It seemed to Drusus that Olaus claimed also to have made contact with the other kingdoms of the New World, the one to the west in Mexico and the one to the south that was called Peru. Had he gone to those distant places himself, or simply sent envoys? Hard to telclass="underline" the narrative swept along too quickly, and the Norseman’s way of speaking was too muddled for Drusus to be certain of what he was saying. But it did appear that the peoples of all these lands had been made aware of the white-skinned, black-bearded stranger from afar who had brought the warring cities of Yucatan together in an empire.
It was the troops of that empire that met the three legions of Saturninus’s first expedition, and wiped them out with ease.
The Maian armies had used the knowledge of Roman methods of warfare that Olaus had instilled in them to defend themselves against the legions’ attack. And when they made their own response, it was to strike from ambush in a way that Roman military techniques, magnificently effective though they had proven everywhere else, were entirely unsuited to handle.
“And so they all perished,” Olaus concluded, “except for a few that I allowed to escape to tell the tale. The same will happen to you and your troops. Pack up now, Roman. Go home, while you still can.”
Those eyes, those frightful eyes, were bright with contempt.
“Save yourselves,” Olaus said. “Go.”
“Impossible,” said Drusus. “We are Romans.”
“Then it will be war. And you will be destroyed.”
“I serve the Emperor Saturninus. He has laid claim to these lands.”
Olaus let out a diabolical guffaw. “Let your Emperor claim the moon, my friend! He’ll have an easier time of conquering it, I promise you. This land is mine.”
“Yours?”
“Mine. Earned by my sweat and, yes, my blood. I am the master here. I am king, and I am their god, even. They look upon me as Odin and Thor and Frey taken all together.” And then, seeing Drusus’s uncomprehending look: “Jupiter and Mars and Apollo, I suppose you would say. They are all the same, these gods. I am Olaus. I reign here. Take your army and leave.” He spat. “Romans!”
Lucius Aemilius Capito said, “What kind of an army do they have, then?”
“I saw no army. I saw a city, peasants, stonemasons, weavers, goldsmiths, priests, nobles,” Drusus said. “And the Dane.”
“The Dane, yes. A wild man, a barbarian. We’ll bring his pelt home and nail it up on a post in front of the Capitol the way one would nail up the pelt of a beast. But where is their army, do you think? You saw no barracks? You saw no drilling grounds?”
“I was in the heart of a busy city,” Drusus told the Consul. “I saw temples and palaces, and what I think were shops. In Roma, does one see any barracks in the middle of the Forum?”
“They are only naked savages who fight with bows and javelins,” said Capito. “They don’t even have a cavalry, it seems. Or crossbows, or catapults. We’ll wipe them out in three days.”
“Yes. Perhaps we will.”
Drusus saw nothing to gain by arguing the point. The older man bore the responsibility for conducting this invasion; he himself was only an auxiliary commander. And the armies of Roma had been marching forth upon the world for thirteen hundred years, now, without encountering a rival who could stand against them. Hannibal and his Carthaginians, the furious Gallic warriors, the wild Britons, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Persians, the bothersome Teutons—each had stepped forward to challenge Roma and each had been smashed in turn.
Yes, there had been defeats along the way. Hannibal had made a great nuisance of himself, coming down out of the mountains with those elephants and causing all kinds of problems in the provinces. Varus had lost those three legions in the Teutonic woods. The invasion force under Valerius Gargilius Martius had been utterly destroyed right here in Yucatan only a little more than five years ago. But one had to expect to lose the occasional battle. In the long run, mastery of the world was Roma’s destiny. How had Virgil said it? “To Romans I set no boundary in space and time.”
Virgil hadn’t looked into the eyes of Olaus the Dane, though, and neither had the Consul Lucius Aemilius Capito. Drusus, who had, found himself wondering how the seven legions of the second expedition would actually fare against the forces of the bearded white god of the Maia. Seven legions: what was that, forty thousand men? Against an unknown number of Maian warriors, millions of them, perhaps, fighting on their home grounds in defense of their farms, their wives, their gods. Romans had fought against such odds before and won, Drusus reflected. But not this far from home, and not against Olaus the Dane.
Capito’s plans involved an immediate assault on the nearby city. The Roman catapults and battering rams would easily shatter its walls, which did not look nearly so strong as the walls of Roman cities. That was odd, that these people would not surround their cities with sturdy walls, when there were enemies on every side. But the enemies must not understand the use of the catapult and the ram.
Once the walls were breached the cavalry would go plunging through the plaza to strike terror in the breasts of the citizenry, who had never seen horses before and would think of them as monsters of some sort. And then an infantry assault from all sides: sack the temples, slaughter the priests, above all capture and slay Olaus the Dane. No business about imprisoning him and bringing him back in triumph to Roma, Capito said: no, find him, kill him, decapitate the empire he had built among these Maia with a single stroke. Once he was gone, the whole political structure would dissolve. The league of cities would fall apart, and the Romans could deal with them one at a time. All military discipline among these people would dissolve, too, without Olaus, and they would become feckless savages again, fighting in their futile helter-skelter way against the formidably disciplined troops of the Roman legions.
The dark fate of the first wave of the invasion indicated nothing that the second wave needed to take into account. Gargilius Martius hadn’t understood what sort of general he was facing in Olaus. Capito did, thanks to Drusus; and by making Olaus his prime target he would cut off the source of his enemy’s power in the earliest days of the campaign. So he declared: and who was Titus Livius Drusus, only twenty-three years old and nothing more than an auxiliary commander, to say that things would not happen that way?
Intensive preparations for battle began at once in all three Roman camps. The siege machinery was hauled into position at the edge of the forest, and work began on cutting paths through the trees for them. The cavalrymen got their steeds ready for battle. The centurions drilled and redrilled the troops of the infantry. Scouts crept out under cover of night to probe the Maian city’s walls for their weakest points.
It was hard work, getting everything ready in this terrible tropical heat, that clung to you like a damp woolen blanket. The stinging insects were unrelenting in their onslaught, night and day, not just mosquitoes and ants, but scorpions also, and other things to which the Romans could give no names. Serpents now were seen in the camps, quick, slender green ones with fiery yellow eyes; a good many men were bitten, and half a dozen died. But still the work went on. There were traditions of many centuries’ standing to uphold here. Julius Caesar himself was looking down on them, and the invincible Marcus Aurelius, and great Augustus, the founder of the Empire. Neither scorpions nor serpents could slow the advance of the Roman legions, and certainly not little humming mosquitoes.
Early in the afternoon on the day before the attack was scheduled to begin the clouds suddenly thickened and the sky grew black. The wind, which had been strong all day, now became something extraordinary, furnace-hot, roaring down upon them out of the east, bringing with it such lightning and thunder that it seemed the world was splitting apart, and then, immediately afterward, the torrential rains of a raging storm, a storm such as no man of Roma had ever seen or heard of before, that threatened to scoop them up as though in the palm of a giant’s hand and hurl them far inland.