-tinkle of a collision right next to them didn’t spark any interest, despite being normally an unthinkable anomaly in this order-conscious country.

When the world was going to Hell…

All Hell breaks loose. In the eleven hours it takes to fly from Boston to Vienna, Arthur Vandenburg thought grimly. And maybe not just metaphorically, if things keep getting worse. Worse faster and faster.

He was the only one of them who saw much of the city’s Baroque splendors as they passed through, and then climbed over low forested hills, the famous Vienna Woods, and descended via back roads through glades and fields.

Arthur Vandenberg, graduate of West Point, formerly and very briefly captain in the US Army (1st Battalion, 75th Rangers) and newly minted Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History from Harvard, had put his phone away with a monumental effort of will after his wife’s last message—we’re praying for you—and his reply.

He was doing his best to be in the moment.

There’s nothing I can do about the world right now. Or even Mary and the kids. Exclude the irrelevant, get on with what’s on your plate.

It was a practiced mental trick he’d acquired in situations where the ability to focus totally was literally a life-or-death matter.

The team of four graduate students he’d put together for this—of oddly varied specialties, as requested—were still glued to their phones or tablets, earbuds in tight and eyes locked to the screens as their fingers flipped between apps, as if a new one would yield better news. They were all years younger than his early thirties, and though he didn’t know them very well yet, he thought they’d all had rather sheltered lives as far as physical danger was concerned.

It was a mild, bright day with a few lacy clouds in a pale blue sky…June in southern central Europe…but he could smell the all-too-familiar acidic rankness of fear in their sweat as they took in the babble that was the news feeds right now. It wasn’t just mutual hysteria building on itself, either, though there was plenty of that. The airport, and international air travel in general by report, had locked down tight right after their wheels touched down on the runway. Every flight in Europe, and apparently the world, was being diverted to the nearest strip…and wouldn’t that cause some lovely chaos.

The scariest thing was that they hadn’t interned the passengers. Or done anything else with them, except tell them to get lost—or manage their own affairs.

A flight of F-35s had gone by fairly low right after that, and they’d watched from the parking lot as they screamed past. Probably headed for a base in Slovakia and to hell with violating technically neutral Austria’s airspace. Things had gone downhill from there. Official silence echoed loudly about the renewed naval clashes in the western Pacific, and ugly, ugly rumors abounded.

And I am so glad Mary took the kids to visit her folks before I left, he thought tightly. Boston isn’t where I’d want to leave them right now. I just wish her family lived in the Falklands or Fiji, instead of Amarillo!

That was a remote, medium-sized city in the Texas panhandle, the closest real town to their nearby birthplaces. But it also had a nuclear-weapons assembly plant and another that made tiltrotors for the military.

When they arrived the campus of the Institute proved to be mostly a modernist anomaly embedded just west of Klosterneuburg’s panoply

of the ages on the Danube’s bank. It had opened in 2009, after all, though the trees and gardens were pretty. A nervous-looking academic with a white goatee and a lab coat over a suit was there to meet them, and the van drove off immediately to take their luggage to the Guest House.

If the driver doesn’t just take off for the Alps the way every third person in Vienna apparently has, Vandenberg thought sardonically.

Doctor rerum naturalium Hans Fuchs didn’t look in the least foxy. More like a terrified rabbit, in late middle age and skinny, with his tie loose and runnels of sweat trickling down his face and his eyes darting around or freezing on nothingness. His clothes looked as if he’d slept in them last night, and there was the slightest whiff of stale underwear.

“Dr. Vandenberg? Would you and your associates please come this way to Lab Eight? I am afraid there is no time to waste,” he said—in accented but fluent English, which everyone at a place like this spoke these days. “All will—”

He pronounced it vill, and Vandenberg’s lips quirked as he involuntarily remembered watching Colonel Klink in ancient Hogan’s Heroes episodes…ancient even then, on VHS…with his grandparents on their ranch in the Caprock country of the Texas Panhandle as a child, back in the early years of the century.

“—be explained. Follow me.”

