Chapter 9

After tearfully hugging each of my wives and concubines, I hurriedly introduced them to the newest group, and then ran back aboard the Audoflede to go help the Marise. I noticed King Tassimut staring at the sunken fleet after hearing that the citizens of the city did most of the fighting.

My troops had remained aboard, figuring that we would head out again once they heard what happened. Once we reloaded food, ammunition for the mortars, and another five hundred archers, we left the Saxon widows in the competent hands of Audoflede and set sail for Ostia, one of the two harbors of Rome. Rather than trying to catch the scattered remnants of the escaping fleet, we sailed at top speed directly for Ostia and Portus, arriving the next afternoon. Any ships that survived their encounters with the Marise wouldn’t even be halfway home yet. When we arrived, Ostia, the city now half abandoned now due to the river silting up, quickly surrendered after a brief display of our mortars. That allowed us to secure one of two mouths of the Tiber River.

Some of the extra archers secured the city, and others boarded any empty or near-empty ships in the port and began making their way up the Tiber River. Meantime, while the Audoflede secured Ostia, the Gotberga secured Portus and the northern mouth of the Tiber. Once they secured the city, all but a thousand of our troops began the trip upriver to Rome aboard smaller ships captured in the port.

Well before dawn, 4,500 of our 5,500 troops were across the Tiber River from Rome. As the first light of dawn began to lighten the morning sky, explosions began to rock the city. By the last explosion, the city was fully awake. Soon they would be both awake and very pissed off. I waited an hour for them to discover my handiwork, and then approached the collapsed section of the city wall on a horse I had appropriated.

When hundreds of troops stormed out of the city towards me, I heard the corresponding thump from dozens of mortars behind me. Several long seconds later, the ground between us exploded, sending horses, soldiers, and parts of both flying, stopping the remainder in their tracks. Many riders were thrown from their mounts when the horses reared or skidded to a sudden stop. When no more explosions occurred, five of them approached cautiously, unarmed, to see what I had to say. I told them that King Odoacer had attacked us, and I was now retaliating.

One of the first explosions this morning had destroyed a section of the upper level of an aqueduct into the city. I warned them that every aqueduct would have an expanse of at least five hundred feet leveled to the ground if they didn’t meet my demands by noon tomorrow. Destroying only a few feet of the top level of a single aqueduct was a gesture of goodwill on my part, making it much simpler to repair. In addition to destroying the aqueducts, I would collapse the ends of the Cloaca Maxima, the underground sewer system where water entered and exited the city, and we would rain destruction down on the city indiscriminately. My demand was to have all the weapons in the city brought to us in wagons. I warned that the prisoners we took in Valencia told us how many there should be (not really, but it sounded good).

In addition, I expected twenty large cargo wagons filled with gold, silver, and jewels. Finally, I expected to have the extended Royal Family turned over to us, and the city surrendered to us. I promised that no harm would come to any member of the Royal Family as long as they cooperated and there was no deception.

I told them not to expect reinforcements from the ill-fated attack fleet. Less than a third of their ships had survived the attack, and one of my ships had been hunting down the survivors for the last four days. Two more of my ships were standing offshore awaiting any that managed to make it back and both ports were in our hands.

Late the next morning, a solemn procession left the city headed our way. As I specified, the wagons were uncovered. The Royal Family was subdued, but they remained dignified as they approached. I re-affirmed my promise to them that they would be safe. Odoacer’s son Thelan, daughter Odele, and his wife Hedda each rode a horse. Each swore that Odoacer’s brother Onulf had gone to Valencia. Onulf’s wife Auberon and two daughters, Sanja and Wilda, rode right behind Odoacer’s family. Once the weapons, Royal Family, and loot from the city were aboard cargo boats, we headed back to Portus. My scouts used their mirrors to signal our other troops. They would remove the explosives and ship them back to Portus or would dump the powder out and burn it to keep it out of enemy hands.

Two thousand of the remaining troops would make their way into the city to keep order until Clovis sent a governor. More than twenty empty boats had arrived overnight from Ostia and Portus to help carry back our troops, as well as any cargo we looted from warehouses along the river. We had loaded and returned thirty boats yesterday and sent another fifteen that were still fully loaded when we arrived.

