Chapter 33

“What the hell are you thinking?” Lucilla asked as soon as they began their walk back to the Roman lines.

It had taken them some time to get all of the Romans ready to travel and Ky knew it was going to be a long and very cold night for most of them. It had taken him hours to run the distance between the Roman wall and the Pict camp, but it would take the entire night for the wounded and exhausted Romans to stagger their way back. Ky had considered making camp for the night, but the truce with the Picts was tenuous and Ky knew some of Talogren’s people wouldn’t be on board with this idea. Since one of them might get the bright idea that they could end the truce and put things back the way they were by themselves, Ky thought it best to get the Romans as far away as possible, just to remove the temptation.

“I want to get your people back to safety as soon as possible,” Ky said, purposefully mistaking her meaning. “I know they’re tired, but they can take one night of hardship.”

“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it. How could you offer something like that to these barbarians?”

“Because you need them. You know I was right when I said the Romans needed the manpower. It’s one of the major reasons we decided to end slavery in Roman borders, and even that isn’t enough. The Carthaginians will roll over you like a wave and no matter how brave you are and how many tricks I can pull out, we won’t be able to stop it by ourselves. Besides, they aren’t barbarians. They’re just people trying to do what they can to survive. Look at it from their perspective. They were happily living their lives on this island until the Romans showed up and pushed them out of their homelands. You are to them what the Carthaginians are to you.”

“That’s different!”

“How? You killed many of them and drove them off? How’s that different? You were all ready to turn all of the surviving Carthaginians into slaves, arguing that they were evil and it was a fate they deserved. I’m not saying you are the same as the Carthaginians, but suggesting that the Picts are in the wrong and the Romans are noble and pure is hypocritical. I’m not saying you should just hand back the land you’ve taken and walk into the sea, but I am suggesting it’s time to stop viewing them as animals and nuisances, and start seeing them as people. Just like you.”

Lucilla fell quiet. Ky didn’t blame her. Besides the ordeal she’d suffered, she also had a lifetime of living as a Roman to get over. It was easy to see your nation as the center of the world and everything else as somehow other and lesser. The Romans, who’d once had an empire that spanned what they knew of as the entire world, were doubly cursed. The bigger and more influential a people became, the harder it got to see outside of their own sphere of influence.

Ky was practical. He hadn’t been planning on righting the wrongs of the past or trying to make everything fair to all of the people he came across. His entire goal, once he picked the Romans as the people he’d stay with, now that he was stuck in this time, was to make sure they kept existing as a refuge and bringing their technological level up to the point where he could at least be somewhat secure.

Once he came to the idea of bringing in other peoples into an alliance with the Romans, however, he had to stop thinking of himself as one of the Romans and view the situation from the outside. He’d never been trained as a diplomat, but he’d spent a lot of time recently looking at politics and nation-building, trying to understand enough to chart a sustainable course for the Romans. One of the things he’d learned in this study was the only way to make lasting negotiations with others was to see enough of their side to actually understand them. History was replete with agreements and deals handed down from a powerful nation to a weaker one, and they rarely lasted. This would only work if he saw both sides and understood what both wanted and what they both needed, and could find a middle ground that kept either from walking away.

“Guilt is fine for me, but do you really think you’re going to convince my father or my brother or people like Silo to go along with this plan?”

“Your father? Yes. He knows what kind of danger his people are in and he understands what Rome needs to be able to survive those dangers. He won’t like it, but he’ll see the necessity of the alliance. Over time, I hope he’ll see it as more than that. I hadn’t planned on this, but the more I think about it, the more I can see it as a viable way for Rome to not only survive, but achieve some of the glory your people liked to reminisce on so much. It won’t be the same, but it will be more durable and could last for generations if we do it right. Your brother and Silo are another matter. Your brother can’t see beyond his petty desire for power and Silo can’t see beyond the past, only wanting things to remain as they were. This has made both of them blind to the real dangers Rome faces, meaning neither would do anything to avoid them.”

Ky knew her relationship with her brother wasn’t great, but he imagined even with that it’d be difficult to see all of his actual flaws. She chose the option she had every time her brother came up, which was to ignore the truth and focus on other parts of the conversation.

She spent the next several hours peppering him with questions as they walked, occasionally having to stop to give the Romans a short rest before they continued. He didn’t have many answers for her, since he hadn’t worked out everything himself. He knew he had to have a full plan by the time they got to Rome, but that all depended on Talogren saying yes. Ky thought he might, but the people of this time tended to be stubborn, regardless of personal danger.

After a while Lucilla went silent, focusing on putting one foot in front of the next. She was as exhausted as any of her people from her ordeal over the last few days and only her anger over hearing Ky offer an alliance with the people who’d put her through that ordeal had kept her going since they left the village. After she burned off that initial anger, she fell into the same stumbling stupor that the rest were in.

This gave Ky time to deal with the other thing that had bothered him since they left.

“How did you know the personal combat thing would work?” Ky asked Sophus silently.

“I was able to isolate parts of their language and find corollaries with known ancient Welsh language files. The connection was not initially made, because there seems to be a blending between that language tree and what we know of the early Pict language tree that caused unexpected variations. In addition, the available libraries on both are extremely limited, since neither left much in the archaeological record. What is known was derived primarily by working backward from more complete ancestor languages. The connection wasn’t fully made until their leader mentioned the god Agrona, which was an ancient Welsh deity that had no crossover or corollary with known Pict deities. Using Roman histories, I was able to able to reconstruct the sequence of migrations that lead to the current makeup of the people now known as the Picts.”

“So they’re not the same as the people who would have lived here in our timeline?”