Arthur Vandenberg’s eyebrows climbed as the man turned and hurried away; the Americans glanced at each other and followed at a brisk walk. This was all about as far from normal Austrian-German academic etiquette as it was possible to get and not suspect the man was on drugs or had just had a psychotic break.

They went into a large, anonymous building with white stone cladding on the outside and institutional-bland decor on the interior, almost painfully new. People pushed past them, apparently headed out; many of the offices were empty and littered with the paper detritus of rapid departure. One half-open door showed a man slumped unconscious over his desk with his face in a puddle of vomit and a bulbous flask-shaped bottle labelled marillenschnaps lying nearby, empty.

By contrast the big open lab they came to had people in plenty, with purposeful movement under the harsh light of overhead floods. Many focused on readout screens, and equipment ranged from standard laptops on tables to hulking and mysterious somethings amid snaking cables roughly taped to the concrete floor with metal protective runners over them. Other lines vanished into the steel vaulting above, crossing in front of the big row of windows just below the roof.

Whatever the machines were, they were eating a lot of power and not just by plugging into the wall socket—the slight ozone smell was fully familiar from deployments where field generators were the only electricity you got. The improvised look of parts of the ensemble was familiar too, however alien and high tech the details; the unmistakable

look of things put together on the whatever works, get it done in zip time, to hell with the paperwork principle.

It was an air you expected in a field encampment in an active zone, but distinctly odd in an Austrian research lab.

In the middle of the great room was a clear circle of space yards across, with stacked boxes and bales and bundles inside the taped perimeter, all resting on a big circle of gridwork. The Austrian led them over to it, and Vandenberg’s eyebrows did another rise as they got closer. It was the sort of gear you’d expect at an unusually period-conscious historical reenactment LARP meeting—

Don’t say period Nazi around here. Deeply untactful. You’re a prof now; gotta learn tact.

—which was an occasional guilty pleasure of his he had to hide to keep respect among the notably snooty Harvard faculty. It was bad enough in their eyes that he and his family attended a Baptist church.

The irony there being I haven’t been sincere about it for years. But ten thousand times better the faculty look down their noses in the common room than my causing Mary hurt.

The crates were wood fastened with crude nails, the parcels wrapped in tanned leather or coarse canvas with hemp or leather binding ropes…

And an honest-to-God gladius on top of one of the wooden boxes, with sheath and red-dyed leather balteus, the Roman military belt. In a second-century style with over-the-shoulder baldric to hold the sword and openwork silvered-bronze plaques on the part around the waist. He walked over to check, trailing grad students like ducklings.

Drawn a few inches, it revealed that it was even a specifically Pompeiian type of short sword with the sides of the twenty-inch blade parallel before the point. That was the final form that had come in with the Principate, and continued through to the third-century collapse.

Before he could organize a question, Fuchs handed him something he recognized just as easily: a dolabra, the Roman soldier’s classic entrenching tool. One side was an axe-head, the other a narrow mattock, and this one was mounted on a three-foot shaft of wood he recognized as from an ash tree.

It was a fine reconstruction; the surface of the metal part even had a pebbled finish, and the marks and filed-out nicks of hard use. Then he looked more closely; the material was wrought iron, not steel.

And his eye recognized the slightly porous texture that came from iron made in a bloomery. A Catalan forge or the like, producing a glowing ball that was hand-hammered over and over to get the slag out, the small-batch, labor-intensive method the Classical world had used to make iron. That was authenticity taken to absurd lengths. Who went to that much trouble with a reconstruction? And the shaft had a worn look he knew from a rural childhood. It was a hard-used tool kept strictly for function, where you didn’t waste time

on pretty.

The quick surface coating of rust was also far too authentic, and when he raised it to his nose and sniffed, he smelled rancid vegetable oil of some sort, layers rubbed in over years and left.

“No, Herr Doktor, it is not a duplicate,” Fuchs said as he saw Vandenberg’s face change. “It is real. This you see around us is not apparatus for dating historical artifacts dug up by you historians and archaeologists—I implied that because you would not have believed what it really is, not without seeing it for yourself.”