Only eleven of the attacking ships made it back to Portus. Neither Odoacer nor his brother were among the survivors. None of the survivors knew the fate of Onulf, but several said the men aboard Odoacer’s boat went down fighting, insisting on shooting arrows at the Marise, even though their arrows fell woefully short. Archers aboard the Marise cut down everyone aboard, but not before the few remaining men alive aboard the boat threw Odoacer’s body overboard to prevent it from being displayed. Then they resumed their ill-advised attack. The Marise had five boats in tow, four of them filled with captured men. The fifth held only bodies, testament to Odoacer’s refusal to be captured alive.

We ended up sending more than six hundred ships filled with captured goods from Rome and environs to Valencia. Among those goods were marble, bricks, and quarried stone for building. We also took cotton, wool, silk, and ingots of various metals. A dozen ivory tusks and a hundred amphorae of spices would bring us a hefty profit. Not wanting the people of Rome to starve, I made sure we left the food. I left word with Captain Brunaz, whom I’d left in charge of our troops and the city, to send as much building stone and as many bricks as he could--after they repaired the aqueduct. His men searched homes belonging to the wealthiest citizens of Rome, Portus, Ostia, and the large villas in the surrounding countryside, stripping them of their treasures and elegant furnishings, which filled more than two hundred more ships. More troops sailed south to the area around Naples and looted the opulent estates of the wealthy there, sending us another three hundred ships filled with looted goods.

Three hundred workers who were intimately familiar with Roman building techniques went with us to help us build up Valencia. I’d forgotten that the Romans built five-story concrete, stone, and brick apartment buildings, something I felt was quickly becoming necessary in Valencia in order to provide suitable housing for everyone I was relocating there. The families of the men we took, and their belongings were included, meaning more than two hundred additional ships. Not everything went at once. Each of the captured ships made numerous trips, as did our own junk-style ships. A last-minute addition was the shipwrights in Portus and Ostia to speed up the construction of our fleet. Their families and belongings would follow as soon as space aboard the ships permitted.

On my return trip to Valencia, we stopped in Massalia (modern Marseilles) and sent a messenger to Clovis to let him know the Frankish Empire just grew, again, and he would need to appoint a governor. I didn’t think anyone left in Rome was appropriate, and the former King and his brother both died in an unsuccessful attack on Valencia. I also let him know just how unsuccessful their attack had been.

The next several months were a blur. Construction and food production were our top priorities. Happily, our production level of food at the time still left us plenty to sell. I only opened two more gold mines on the Italian peninsula but sent the three hundred captured soldiers to work in our limestone, sandstone, and cement quarries in Iberia.

The addition of so many shipbuilders from Ostia and Portus allowed us the luxury of repairing many of the more severely damaged ships and we repaired almost two hundred of the boats that sank. We used them for several years while our own fleet was growing to meet our needs, needs that were also quickly growing. Eventually we sold many of the repaired ships, but also continued using quite a few.

The Marise and the Nadine were both finished quickly, and we began three new Governor Class ships: the Ragnachildis, the Bisinus, and the Gibuld. We also started the Montana, another Clovis Class ship. I’d come to regret my decision to make the Clovis a flagship, realizing now how valuable that ship was to rapidly transport thousands of troops. I also decided that anything bigger would be impractical at this point and chose to make another one the same size, naming it after my birthplace.

Groups of our shipbuilders went to Treva, Bremen, Utrecht, Rouen, and Massalia to oversee a fledgling shipbuilding industry of the junk-style ships in those ports. The northern ports intended to build Duchess Class ships for oceangoing trade, as well as a slightly different version of the Capital Class ships to use for river travel. I wished them well. Adjusting the original ship design to make bigger ships was the extent of my comfort level. Their idea did make sense, though, as the smaller, longer Capital Class ships would have an even shallower draft necessary for the rivers.

As the city of Valencia began to shape up, I sent more miners to recently annexed territories. The Italian peninsula had little in the way of undiscovered minerals, but there were ten undiscovered gold and six silver mines available on Sardinia, as well as deposits of coal, zinc, lead, and copper.

Saxony had locations for three large silver mines, but mostly coal, iron, lead, and copper mines. We smelted and refined the ores there and used the resulting ingots for purchases or shipped them to Valencia or Paris. Scheelite, tungsten, vanadium, molybdenum, chromium, and magnetite went to our new iron smelters in Saxony so they could begin making our Soissons steel.

Clovis sent his Captain Marifius to Rome as the new Governor, along with two thousand troops to relieve mine. Marifius continued to send shipments of building materials and allowed us to take another thousand craftsmen and their families from across the Roman peninsula. He was surprised at how little we had actually looted while we were there.