“Correct. In our original timeline, the Romans did not move into the British Isles until much later, and then at a gradual pace. After the fall of Rome, the areas they did control partially reverted back to their pre-colonization makeup, although still carrying through some effects of the Roman occupations. In this timeline, the Roman migration onto the British Isles was much faster and, because the migration was for permanent settlement, had the effect of displacing people that would otherwise not have been displaced. It appears the largest group that was forced north into the Scottish Highlands were the Welsh, who took large portions of their culture and beliefs with them. From this information, I formed the supposition that they might react to similar cultural responses, such as the right to determine disagreements through personal combat.”

“Is there any way this helps us?”

“Perhaps. Without further study, it’s hard to say what the full effect of the merger between the Picts and the Welsh into a new conglomerate society are and which societal norms from the two cultures were adopted and which abandoned.”

“Yeah, I thought you were going to say that.”

By the time they made it back to the Roman lines, half of the survivors of Lucilla’s group were carrying the half that couldn’t walk. Besides injuries from the raid itself and extended abuse over the days that followed, it was well into winter and none of the people had been dressed to endure the march south.

Ky gave directions to the Roman healers on how to treat some of the injuries, especially how to keep the frostbitten fingers and toes from turning gangrenous. Some would still need amputations, but if they followed their instructions, most would make a full recovery. Ky had hated forcing them to move quickly, but had they stopped, many of the injured would never have moved from their temporary camps. It sounded harsh, but Ky thought a few fingers and toes was a fair exchange for their lives.

His lictores had been all over him when he returned, as were the commanders of the fourth legion, all of whom wanted to know what happened. Ky didn’t have time to give them a blow-by-blow of the events, but did warn them that a Pict party might be approaching the Roman lines in the next few days, and that they must be allowed to pass safely. Since he had all of his lictores with him, Ky put them to work overseeing the Roman patrols making sure a twitchy centurion didn’t order the slaughter of messengers that might have brought an end to the Pict threat. In return, he had to agree to keep within his tent and to not venture out anymore, so they could leave a minimal number of men to protect him and use the rest as a form of informal officers corps.

For once, Ky didn’t argue, since he had work to do. He’d made his proposal off the cuff and, while he had the beginnings of an idea of how it would work, he hadn’t actually come up with a plan. If the Picts did agree, they’d want to know what his offer was in full and then he’d have to take it to the Romans and get the Emperor to agree. That meant he needed to figure out a working solution, and he knew it had to be something more than just becoming a Roman protectorate or a treaty.

The historical documents that Ky had reviewed showed that it wasn’t far from the end of the Romans in his time. As their ability to field Italians and other Romans as soldiers to protect the borders of the Empire from a series of tribal migrations from the east, the Romans had turned to some of those tribes that had been forced into their territory. Long-standing prejudices kept the Romans from absorbing these people into the Empire, and instead, a series of treaties had been drawn up to allow these tribes seeking sanctuary to move over the Danube and even fight in their legions, but still hold them as non-citizens. Eventually, the inevitable happened and the tribes realized they didn’t have to keep listening to the Romans. They were over the major physical barrier and large parts of the Roman armies were made up of their own people, or people related to them.

It hadn’t been an instantaneous reversal, but over time they began moving further south, taking over parts of Roman territory and making it theirs. Ky and Sophus agreed that the only way to avoid a repeat of this, since Rome was facing similar problems now, was to make these people tied to the fate of Rome itself. They couldn’t join as outsiders.

Except for the occasional interruption from his lictores delivering messages from the fourth legion commanders or updates on the survivors, Ky worked through the entire day in solitude. Even as he worked, going over different governmental systems and alliance structures that Sophus could pull from his data downloads, Ky couldn’t help but notice Lucilla’s absence. Following their brief conversation after they left the Pict village, she’d fallen silent and had disappeared to recuperate as soon as they arrived back at the Roman camps. For everything he’d been willing to sacrifice to bring her back safely, Ky knew there was a chance it might come down to a decision between her or making the changes that Rome needed to survive. It was the slavery argument all over again, except the people he was preparing to anger were the same ones that had supported him last time.

It was worse for Lucilla, since she’d suffered more personally than the people still in Devnum, for whom the Pict threat was still abstract. Ky had hoped that their personal connection would be enough for her to look past those experiences, but he knew it might not be. What’s worse, he knew that if he had to choose between saving Rome and keeping her affections, he’d have to choose to save Rome, if only because if Rome fell, she would most likely die. And that he couldn’t live with.

He tried to push the thoughts aside, but he was failing. Enough so that Sophus had to remind him several times of the importance of having a plan, even though Sophus didn’t seem as confident that the Picts would come at all.

Ky had just started to refocus for the thirtieth time when a cough at the entry flap to his tent caught his attention.

“Hello,” Lucilla said.

She looked good. Someone must have found her hot water, because the dirt and grime from her ordeal were gone. Ky sat down the stylus he’d been using, marking lightly on the thin scroll so that he’d have something for the Emperor to look at.

“Hello,” he said, awkwardly stopping somewhere between standing and sitting.

“Can I come in?” She asked, pointing at a stool next to the small camp table Ky had been writing at.

“Yes, yes. Sorry. How are you feeling?”

“Much better than my retainers. Those anim ... sorry. They went through a lot and I know I’m lucky they didn’t do anything but threaten and yell at me.”

“That’s still a lot to deal with, especially since you must have thought much worse would have happened soon. I know you’re upset with me and it seems like I’m siding with them or rewarding them for what they did to you. I hope you know I’d never do that, but I also have to think about the rest of you and how to make sure Rome survives.”

“I know, and you don’t have to apologize. I actually came to apologize to you.”

“Why, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I don’t know about that. Had I listened to you about not going to see the oracle, I wouldn’t have ended up there at all. And you came and saved me. Again. I keep having to thank you for saving my life.”