He’d said they’d developed a method for giving an immediate, nonintrusive and really reliable absolute calendar date for any artifact, which would have been an archaeological Holy Grail and very, very important for historians too.

“My apologies for the necessary deception.”

Vandenberg felt a surge of anger replacing bafflement; he’d been lied away from his family, and it had been done now of all times!

The Austrian waved around them. “This…it is an apparatus for temporal displacement. A radical breakthrough. The first small-scale experimental confirmation a year ago…you are holding it…very rapid progress since.”

Time travel? Vandenberg thought, his fury growing as he dropped the dolabra on a bundle. Where’s the big lever and the upright circle of fake CGI mercury rippling?

He very nearly turned around and walked out then. What stopped him before the weight came off his foot was a quick glance around the chamber; there were several score million euros or more on display, possibly much more. And the Institute in general and Fuchs in particular had excellent reputations: he’d checked when Fuchs contacted him months ago, talking with people he knew in the science departments back at Harvard.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t a total crank playing make-believe in his mother’s basement. Serious R&D money was involved; so was the Institute’s reputation.

And I can’t get home anyway, not right now. Air travel’s locked down.

Just then his opinion of the Austrian physicist became moot, because his graduate student Filipa Chang screamed.

It was an ear-piercing shriek, and she was clutching her phone in both hands and sobbing and looking as if she was about to puke, too:

“Seoul! Seoul was bombed, nuclear!”

Her parents had been born there, and he knew she had family ties that she kept up.

The other graduate students—Mark Findlemann, Paula Atkins, Jeremey McCladden—brought up the phones or tablets they’d let fall to their sides while the senior academics spoke. They began babbling in chorus, and he had to focus totally to pick out the separate threads:

“—there’s a flash from over Seattle—city communications cut out all of a sudden—”

“Tokyo’s gone—”

“Russian troops crossing the Lithuanian border from Kaliningrad—”

“Tactical nuke at—”

“London! London’s been bombed, multiple hits!”

“New York—shit, my family’s there! Shit, shit—”

“Hundreds of launches incoming to North America. From China, and what’s left of Russia too!”

“We’re launching back—subs—”

Somewhere in the background a siren began to wail.

Professor Fuchs reacted instantly, as if he’d been thinking of just this; he turned and ran for one of the computer stations and started hammering two-fingered on the keyboard. One brief set of entries, and he was up and running back toward the Americans.

There was a bright flash through the high windows. Then a sudden high-pitched whine from the electronics all around them, earsplittingly loud, and after a split second beneath it came a bass rumble.

Arthur Vandenberg had never heard those sounds before, not in person. There hadn’t been any above-ground nuclear tests in his lifetime, though his father’s grandfather had been in a slit trench a mile and a half from one in 1957 in Nevada. He’d heard the recordings in classes at West Point, though, and recognized it instantly. The hairs tried to stand up along his spine.

This wasn’t a scratchy analogue-to-digital recording. He could feel the shudder beneath his feet. A high-yield fusion bomb had detonated within—at most—ten miles from where he stood. Several hundred kilotons at least, a city-smasher.

Flicker.

Everything seemed to freeze for an instant, and the light dimmed.

Then it was back to normal and Fuchs was dashing for them, face twisted in panic as pieces of equipment began to short out spectacularly in the background amid showers of sparks and:

Flicker.

And Fuchs was launching himself through the air in a dive like someone going for first base, headfirst with arms outstretched. Other people all through the big lab were starting to run toward them, or just sat there screaming. And the screams went up and down the scale, from normal shrill to dull sonorous tones that stretched out like molasses in January.

Flicker. Flicker.

Fuchs stopped in midair; then lurched forward; then he hung again impossibly suspended.

Light swelled through the broad, high windows. Everything turned a washed-out faded color.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.

Faster and faster, strobing, and now Fuchs’s leap was in jerky slow motion and there was a vast bass rumbling like the sound of a world breaking. The big windows began to bulge inward, fractures in the tough glass.

spreading as Vandenberg watched.