My troops in Rome “liberated” several more shiploads of treasure (including marble statues of everything except Roman Gods or rulers) from the wealthiest citizens of Rome, Naples, and environs. They stripped the interior of the Royal Palace of anything they deemed gaudy, pretentious, or unnecessary for the new governor, and found Odoacer’s and his brother’s private stashes that combined for more than fifty thousand gold and silver coins. They left churches and temples undisturbed.

What I considered the “pièce de résistance” was what had to be an astronomically expensive water clock of Indian origin. It currently occupied a small building on our property. The building had glass windowpanes covering the front and back, so the clock was visible to anyone passing by. A similarly liberated marble and brass sundial sat outside, next to it.

I sent craftsmen out across the Iberian Peninsula. Some went to expand the port facilities in Barcelona and to start shipbuilding facilities. Some of the agricultural assistants from here received promotions and went to plant thousands of olive trees and grape vines across Iberia. They also planted alfalfa. We sent cattle, horses, sheep, and goats to Barcelona.

Not having the time to do it myself, I had taught two men how to graft the citrus trees. In Valencia now, there were thousands of clay pots with trees growing in them; those trees were grafting stock. My two grafters taught forty-seven more men how to graft. Those forty-seven men also got a thorough indoctrination into everything they would need to know to plant, expand, and care for vast citrus orchards. Four of the men would go to Barcelona, taking two thousand each of the Valencia orange, Navel orange, lemon, and lime trees. Almonds, chestnuts, and hazelnuts would also be grown there. Others would open or expand mines for cement, potash, iron, coal, and lead. I decided to have them set up the usual manure beds, both to provide the nitrates and the compost we religiously worked into our orchards and fields.

In Cartagena, we tripled our plantings of sugar cane, increased the cotton fields tenfold, greatly enlarged the port, and started a shipbuilding facility. Roman roads leading inland throughout the Iberian Peninsula were repaired and a new agricultural city founded about twenty miles to the north where the Umayyad Caliphate would have founded Murcia about three hundred years later. We would grow cotton, sugar cane, and grapes for wine there. Four of the trained grafters supervised the planting of two thousand of each variety of citrus tree.

Malaga would also have a shipbuilding facility built and the port expanded. Their cotton, sugar, and banana production were increased, and the capacity of the salt works tripled. We planted more mulberry trees hoping that I could someday get silkworms, and planted paper mulberry trees for making paper.

Granada saw olive and grape production more than double from what it was when I first visited there. We planted fruit trees, cotton, and sugar cane, and installed the ubiquitous manure beds.

We founded the town that would have one day been Almeria, and began construction of a port, planting mulberry trees, along with paper mulberry, cotton, sugar cane, bananas, olives, and grapes.

The city of Sanlucar at the mouth of the Betis (modern Guadalquivir) River sat near giant marshy lowlands perfect for growing rice. The marshes were more than double the size of the one south of Valencia where we grew rice. In addition, fertile agricultural soil surrounded the city. Once we had rice growing, we planted bananas, sugar cane, grains, citrus, and fruit orchards, and expanded the harbor to hold more and larger ships.

Six months after my return from Rome, Clovis made a surprise visit. In the last two months, the Anglii, the Jutes, and the Danes had each asked to join the Frankish Kingdom. The three were small countries comprising much of what would ultimately become Denmark. Evidently, the Saxon priest had visited them and convinced them to join us.

The Britons of Armorica, or Brittany as I knew it in my original time, asked to join. The Britons, Jutes, Anglii, and Saxons thought the ones who went to settle in Britannia would join, too. Farther east, the Lombards and Ostrogoths also asked to join. That left only the Basques, Picts (Scotland), and Ireland before all of Western Europe was part of the Frankish Kingdom. I suggested to Clovis that it might be time to call it the Frankish Empire, now, and name himself Emperor. He said he’d think about it.

Meanwhile, the Anglii, Jutes, Danes, and Lombards had each sent one of their priests with their emissary. Those priests wanted to verify for themselves what the Saxon priest was telling everyone. After each priest verified the power he felt in me, the deal was struck, and the four countries joined the Frankish Kingdom. Only then did they present their tribute to me, a beautiful young woman from each of the four countries. The Saxon priest had warned them that the women would have to be volunteers.

I literally dragged myself from the bedroom in the morning, but my four new wives were obviously happy, and my original wives were both happy and amused.

Clovis teased me about why I got the women, not him, so I teased him back. “You’re the cute one, I’m the scary one, and they want to make sure I’m happy,” I laughed.

“And are you happy?” he asked, suddenly turning serious.

