Debt of Ages (25 page)

This got Sarnac's undivided attention. He and Tiraena would no longer be limited to second-hand messages relayed through Tylar. "I guess she's permanently out of stasis by now?" he asked, attempting offhandedness.

"Oh, yes—and hearing some disturbing rumors." Tylar himself looked disturbed, which was so rare an occurrence as to be alarming. But the time traveller proceeded before he could ask any questions.

"As I say, there's more. But we'll have time to go into that before your departure. What's most important just now is how you're going to deal with the military threat to Gaul. In these matters I will, of course, defer to Artorius."

The former High King seated himself on a marble bench, and they all followed suit. "Remember I mentioned that I've been making a study of my counterpart's reign? I wanted to pinpoint what gave him his military edge in the post-470 period."

"I've wondered about that myself. I know how good you . . . er, he was. And having served with the Artoriani, I know how good
they
were. But he was up against some top-flight opposition in Italy and later in the Eastern Empire, including
lots
of professional heavy cavalry."

"Ah, but before that—just after the diverging of the timelines and his defeat of the Visigoths at Bourges—he was called back to Britain to put down raiders from the western region known to you as Wales. Naturally, he recruited among the friendly tribes there; and on his return to the continent, with some of those recruits in tow, it was widely noted that his army's archery had improved dramatically. Does this suggest anything to you?"

"No," Sarnac replied, clueless. "Oh, sure, I remember how mediocre the archery was at Bourg-de-Déols. In fact, it had nowhere to go but up! But I don't see the connection between an improvement and the Restorer's rebel-bashing in Wales."

"Perhaps, Robert," Tylar prompted, "you're not aware that the English longbowmen of our history's Middle Ages—and their weapon—came from the Welsh marches."

Sarnac started to open his mouth, then closed it and was silent for a space. "Uh, but didn't that come a whole lot later than this?" he finally asked.

"To be sure," Tylar nodded. "But it's fallacious to suppose that the English longbow suddenly appeared, in the hands of men who were experts in its use, just in time for Crécy and Agincourt. There was, I believe, a medieval adage which held: 'To train a bowman, begin by training his grandfather.' "

"Still," Artorius said to Sarnac, "you're right up to a point. We're not talking about the fully-developed archery that flattened the fourteenth-century French chivalry. But that archery built on a very old tradition in parts of Wales. We now know just
how
old. They're using bows almost six feet long. And they've learned to draw them to the cheek, not to the chest." He saw Sarnac's expression and nodded. "The Restorer encountered this kind of archery in 470 and"—a self-deprecating grimace—"immediately saw its possibilities. He developed tactics for employing it in conjunction with his heavy shock cavalry . . ."

". . . which was already pretty much in a class by itself," Sarnac finished for him. "Jesus Christ! Now I can see why the Restorer went through Europe like beans through a Gringo! The Artoriani, supported by archers who know what they're doing, is not something I'd want to see from the receiving end!"

"But you're going to see it, Robert," Tylar said quietly. "You and Ecdicius. Your old comrade-in-arms Kai is about to lead the army you've just described into Gaul. And you're going to have to stop it."

* * *

After a while, Sarnac became aware that his mouth was open. He closed it, swallowed, and decided to speak calmly and reasonably. That, he'd heard somewhere, was the way to deal with a lunatic. "Tylar, I don't suppose it would do any good to ask if I can use high-tech stuff."

"Absolutely not! As I've repeatedly explained . . ."

"Okay. Okay."
Remember, calmly and reasonably! Screaming and jumping up and down would probably be counterproductive.
"So my job is to stop what's currently the best army on this planet, without any technological edge. Fine. I'm completely open to suggestions." A slight pause. "Uh . . . you
do
have suggestions, don't you?"

"Actually," Artorius said, "I do have one. It's something readily available to Ecdicius. In fact, it's so obvious that I wonder why I never thought of it, back when . . ." He gave a vague you-know-what-I-mean gesture. "What I want you to propose to Ecdicius is . . ."

They were descending from the high pass, with the Alps looming behind them, when they heard the commotion from the baggage train.

"What now?" Ecdicius muttered, signalling a halt and turning his horse's head around. Sarnac and Andreas followed him, as did the standard bearer, and they rode back uphill alongside the column with the red dragon standard streaming in the brisk upland air.