He knew with some remote part of him that he was about to die, and the faces of his son and daughter and Mary were there. He hadn’t really believed in Heaven for some time, but now he wished he still did.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.

His own mind telling his body to hit the dirt, close his eyes, put his arms across his face, but the response of body to thought was absurdly slow, as if he was encased in amber honey. Heat beat against his face. A taste grew in his mouth, acrid and metallic and burnt all at once.

FlickerFlickerFlickerFlickerFlickerFlickerFlickerFlicker…flickflickflick…

Blackness.

CHAPTER 2

Provincia Pannonia Superior, Imperium Romanum

Consulate of Marcus Gavius Orfitus and Lucius Arrius Pudens

Fourth year of the joint auctoritas of Imperator Caesar

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus and Imperator Caesar Lucius Aurelius Verus Augustus

Ante diem VII Kalendas Iulias CMXVIII Ab Urbe Condita

(June 25th, 165 CE)

 

The merchant Josephus ben Matthias—it was Lucius Maecius Josephus on the libellus that attested his Roman citizenship—rode northwestward from Vindobona on a fair summer day, along the Roman highway that ran not far from the west bank of the Danube. Which river hereabouts was the border of the Empire as well, or at least the boundary of direct control. His young nephew Simonides rode at his right hand and his Sarmatian freedwoman Sarukê came behind, managing the remounts and the packhorse whose panniers contained very little right now except a goodly sum in coin.

They passed through the well-cultivated land that surrounded the city: truck gardens, rich grainfields shining golden, orchards and vineyards on slopes, woodlots higher up. Scattered farmsteads stood among the fields, and hamlets huddled together. Rarer but imposing were red-roofed villas stuccoed in cream-white or brighter colors, each with its dependencies and the distinctive luxurious glitter of windows made with panes of glass in wooden frameworks. Rows of workers in the fields were taking the very first of the winter wheat with flashing sickles, looking up now and then to gaze at the road.

At travelers on foot or in the saddle, groups of belated migrant harvest workers trudging with their bundles and tools on poles over their shoulders soldier-wise, and long trains of two-wheeled carts and bigger wagons inbound toward the city with fodder and fruit and vegetables and firewood and charcoal. Or at donkeys nearly invisible under bundles of this and that.

Plus the odd herd of docile sheep or obstreperous pigs or smaller groups of cattle headed likewise, and once a coffle of twenty German slaves yoked neck to neck and supervised by several armed, mounted guards with clubs and whips. Some of the human merchandise were young men with healing wounds—warriors captured in some intertribal skirmish across the river, and sold to Roman traders. They’d probably be kept going to markets further away, for safety’s sake.

The numbers on the road dropped off as the day progressed, and there were only scattered groups after they stopped for a noon meal of bread, oil, onions, smoked mutton sausage and fruit. Now and then cavalry patrols from the auxilia went by, giving them sidelong looks, sometimes swinging across the road and asking questions, then riding on at his cheerful greeting and mention of his name and residence.

“More patrols than usual,” he said. “The Lord of Hosts grant it’s just the commanders being nervous.”

“Amen,” his nephew said.

Sarukê snorted; she knew better.

For that matter, so do I, Josephus thought, pressing his lips together.

Out on the blue river itself, barges and sailboats passed, and rafts of timber and little fishing smacks. Twice a light patrol galley, swift as a serpent among the tubby cargo vessels, its fifteen oars a side beating the water into froth and a gilded bear or boar’s head and painted glaring eyes above the bronze ram. The water smelled cool and fresh when the wind came from the northeast, leavening the earthy-dusty scents of farmland, the green growing tang of woodlots and pastures and the barnyard odor of livestock and their own horses’ sweat.

Birdsong was loud, louder now that the sound of human voices was rarer. The hooves of the horses clattered on the concrete-set paving stones of the road, or thudded on softer dirt when they could ride beside it to spare the beasts.