“I don’t think I could be happier,” I replied. “I have more beautiful wives than I can keep track of, not including concubines and slaves. I have so many children that I am considering using herding dogs to control them. The territory my King controls has grown faster and bigger than I ever imagined and at very little loss of life to our troops. The people are learning habits to keep them healthier so there will be less disease. They will live longer and become more prosperous. We have more than enough food for our people, and we sell the excess. I have more wealth than I could ever spend, and probably more than your sister could spend,” I laughed.

Clovis joined me in laughter and then followed me around as I showed him the new projects I had in the works. Looking around at the numerous partially completed projects, I suddenly felt like an inventor with attention deficit disorder, starting something only to become distracted by something else or bored with it and setting it aside for something new.

The project I was most excited about right now was my just-completed horse-drawn cotton harvester. Having personally harvested cotton by hand, both before and after my arrival here, I knew it was backbreaking work, as well as how much damage it did to your hands. At the time, I thought my parents were crazy for growing cotton in Montana. We only had a few plants, and the yield was poor, but it gave me experience with growing and harvesting cotton. This harvester would eliminate the need for using thousands of workers to pick the cotton and would speed up the process considerably. This year, we had fences covered with woven mats of reeds and willow branches around every cotton field here. After clipping their wings so they couldn’t fly away, we released ducks and geese into the fields to reduce the amount of labor needed to keep weeds down. It also had the fortuitous side effect of reducing the number of slugs, snails, and insects.

We expanded the practice to other row crops as our supply of ducks and geese increased. Every field had two raised lookout towers for archers to watch out for the many predators that targeted the geese or ducks. Aside from their pay for their guard duty, the guards could keep the predators they killed, usually selling the pelts.

The next project I planned was a more modern explosive. Before I could do anything else, though, I first had to create supplies of nitric acid and sulfuric acid. It was time consuming, but not impossible, and I finally created enough so the work required to make gelignite was worthwhile. I also trained several people to continue making the two acids.

Like the acids, gelignite was laborious to manufacture. Then I had to make rudimentary blasting caps to detonate it. Since drawn wire was still further down my list, it would be a while before we could use a handheld dynamo to detonate the blasting caps. I’d need copper wire for the windings of the dynamo, as well as to carry electrical current to the blasting caps.

The explosives I finally came up with created three new industries: making the acids, making gelignite, and making blasting caps. Gelignite is moldable so I had one-kilogram bricks made and wrapped in paper impregnated with linseed oil. I trained forty men how to use the stuff safely, and then sent them out to my mines, beginning with the most profitable mines. They showed our miners how to safely use the explosives. Only the person in charge of each mine would have access to the explosives. For each mine, I filled a steel box similar in size to a modern handheld toolbox with the gelignite. In another toolbox I packed a wooden box capped with a snug-fitting lid, I added the blasting caps, each swaddled in cotton. A special screw secured each corner of the lid of the toolboxes to the bottom, and only a twice-tempered Soissons steel hex wrench would be able to unscrew it. Each mine supervisor received one hex wrench on a chain that he always wore around his neck. We planned to track how much explosive each mine used and make deliveries every three months until we had a better idea of how much they used.

Cordite proved impossible to manufacture for now because I hadn’t yet begun pumping and distilling crude oil to make petroleum jelly, so I settled for using gelignite. Meanwhile, production of the old-style mortars and mortar shells stopped, and we began making new ones. Now that I was able to make percussion-style blasting caps, I could make mortars that didn’t require a burning fuse. A built-in firing pin in the base of the mortar would explode a small blasting cap in the bottom of each mortar shell to ignite the gelignite charge that launched the shell.

Our metalworking had progressed far enough that screw threads were possible to make, especially in brass. We used different sizes of dies to cut the screw threads properly, dies made from twice-tempered Soissons steel.

We used dies to cut screw threads into the pieces of the shell casing. Next, we filled a brass casing like the metal base of a shotgun shell with primer. The top end of the primer remained open, but was sealed with beeswax. The primer casing screwed into the base of the lower section of the shell. Then we filled the shell with a pre-measured amount of gelignite that would launch it from the mortar. When we dropped the shell into the mortar, the primer struck the firing pin, igniting it. That flash ignited the gelignite, propelling the projectile into the air.

The new mortar tubes were rifled to give the shells more stability in flight, and hence, more accuracy. I shaped the shells like a cross between a modern mortar shell (no fins, though) and an artillery shell. The head was slightly bulbous and the tail slightly slenderer and more elongated, so the shell fell nose-first.