Clash of Eagles Read Free Page B

the world a Roman citizen.
    The Norse didn’t care a fig about the delay, though. A pragmatic race, they had already carved themselves out a critical role. Roma needed its navy now as never before, and the well-traveled Norsemen were just the people to help them run it.
    After a decade of stagnation and even retreat under the rulers who had followed Titus, the new Imperator Hadrianus III had grasped the nettle. Right out of the gate the man had thought big. He had vowed at his coronation that under his leadership the power of Roma would encircle the globe. Only twenty-nine years of age at his accession, he had figured that if he set the wheels moving quickly enough and remained popular enough to die of old age, he might leave as his legacy a world where the sun never set on the Roman Imperium.
    Candidly, Marcellinus thought the man was cracked. Roma had reined in its expansion in the first place because of the high cost of defeating the Khazars and the eastern sultanates. And now Hadrianus was trying to expand the Imperium even farther into the east at precisely the moment when the Mongols and Turkic tribes were swooping westward into Kara Khitai and southward toward the Chin Dynasty. Leave the buggers to it; that was what Marcellinus thought. Let the nomadic Mongol Khan swallow all that and try to administer it. Roma should hold its current line in the sultanates around the Ganges, which Temujinus—or Chinggis, or however he wanted to be addressed these days—had shown no ambitions toward. Eventually the Mongol Khanate would overreach itself and crumble, and that would be Roma’s moment to march eastward again. In the meantime, the real estate from Hispania to the Himalaya and from the barren northern ice to the fetid jungles of Aethiopia Interior should surely be enough Imperium for anyone.
    But of course it wasn’t, and so here they were, pushing on beyond the sunset into Nova Hesperia, New Land of the Evening. Because clearly if your territorial ambitions were stalled in one direction, it was only logical to spearhead an attack in the other. As if controlling two frontiers at the same time hadn’t been a nightmare for the Imperium ever since the first Nero had tried to conquer the barbarians beyond the Danube while simultaneously holding the Parthians at bay.
    “Imperators,” as Marcellinus might say over dinner, “have no sense of history.”
    And “Soldiers,” as First Tribune Corbulo would regularly chide him in response, “have no grasp of economics.”
    Corbulo would remind Marcellinus that if popularity cost money, keeping your army loyal cost even more. Bread, circuses, and bribes: big money. And if you were an Imperator spending coin faster than you were collecting it in taxes, you needed somewhere to invade so you could steal more.
    Which brought Marcellinus full circle, back to the Norse.
    His officers awaited him in the open air outside his Praetorium, armor off and cloaks on against the growing breeze of dusk: Corbulo, sitting off to one side looking bored; Aelfric, tapping his foot; Tribune Marcus Tullius, solid, earnest, sunburned, and blond, still brooding over his lost men; Gnaeus Fabius, the magistrate and junior tribune Hadrianus had assigned to the 33rd Legion at the last minute either to get him out from underfoot or to spy on Marcellinus (most likely both); and Leogild, his Visigoth quartermaster. Nearby, Marcellinus’s guards stood bunched around Sisika and Fuscus.
    Sisika’s eyes were wide. When they had frog-marched her into the Praetorium the castra had been little more than an outline, a large square ditch and embankment surrounding virgin meadowland. In the intervening hours the camp had sprung up all around them to become a living community of wooden buildings and goatskin tents as familiar to Marcellinus as his hometown and as foreign to Sisika as the surface of the moon.
    Fuscus, who witnessed this transformation every night, had adopted an even more noticeable air of