Josephus was in his thirtieth year, and Simonides only just adult at seventeen, but otherwise they had a strong family resemblance: both of medium height, olive skinned, wiry slim in a well-muscled way with big dark-hazel eyes and black hair and long faces with bold noses. Josephus wore his dense curly beard short cropped, in the Greek-philosopher style that Marcus Aurelius had made popular, and his nephew’s was so tufty-patchy to date that he shaved in the older fashion to avoid humiliation.

They both wore openwork cothurnus boots, tight knee-length leather riding breeks—called

femoralia because they covered the femur, the thigh—and short-sleeved tunics. Those were of tough linen bloused up through their belts to knee length too, but of good dyed cloth with embroidery at the hems, and they had broad-brimmed leather traveler’s hats on their heads. On a warm summer’s day like this the practical hooded cloaks woven from grease-in wool were rolled up and strapped behind them; unlike the lands further south, it could rain here at any season, which made the cloaks a wise precaution.

“Usually nobody minds much if you dodge some of the import taxes on amber and furs, provided you—” the merchant said.

With a gesture that involved fingers stroking palm and meant grease the right hands.

He spoke in Greek, which was the language they usually used in his family; Josephus had been born in Syrian Antioch, and so had the boy’s father, who was his half brother and elder by fifteen years, by his father’s first wife. Simonides spoke Latin as well, of course, and Aramaic; Josephus had those and a few others, including Persian and the local varieties of Gallic and German.

“But lately the Marcomanni”—he inclined his head toward the river; that was the German tribal confederation that occupied most of the other bank here—“have been kicking up their heels. Raids, and not just by a few hotheads. Prince Ballomar swears he’s a loyal Roman ally, but he’s the one behind it, and his father’s too old and doddering to stop him. So the new legate of the Tenth—”

Which was the legion long stationed at Vindobona, though seriously understrength right now. The previous commander had been sent to help wage the war the emperors were currently fighting with the Parthians in the east. He’d taken large vexilliationes, detachments, from all the Danubian legions with him and a goodly chunk of their auxiliary archers and cavalry too, and nearly all their catapults and siege gear.

That was one major reason Prince Ballomar was getting playful, insofar as a German warlord needed reasons to cut throats and burn and steal.

“—he’s getting tight-arsed about enforcing the duties and regulations on cross-border trade. Still, it’s worth a little risk. It increases the margin of profit on the goods by, oh, two parts in ten or a bit less. Which is the difference between not worth bothering and nice tasty morsel.”

Simonides frowned, memorizing the information. Like his uncle he was a younger son—youngest son, and third youngest of six living children, in fact—and would have just enough of a patrimony to get him started. He was staying with Josephus as an apprentice, more or less.

Though of course all the extended family’s heads of household helped each other at need, contributed local connections, partnered on ventures, and corresponded and exchanged valuable news

from Massilia in Gaul all the way to Seleucia over the border in Parthia. They all collaborated on charitable works too, and on supporting rabbinical students from the family or bright youngsters from poorer ones.

Josephus was moderately proud of how he’d turned a small inheritance into a fair degree of affluence, though trading on the frontier had its risks.

No risk, no profit, he thought, slapping the hilt of his sword, a plain practical cavalryman’s weapon like the bow cased at his knee with its built-in quiver. And hereabouts…sometimes it’s not just money you risk.

Hence this trip to dicker with a minor landowner who sidelined in smuggling because his Norican-Gallic family had old blood links over the border. With absolutely nobody along he didn’t fully trust to keep their mouth shut. Fortunately, amber was very high value in relation to bulk. One packhorse could anonymously carry far more than was practical to buy, hidden among nondescript bundles. Ostensibly he was buying beeswax, which was perfect for concealment and quite plausible, since it was moderately high value itself.

Sarukê dhugatêr Arsaliôn—the middle word was “daughter of” in her tongue and the last her father’s name—looked carefully and methodically both ways down the deserted stretch of highway and said:

“Leave road here, lord?” in rough but fluent Greek; she spoke equally bad Latin too. “For villa of Lord Marcus? I go first?”

Josephus checked the road in his turn; they were alone and she was reliable, but you couldn’t be too careful. Nobody was in sight, and there weren’t any of the border watchtowers overlooking this stretch either.

