Here they landed and went ashore. And everything that the mound-building people of the northern land had said proved to be true.
“There is a great nation there,” Haraldus told the Emperor. “The citizens, who are extremely friendly, wear finely woven robes and they have an astounding abundance of gold, which they use in every imaginable way. Not only do men and women both wear golden jewelry, but even the toys of the children are of gold, and the chieftains take their meals on golden plates.” He spoke of colossal stone pyramids like those of Aegyptus, of shining marble temples, of immense statues depicting bizarre gods that looked like monsters. And, best of all, this wealthy land—Yucatan, its people called it—was only the nearest of many rich kingdoms in this remarkable new world across the sea. There was another and even greater one, the Norsemen had been informed, off to the west and north of it. That one was called Mexico, or perhaps Mexico was the name for this entire territory, Yucatan included: that was unclear. Sign language could communicate only so much. And still farther away, some inconceivable distance to the south, was still another land named Peru, so wealthy that it made the wealth of Mexico and Yucatan seem like nothing at all.
Upon hearing this the Norsemen realized that they had stumbled upon something too great for them to be able to exploit by themselves. They agreed to split into two parties. One group, headed by a certain Olaus Danus, would remain in Yucatan and learn whatever they could about these kingdoms. The other, under the command of Haraldus the Svean, would carry the news of their discovery to the Emperor Saturninus and offer to lead a Roman expedition to the New World on a mission of conquest and plunder, in return for a generous share of the loot.
Norsemen are a quarrelsome lot, though. By the time Haraldus and his friends had retraced their coastal path back to Vinilandius in the far north, feuding over rank aboard their little ship had reduced their numbers from eleven to four. One of these four was slain by an angry brother-in-law in Vinilandius; another perished in a dispute over a woman during a stop in Islandius; what happened to the third man, Haraldus did not say, but he alone reached the mainland of Europa to tell the tale of golden Mexico to Saturninus.
“Instantly the Emperor was gripped by an overpowering fascination,” said Drusus’s father, the Senator Lucius Livius Drusus, who was at court the day Haraldus had his audience. “You could see it happening. It was as though the Norsemen had cast a spell over him.”
That very day the Emperor proclaimed the western continent to be Nova Roma, the new overseas extension of the Empire—the Western Empire. With a province of such fantastic opulence gathered under its sway, the West would gain permanent superiority in its rivalry with its increasingly troublesome sister realm, the Empire of the East. Saturninus raised a veteran general named Valerius Gargilius Martius to the rank of Proconsul of Mexico and gave him command of three legions. Haraldus, though not even a Roman citizen, was dubbed a duke of the realm, a station superior to Gargilius Martius’s, and the two men were instructed to cooperate in the venture. For the voyage across the Ocean Sea a fleet of specially designed ships was constructed that had the great size of cargo vessels but the swiftness of warships. They were powered by sails as well as oars and were big enough to carry an invading army’s full complement of equipment, including horses, catapults, tents, forges, and all the rest. “They are not a warlike race, these Mexicans,” Haraldus assured the Emperor. “You will conquer them with ease.”
Of all the thousands of men who set forth with great fanfare from the Gallian port of Massilia, just seventeen returned home, fourteen months later. They were parched and dazed and enfeebled to the point of collapse from an interminable ocean voyage of terrible hardship in a small open raft. Only three had sufficient strength even to frame words, and they, like the others, died within a few days of their arrival. Their stories were barely coherent. They gave rambling accounts of invisible enemies, arrows emerging out of nowhere, frightful poisonous insects, appalling heat. The friendliness of the citizens of Yucatan had been greatly overestimated, it seemed. Apparently the whole expeditionary force but for these seventeen had perished, one way or another. Of the fate of Duke Haraldus the Norseman and of the Proconsul Valerius Gargilius Martius they could tell nothing. Presumably they were dead too. The only thing that was certain was that the expedition had been a total failure.
At the capital, people solemnly reminded one another of the tale of Quinctilius Varus, the general whom Augustus Caesar had sent into the Teutonic forests to bring the northern barbarians under control. He too had had three legions under his command, and through his stupidity and incompetence they were massacred virtually to the last man in an ambush in the woods. The elderly Augustus never entirely recovered from the catastrophe. “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” he would cry, over and over. And he said no more about sending armies to conquer the wild Teutons.
But Saturninus, young and boundlessly ambitious, reacted differently to the loss of his expedition. Construction of a new and greater invasion fleet began almost immediately. Seven legions would be sent this time. The Empire’s most capable military men would lead it. Titus Livius Drusus, who had already won distinction for himself in some minor border skirmishes in Africa, where even at this late date wild desert tribes occasionally caused trouble, was among the bright young officers chosen for a high position. “It is madness to go,” his father muttered. Drusus knew that his father was growing old and conservative, but still he was a man of profound understanding of events. Drusus also knew, though, that if he refused this commission, which the Emperor himself had offered him, he was dooming himself to a lifetime of border duty in places so dismal that they would make him long most keenly for the comforts of the African desert.
“Well,” said Marcus Junianus as he and Drusus stood side by side on the beach, supervising the unloading of the provisions, “so here we are in Yucatan. A strange sort of name for a place that is! What do you think it means, Titus?”
“‘I don’t understand you.’”
“Pardon me? I thought I was speaking very clearly, Titus. I said, ‘What do you think it means?’ I was referring to Yucatan.”
Drusus chuckled. “I heard you. And I answered you. You asked a question, and ‘I don’t understand you’ is what I replied. All around the world for centuries now we’ve been going up to the natives of one far-off place or another and asking them in nice grammatical Latin what that place is called. And since they don’t know any Latin, they reply ‘I don’t understand you’ in their own language, and we put that down as the name of the place. In this case it was Norse, I guess, that they don’t happen to speak. And so, when Haraldus or one of his friends asked the natives the name of their kingdom, they answered ‘Yucatan,’ which I’m almost certain isn’t the name of the place at all, but merely means—”
“Yes,” said Marcus Junianus. “I think I grasp the point.”
The immediate task at hand was to set up a camp as quickly as they could, before their arrival attracted the attention of the natives. Once they were secure here at the water’s edge they could begin sending scouting expeditions inland to discover the location of the native towns and assess the size of the challenge facing them.
For most of the voyage the fleet had kept close together, but as the ships approached the coast of Yucatan they had fanned out widely, by prearrangement, so that the initial Roman beachhead would cover twenty-five or thirty miles of the shoreline. Three legions, eighteen thousand men, would constitute the central camp, under the command of the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito. Then there would be two subsidiary camps of two legions apiece. Drusus, who had the rank of legionary legate, would be in command of the northernmost camp, and the southernmost one was to be headed by Masurius Titianus, a man from Pannonia who was one of the Emperor’s special favorites, though nobody in Roma could quite understand why.