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Chapter 23 - The Historian

Calvinus's comfortable refuge from the storm had perhaps been a farmhouse, or the residence of the dryade keepers of the nearby fane. It was the only permanent structure within the camp's palisade. Its walls were thick stone, recently plastered, and it was heavily thatched with new reeds. A single window's heavy shutter was now closed. It was snug and warm, and coals glowed in a bronze fire pot in the center of its single room. A white-haired man held his hands out over the heat. At first Pierrette thought he was a Gaul, because all the Romans she had seen dressed the same, in military fashion. But at a second glance, she realized she did not know at all what kind of man he was. He had a beard, while most Gauls cultivated only their mustaches.

"Honored sir," said Calvinus, "this woman claims to be a seeress, and she has spoken ominous words to me. I have told her you will help me ferret the truth from her utterings."

The old man's smile was young and mischievous, though it crackled his face in a hundred wrinkles. "My experience with oracles is strictly limited," he said, "but I'm quite willing to extend it, with someone as attractive as you. What have you been telling my friend the consul?"

"The Gallic chieftain Teutomalos, and his dryades—that is, druids—have been dabbling in a new, very powerful kind of magic. They have not yet achieved their goal, but when they do, and it will be soon, the forces they will bring to bear will be invincible."

"You haven't spent much time among Romans, have you, child? They honor their gods, but they are not superstitious folk like Gauls. Their magic is more worldly, and expresses itself as ballistae and catapults."

"Even Romans should be concerned, because what Teutomalos intends is to create a god, from the captive spirits of uncountable dead men. I have walked in the realm where that god will rule, even centuries from now. In that future, Roma is a minor tributary to his vast empire, and holds only Latium and Tuscany. Only one event divides that future from another, in which the Roman realm encompasses Alexander's kingdom in the East, the rivers Danu and Rhenus to the north, all of Africa to the very verge of the great desert, and the furthest islands of the Western Ocean."

"I've often pondered the role of fate in charting the course of history," said the white-haired man. "But battles are won by the actions and decisions of great men, like Hannibal, crossing this land and the mountains beyond to wage war in Italia—or like Fabius, whose avoidance of decisive battles was genius in its own right, wearing the Carthaginian down. Now you come, and postulate another crux, where one man's decision may echo down the long corridors of the unseen future." He shook his head, not in negation, but as if to clear it of cobwebs. "If what you say is true—though I see no way to verify it—my friend the consul holds not just one battle, but the entire future of Roma in his hands. But—is there still a place for fate, in all this?"

Pierrette smiled at him. Her heart was pounding with excitement as well as tension, because the elderly fellow's words, his very thoughts, were not unfamiliar to her. She knew who this man was! "I am here," she said. "What great man commanded my presence?"

"Exactly!" he crowed. "Are you Fortuna herself—Tyche, an embodiment of that internal voice that says to the consul `Do this, and thus will events transpire, or do that and . . . ?' I don't believe in that goddess, you know."

Pierrette made a show of pinching her arm, as if to verify she was not dreaming. "I am no disembodied voice in the general's head. What I have seen is not mere speculation."

"But how can we confirm it? I am almost eighty years old. I won't see another decade, let alone a century or two."

Pierrette's mind raced, trying to remember something she had read. . . . "Have you found the headwaters of the river Padus here, just north of Massilia?"

The abrupt change of subject disconcerted him. "What? The Padus's source is on the other side of the Alps."

"That's not what you wrote in your second book. `The river Padus, which poets have celebrated as the Eridanus, rises in the Alps near the apex of the triangle'—the triangle, that is, that is formed by the Alps, the Appenines, and the Tyrrhenian sea—`and begins by flowing south toward the plain.' How many future historians will scoff at your ignorance of geography, and cite that passage to denigrate everything else you've written?"

"Unfair! When I wrote that, I knew no one who had followed the river to its source. Flaccus's foray, last year, was the first time the actual distances were measured with chains. And anyway, I was only generalizing, because most of my readers are Greeks, and know nothing at all of the area. But how do you know what I wrote . . . ?"

"I've read all thirty-nine of your books, master Polybius. I've even perused the fortieth, the index volume."

"How do you know of that?" He turned to Calvinus. "What have you told her?"

"Nothing," the Roman said. "Perhaps she heard me say your name, but nothing else." The old man, Polybius, withdrew his hands from the brazier's heat, and shuffled over to a brass-bound trunk along the wall. Opening it, he withdrew a sheaf of vellums, and proffered it to Pierrette. "Is this what you . . . perused?"

She thumbed through the sheets. Only the first two had been written on. "There is hardly anything here," she said.

Polybius turned to Calvinus. "The veleda has established her bona fides, I think. This is my fortieth volume, the index to all the rest, and it is yet unwritten, only begun since we arrived here, as a sop to the boredom of this camp, and because there has been nothing else for me to record. No one but you knew of it, or even of my intention to write an index. How could she have read it?"

Polybius sighed. "Open the door. It's stuffy in here." Indeed, though the fumes of charcoal ordinarily seeped out of thatched roofs, the rain had swelled the reeds, and the atmosphere was close and breathless. Calvinus pushed the wooden door open. Fumes ebbed out near the lintel, and a rush of cool freshness swept in over the sill, making the brazier's coals flare up.

Though the trampled soil outside was puddled, the water was smooth, unruffled. The rain had ceased to fall. Pierrette saw the glimmer of moonlight reflected in the still water. She sighed. Was Guihen right? Her mood of gloom and disaster looming ahead had dissipated.

The historian Polybius was a wise man. Though a Greek, he had been a friend of Scipio Aemilianus, Roma's final victor over Carthage. He had held high office in the eastern provinces, and the express purpose of his forty-volume history of Roma had been to explain to his Greek readership the Romans' success—their superior military organization, forged in the several Punic Wars, and their superior constitution, which pitted noble consuls (elected by the Senate) against plebeian tribunes (elected by the commons) against each other, and placed priests and judges in opposition to both.

When she considered that, the stakes of her success were raised still further. The Roman constitution was an exquisite system of checks and balances, according to Polybius, that had evolved from the conflict of classes in a city beset on all sides by Sabines, Oscans, Etruscans, Celts, and Greeks, who attacked Roma every time its internal conflicts rose to the fore. If Roma flourished, that system, however adulterated by autocratic emperors not yet born, however undermined by the decay that Polybius postulated was inherent in all political entities, would serve as example throughout the centuries, long after Roma itself was a fading memory.

Polybius's presence here, in Gaul, unrecorded in any history or biography, was perhaps the best thing that could have happened. Once Scipio's friend and advisor, now he was Calvinus's. If she could convince him of her mission, she would not have to convince the consul. Polybius would do it for her. No wonder the puddles were smooth and shiny, and no wonder the clouds no longer muffled the moon and stars. Pierrette decided that the day soon dawning would be a bright and sunny one, whether or not she had anything at all to do with it.

 

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