“Do it,” he said. “Nephew, take the extra horses’ leading rein, she’ll need both hands.”

Sarukê was probably about two or three years younger than the merchant, and a full four inches above his middling five foot five height. Sarmatians were a tall folk; she also had the pale skin, almost colorless gray eyes and reddish-blond hair common among those nomads of the Pontic steppe, and was beaky faced and built like a leopard.

Fighting women were not unknown among them too, though not exactly common. Josephus suspected the old Greeks had gotten their legends of Amazons from that source. She’d been captured when a raiding warband was smashed on the northern border of Dacia, the trans-Danubian province further east that Emperor Trajan had

conquered a lifetime ago, and sold to the arenas further south as a slave gladiatrix.

The merchant had bought and manumitted her after he saw her win a bout in the arena, thus almost certainly saving her from an early, nasty death.

Right now she was dressed in her native garb, or as close as you could get here. Leather jacket and baggy woolen trousers that were tucked into soft strapped boots; a knee-length coat of riveted mail went over it, and a dagger and a ring-hilted longsword were belted to her waist, along with a steppe recurve bow in its quiver-case. The round shield slung over her back was painted with a triskele pattern of gryphon heads.

When armed as now, with the domed helmet on and its horsehair plume nodding over her head, and the hinged cheekpieces that tied off below her chin covering much of her face, she was usually taken for a man among Romans. Ex-gladiators were commonly hired for bodyguard work, though Josephus’ friends had twitted him about a female one, with rough jokes about dual jobs and sly digs about excessive thrift on her purchase price. But he’d found it very useful indeed to have a competent bodyguard who did not look like a fighter when she was in woman’s garb.

Not to ordinary Roman eyes, at least. That had given several robbers and one unscrupulous business rival a very nasty…very pointed…surprise.

And she’s more loyal than a man in her position would be, he thought. She can’t go home again.

She also had an uncanny memory for terrain; they’d only been this way once before, and that in wintertime, but she never hesitated as they crossed the roadside meadow and went into the wood beyond on a deer trail leading northwest. Big trees towered over them as they rode through low densely forested hills, beeches and ash, oak and hornbeam, elm and more casting an umbrous gloom. Brush was thick where sunlight broke through, and they could hear the odd rustle from boar and deer and aurochs and other wild beasts. A half-wild sounder of the landowner’s pigs feeding on the rich mast of beechnuts and acorns squealed and gave them suspicious, gimlet-eyed, tusk-clashing looks as they passed, though the swineherd wasn’t in sight.

Occasionally they passed a stump and chips and the drag marks of an ox team where a tree had been harvested, or a circle of saplings springing up from the roots of such. The hills began to fade as they descended to the north, and open patches showing the marks of grazing herd beasts grew more frequent.

Then he reined in and said:

“Hold!”

There was an odd feeling in the air, like the tension before a thunderstorm, prickling the hair on the back of his neck. The birds had grown silent.

And then a flick of brilliant white light came from beyond the edge of the trees, followed by a sharp, piercing whining noise not quite like anything he’d ever heard before. Almost like two pieces of metal scraping but far louder, loud enough to hurt the ears.

Another flick of light, and another. More, and each closer to the next until he closed his eyes and threw up a hand against the intolerable brightness. Then it was gone, and the noise ended with a crack sound and a thudding like heavy weights dropping on the ground but from no great height. The horses snorted and reared and rolled their eyes, and he slugged his back into obedience with a hard tug on the reins. 

Sarukê was looking frankly terrified, eyes wide and staring beneath the rim of her helm, teeth bared in a snarl; men and beasts didn’t frighten her much, but this smacked of the Otherworld. Simonides was pale but biting his lip and visibly mastering himself.

“The Lord God of Hosts is with us!” Josephus said to the boy sharply. “Call upon Him, and fear nothing.”

He was frightened himself. But he was also curious; and there really was no profit without risk. New things were opportunities, and you had to be able to seize them. Letting terror cloud your wits didn’t help.