They hadn't been able to bring many troops from Italy—Gaul would have to defend itself with its own resources—but there were enough to discourage the remaining bandit gangs in the Alpine passes. (Twenty years earlier, Ecdicius would have had to pay them tribute for safe passage.) Behind the soldiers were the pack animals laden with good-quality weapons and armor as well as their own provisions. Here an altercation was underway, with several of the drovers yelling and gesticulating with Italian fervor at one of the others, a boy. As they neared the scene, one of the men grabbed the youth by an arm.

"Hold!" Ecdicius shouted. "What is this?"

The boy twisted free and whirled to face them . . . and Sarnac saw that she wasn't a boy. It took him another instant to recognize her, behind the smudged face and hacked-off hair. By then, Ecdicius's face was a mask of fury, and Andreas' one of joy.

"
Julia!
" Ecdicius looked like he was going to have a stroke. "What . . . what . . . ?"

"I was going to tell you tonight, when we came to our first halt in Gaul, father." She faced Ecdicius unflinchingly. "Don't worry about mother—I left a letter telling her where I am."

"But, but . . . how . . . ?"

The chief drover looked acutely miserable. "He . . . er, she joined us at the last minute in Rome, Augustus. She's pretty much kept to herself the whole way, and it wasn't till now that any of us had any idea. So nothing has . . . well, you know,
happened
, if you take my meaning. . . ."

"It's true, father. Don't blame these men; they knew nothing. It was all my idea." All at once her facade began to crumble, and she looked even younger than her years. "I
couldn't
stay behind in Rome and do nothing, father! And I knew you'd say no if I asked you. . . ."

"That's God's own truth!" Ecdicius leaned forward on his saddle-bow and glared down at her. "And Rome is exactly where you're going, young lady! I'm sending you back at once!"

Her lower lip trembled a little, but she looked her father straight in the eye. Sarnac had never noticed before how much like him she was. His beak was, in her, softened into a gentle aquiline curve, and she had her mother's lighter complexion and chestnut hair. But for sheer determination, there was little to choose between in those two faces.

"How, father?" she asked. "You can't send enough men back to keep me safe from the bandits in the mountains."

"It's true, Augustus," Andreas put in helpfully. "She's safer with us."

Ecdicius seemed about to explode, but he gradually subsided. "Very well," he grated. "You can come with us, until—and
only
until—I can find some proper lodging for you. In the meantime, now that everyone knows you're not a boy . . ." He gestured vaguely in Andreas' direction. "Andronicus, I want you to guard her, and
try
to keep her out of trouble!"

"I'll do my best, Augustus," Andreas replied, all dutiful resolve to carry out his orders, however distasteful. He looked like a Roman recruiting poster would have, if they'd used them. Sarnac somehow managed not to burst out laughing.

"And now," Ecdicius continued grimly, "let's proceed. We've wasted enough time as it is." As he turned his horse around, he gave Julia a final glare—or what was intended to be a glare but fooled no one. Then he shook his head. "Where you get your stubbornness and boldness from is beyond my comprehension!"

Sarnac continued to keep a straight face, nearly rupturing himself in the process.

* * *

A group of riders came out from the Arvernian villa to meet them. Ecdicius shouted a greeting to their leader and spurred his horse forward. Sarnac followed, urging his horse into a gallop.

He'd done a little riding in his youth, which combined with the trained reflexes conferred by Tylar's implants to make him an above-average horseman of this era. He was, in fact, just good enough to recognize greatness when he saw it, as he did when Ecdicius mounted a horse and they became a single organism with a single will. There were, he reflected, a few sights in the world that were in a special class by themselves. A clipper ship running before the wind under full sail. A cheetah building up to full speed as it pursued an antelope. A stooping hawk. Ecdicius on horseback.

They met the party from the villa, and its leader dismounted and saluted. "
Ave
, Augustus."

Ecdicius flung himself from the saddle and embraced the man. "Ah, enough of titles, Basileus! It's been too long." He held Basileus at arms' length and examined him with mock disapproval. "You've gone to fat since we rode together against the Visigoths! You must breed strong horses in these parts, to find one that can carry you!"