And I’m not going to look fearful before my nephew.

The merchant slid down from the horned cavalry-style saddle and tethered his horse to a nearby sapling; the normal, mundane actions helped him take back self-control. The other two did likewise, and Sarukê had the remounts and packhorse calm in moments. Josephus drew his sword, his nephew a long curved sica dagger, and the Sarmatian had an arrow on the string of her powerful four-foot horse-archer’s bow. They went forward to the northern edge of the woods, down on their bellies for the last few yards, through hazel thicket and ladybell with the odd blue flower lingering, yellow Venus-foot and others.

The stretch of meadow ahead was normally just more rough grazing on a low, gentle slope; the Danube was out of sight from here even when the leaves were off the surrounding trees. The great river did a sharp turn to run east-west a few miles north…upstream…of here, and they were in the elbow of the curve.

No birds sang, and no butterflies danced or bees buzzed about the flowers. Now it held—

You’d need a big oxcart to take all that, his merchant’s mind calculated automatically as he blinked at the sight. No, two of them. Or a four-wheel wagon.

Ten yards away in the knee-length flower-starred grass was a collection of wooden boxes, fastened together with the luxury of iron nails and tumbled higgledy-piggledy, some cracked a bit. One teetered and fell over with a thump as he watched. A few chests and trunks, and a number of sacks. Many large bundles, rope wrapped with outer coverings of coarse burlap or waxed leather. A few things leaned against them; a pair of spears, a couple of ordinary flat oval shields of the type many people carried in rough country, and a Roman legionary sword and belt.

And sprawling unconscious on the ground, just to one side, five odd-looking people…and part of another man a little further aside, an older man with a white tuft of beard on his chin, his legs sliced off neatly at the upper thigh and his mouth gaping in death. There was no sign of the missing limbs, but the blood was still flowing.

Which made no sense at all.

Wounds like that killed quickly, and the red tide ebbed and slowed to a diminishing trickle even as he watched. But where had been the screams and

clash of iron and beating of blade on shield? And some of the bundles were smoking faintly, as if they’d been exposed to very high heat, like cloth held too close to a crucible of molten copper but not quite long enough to burst into flame.

He rose and walked forward into the clearing, sword still ready; the air was unnaturally hot, and there was a curious smell like lightning, but both were fading quickly. The others followed, and Sarukê did a swift expert circuit of the clearing, bow ready.

When she called there was disbelief in her voice:

“Nobody else! No new man track or horse track or ox sign or wheel sign, either, lord! None!”

“Take a look at the baggage,” Josephus said to his nephew, sheathing his sword.

And added to himself: “Strange, very strange. Solomon in his wisdom might be able to figure out how they got this much heavy gear here without leaving tracks. There must be a full”—he stirred a few of the bundles with his toe to confirm his impression from the way they looked—“two or three thousand libra of it. Thirty or forty talents.”

Sarukê was good at hunting and fieldcraft, and if she said there wasn’t any sign, there wasn’t.

“But I can’t figure it out. Unless they dropped from the sky like that Greek Icarus in the story!”

Young Simonides hastened to obey, his natural curiosity overcoming the ebbing fear. Sarukê remained tightly ready for a fight as she kept their surroundings under a ceaselessly moving eye.

Josephus examined the people, the living ones—several of them had trickles of blood coming from nose and eyes and ears, but they were definitely not badly wounded, breathing steadily if slowly, their pulses regular when he put his fingers to throats.

There were five. One very tall man, fully six feet, of about Josephus’ age or a bit less, but clean-shaven in the older Greek or Roman way. He had light hair sun streaked with white-blond and cropped close, and out-of-doors tanned and weathered skin; the merchant raised one eyelid with his thumb, and the eye beneath was blue. The features were oval, handsome in a bluntly regular square-chinned way, and he’d have called them Gaulish or German at first glance. Though plenty of folk of both stocks had lived under Rome for centuries now, mingling their blood with all the others.

His clothes had a vaguely Germanic shape too, rather close-cut ankle-length trousers with a buckled belt through sewn-on loops to hold them up, socks of a distinctly odd make, closed leather shoes of intricate construction, a blue jacket with a white shirt beneath it that was fastened up the front with an odd arrangement of pearly disks shoved through slots in the cloth. But no single detail of cut or construction was familiar, and the cloth was of a fantastically fine weave and unfamiliar materials. The shirt might have been cotton, an eastern fabric as expensive as silk, but

 wasn’t—not quite. It felt too smooth, somehow.

Scars on his face and hands, Josephus thought. Not quite like any I’ve seen before either…but a warrior if I’ve ever seen that. Strong built, out much in all weathers, but not a laborer’s muscle. And a rich warrior, by his garb. A chief or lord, perhaps?

The other four were younger, not much older than his nephew…though he couldn’t be certain, because they were all quite big too. Not giants, no size you wouldn’t see occasionally on a farm or city street, but conspicuous when you saw the five of them together.

Like a crowd of Sarmatians for height.

Two were women, but they were as tall as he was or nearly; two were men, and taller. All four wore tight blue trousers with copper studs, tight as his own leather riding breeks but ankle length rather than to the knee, and closed shoes even stranger than the older man’s, of hard-but-flexible materials he couldn’t identify at all.

Leather boiled and waxed would come closest, but not very close.

And tunics, small tight ones of a stretchy fabric; one bleached snow-white, one black, one brown and in one case white with a distorted dog’s head drawn on the cloth somehow, and all tucked them into the blue trousers.

One of the men was skinny, with a big nose and light olive skin, a shaggy-frizzy dark-brown beard and similar hair already retreating a little; he might have been a cousin of Josephus, save that he was as tall as the strange warrior. The other man had the same Gallic or German looks as the first, and like him was clean-shaven, quite tall but not towering, broad shouldered and strong but with little callus on his hands.

Like a rich Greek who spends much time at sport.

The women were truly, deeply strange, even apart from their mannish garb. One was a black Nubian or Aethiop, ebony skinned and good-looking in a rather plump fashion. The other had pale umber-brown skin just a little darker than his own, a small nose, high cheekbones, long raven-dark hair and black eyes that had a fold at the corners, making them look tilted.

I saw a man who had those slant-eyed looks in Parthia, and he was flat of face like her, he thought, recalling a journey with his father half his lifetime ago. Though it didn’t look nearly so pretty on him! They said he came from far to the eastward.

This group was as mixed as you might see in a great city, Antioch or even Rome, never mind this provincial backwater. All of the strangers also had the look of those who’d never wanted for food, and except for the older warrior didn’t look as if they’d had to labor as hard as most did, either. And—he checked, on a vagrant impulse—they all had unusually fine teeth, white and straight and none missing.

Which meant they were all rich or raised that way, and unusually lucky too.

Unlike hunger and toil, trouble with your teeth was one of those things you couldn’t buy your way out of. If anything the rich had more of it, for some reason.

“Uncle! Uncle!”

Simonides’ voice was urgent, but this time his excitement held a note of pleasure. Even of awe.

Josephus saw that he’d opened the chests—they had locks, strange and small and finely made, but the keys were still in them. The one he hung over eagerly was big enough to need two men to carry it, and had hide loops for that riveted to its sides; the construction was boiled and oiled leather over a stout wooden interior, and it was strapped with iron.

Another one, even larger but otherwise like it stood open beside it, and it was packed with books—in codex form, not scrolls, bound along one side, and in fancy ways with unknown lettering on the backs rather than on the cut edges of the pages. That almost distracted him, his hands itching to examine the odd volumes, but the soft leather sacks had a magical pull.

An interior partition divided the trunk into a larger and smaller compartment. The younger man had opened the topmost sack on the larger side, and poured coins into his hand. Josephus snatched one up, bit it and held it up to catch the light.

It was a silver denarius of Antoninus Pius, the emperor before the current princeps and his co-ruler Verus. Good silver, definitely, not clipped or some cheap counterfeit—an ability to judge money accurately at a glance was a necessity in his line of work. ...