Basileus—about Ecdicius' age, and not noticeably overweight—grinned amid the general laughter. "You'll find I can still ride, Ecdicius. So can all of us. I've sent word to others of the old brotherhood, and several are on their way here now. We'll ride again, this time for the rightful heir of Artorius Augustus!" His men broke into a cheer, even the younger ones, who knew Ecdicius only from their elders' stories.

"Splendid! We've been spreading the word that we're all to rendezvous at Clermont next month. It'll be a reunion of the brotherhood, Basileus."

They had first passed through the Burgundian lands and made sure of the allegiance of those Roman allies. Then they had moved on into the Auvergne, stopping at the estates of Ecdicius' fellow cavaliers whom he'd led to the victory of Bourges, not on a hopeless exercise in gallantry as in Sarnac's history. They were mostly men in their late forties like the new Augustus of the West, but Basileus was right: they could still ride like centaurs. And the response had been the same everywhere. Clearly, Ecdicius would be able to throw limitless gallantry and
elan
at the hardbitten professionalism of Kai's veterans. Sarnac wondered if it would be enough.

Ecdicius remounted, using the stirrups Artorius and his men had inherited from that Sarmatian lump in the British melting-pot from which they were descended. In Sarnac's history they had been lost sight of after Artorius's downfall, vanishing from Europe until reintroduced by the Avars a century later. Here, of course, they were part of the standard heavy cavalry kit by now. So as far as cavalry technique went, it would be a wash between them and Kai.

Kai.
The image of his onetime friend, soon to be his enemy, came crowding in.
Does
this
Kai remember me at all? If he does, it's probably as a damned deserter! He must have wondered what became of Bedwyr and his mysterious employer Tertullian shortly before the Battle of Bourges.

He hauled his mind back to this late-summer day in Gaul, to this field he was riding across at Ecdicius' side. The rest of their party had joined them, and as they rode toward the villa Ecdicius was undergoing the embarrassment of introducing his daughter to Basileus. It wasn't as bad as it had been their first few stops; they'd gotten her some socially acceptable clothes, and her hair was growing back.

Ecidcius turned to him and smiled. "Look at them, Bedwyr," he said, swinging his arm in a circle to indicate Basileus and his retainers. "Have you ever seen such a crew of madmen? Kai will know he's been in a fight!" Then he turned serious, and seemed to echo Sarnac's earlier thoughts. "What courage and love of country can do, we'll do. But I can't stop thinking of what we're going to have to face. If it were just cavalry against cavalry, I'd face it willingly. But Kai's a master at using those damned longbowmen of his in conjunction with his cavalry. They can break up a formation, blunt a countercharge . . ."

Now's as good a time as any,
Sarnac decided. "Augustus, it seems to me that we must match him with archery of our own."

Ecdicius's brows drew together. "But how, Bedwyr? We can't just copy the idea of longer bows; it takes
time
to learn to use them properly. Those men Artorius brought back from western Britain had been doing it since they were boys! You can't duplicate that kind of skill overnight."

"True, Augustus; it takes time to train a longbowman. But . . ." He turned toward one of Basileus' men, who looked like he was just back from hunting, and pointed at that which hung from the saddle-bow. "It doesn't take long to learn how to use one of
those
, does it?"

"Why of course not." Ecdicius looked blank. "Anybody can learn to use a crossbow; there's little skill to it, you sight along it and pull on the handle. Every lad in Gaul uses them for shooting game. But what's that got to do with . . . ?"

Artorius had warned Sarnac to expect this. The Romans had had crossbows for a long time, and they were as popular for hunting as Ecdicius had indicated, not just for the relative ease of learning how to use them but also for the fact that you could leave the quarrel nocked indefinitely while stalking game and be ready to get off a quick shot as your prey broke cover. But the thought of using them in war had never occurred to anyone. They were hunting weapons, period. Why? Because that was what they'd always been. It would have surprised Sarnac before his previous brush with the fourth century, but now he knew about the conservatism of preindustrial societies.

"Since so many Gallic men know how to use them, Augustus, or can be quickly taught to do so, why not form a corps of them to give our men some missile support? Kai's longbowmen would have the advantage in range, but as you've said he has only a small number of them. We could put masses of crossbowmen into the field."