Chapter 23: Stalking Castra Taurorum

We set about making a real camp at Mauch Chunk, there in the bend of the river. We built three longhouses, one for the Iroquois speakers, one for the Lenape speakers, and one for the Latin speakers. We didn’t have any exclusively Saxon speakers, thank goodness. Latin was the common language holding us together, since it had been the language of the venenarius at home. For all our diversity, we did have a common objective, which was to cause great harm to the Wizard and any loyal minions he might have remaining. Diversity, I might add here, was not our strength, as the saying goes. The cultural differences among us were problems to be overcome, not grease to the system. We overcame diversity by periodically reminding those who thought the laws of their tribe were the laws of nature that this was no damned democracy. They were all literally my slaves, and I was a demon and could toast them to a cinder if I felt like it, even though I didn’t. The knowledge kept things running pretty smoothly, if I do say so myself. There’s a time and a place for everything, and this was neither the time nor the place for bickering.

By this point, I had had a long talk with myself. This wasn’t the corner of the multiverse where I had grown up. For better or worse, the tradition and practice of slavery existed here. Without it, society didn’t work. Nannakussi and I had become friends, even though we were dominus and servus. He and Winky and Littl Bird were family, whether they were servi or not. Sabina was too, though I wasn’t as close to her. Nevy told me that was pretty common. Even after manumission, Nannakussi and his family would remain my clientes. The Empire itself ran on a patron-client system, with clients supporting the patrons who took care of them. Slaves were the bottom rung of the system. There were laws, rules, and social norms that governed how things operated. I needed to learn them and adhere to them, like ye Wizard and his patron had not.

Palégos was pretty cheesed when he discovered he had lost his house – Poof! Gone! He returned, he stomped around the thick forest where formerly there had been columns and a couple domes and glass-roofed gardens. He found a single corpse (the dungeon master), and then he returned from whence he had come. I put a hex on the place as soon as he was gone, so he couldn’t even come back, in case he meant to start over. He’d never be able to find Bear Mountain again. Having seen him in the flesh – we were little birdies in the trees again, and yes, he did lug a lot of flesh around – Nevy and I could keep an eye on him from a distance. His privacy “blanket” was so tenuous to us by then that it may as well not have been there.

Palégos retired to Castra Taurorum, which in my realm was indeed the location of White Haven. It’s a nice, peaceful little town of maybe four thousand people, it’s distinguishing feature a State Police barracks. Palégos Venenarius had a much less luxurious house there, with only a handful of deformed servants and no concubines or bath children. No doubt he planned to get more.

Castra Taurorum was an Imperial fortification, which was why it was called a castra of course. It was situated about a hundred yards from the river. There was a stone bridge of recent construction thrown across the mighty Lehigh, and the camp was the terminus of a road (Via CCCLVIIII “Via Iulia,” if you must know) that ran to the east and was planned to be extended to the west. The camp itself was eight or ten acres, home to a cohort, which was a unit of about five hundred mounted infantry, so I guess it had a “state police” barracks too. The fort’s main gate faced west, toward the growing little town of Nida.

Nida was set in hilly farm country. I guessed its permanent (non-military) population at around a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred counting the transients. It supplied the castra with fresh food, had a joy street to keep the troops content, and what seemed like a tavern or a bakery every other building’s width on the main drag. There was a forum, naturally, a shrine to Bacchus, and even a theater. The temples of Mars and Minerva were inside the walls of the fort. In the town there were smaller temples or shrines to Venus, Mithras, Cretan Cybelle, and of course Jupiter-Nanapush. The population was mostly Latin, but there were lots of Lenape and Saxon families as well. The town was still pretty raw; there wasn’t a temple to Hera or to Vesta yet.

Nida also had what could only be called a palace for the Legate’s occasional visits. It made Palégos’ mansion look modest by comparison. The slave market and its attendant pens were located within the palace walls. They were built to keep indignant citizenry out.

I intended to take that palace when the Wizard was there. Our base force was a dozen Iroquois warriors – mixed Onondaga and Mohawk, with a lone Seneca. I don’t know where he came from, but he was still mad about it. We had fourteen Lenape – Unalichtigo, Unami, and Nanticoke. Nannakussi was in command, with young Kogwahee as his deputy. Those were our light infantry, assuming we needed them, which we’d better or they were going to be indignant. They were being fed back up to fighting weight, and I’d had all of them drilling together mix and match since they were strong enough to fling a hatchet.

Our close air support was three entire covens of witches. Nevy had appeared out of thin air in Falacrīnum and talked to that coven. They had agreed to come and help if we could get them there. Nevy had popped the lot of them to our camp before you could say “Dumbledore disapparated” three times quickly. Then she did the same with the Centumcellae coven. Finally she brought the remainder of the Sandy Isle coven. She had “slightly” outgrown her role as the coven’s Maiden Initiate, so she also brought a promising young maiden from the Outer Circle. A coven needed seven members for maximum power.

Witches and wizards in the Much Later Roman Empire had never hit upon the idea of riding brooms. In my own reality stream that idea hadn’t been dreamed up until the fifteenth century, which would be around the time of Hadrian IV in this one, or maybe it was Constantinus VII. Nevy wasn’t sure which. By then there was an Imperial Ministry of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with the amount of inventiveness you’d expect. The people making the decisions on witchcraft weren’t witches, they were political appointees. That meant in most cases that they were politicians’ relatives in need of an income. The bureaucrats spent most of their time trying to figure a way to license witchcraft, the ultimate goal being to charge real money for the license.

Nevy told me a funny story about that, funny at least if you’re a witch or a wizard, not funny at all if you’re a bureaucrat. It seems they actually succeeded in instituting licensing for wizards and witches during the reign of Brutus Neronis Germanicus, who didn’t stand really high on the list of great Wearers of the Purple. You paid your money and you got your license. You had to pass a test, of course, but everyone knows how that goes. Maybe a solidus or two on the side and you got marked passed. Even if you didn’t have an extra solidus, at some point the test became multiple choice. Unlicensed witches and wizards, naturally, continued casting spells and mixing potions and occasionally turning people into beavers or woodchucks or something. So the Ministry decided that for an Imperial wizard or witch’s job you needed a license.

Twenty years or so later there was a new Imperator, Gaius Valerius Venustus. There was an actual office of the Imperial Magus at the time. The Emperor needed something magical, a love potion, in fact; her name was Bissula, like the pretty slave girl in the poem if you’ve ever read it. Instead of being a beautiful slave girl, she was a gorgeous lady of lofty station, from an old Alemannic family. Venustus was the grouchy soldierly type with a liking for loud jokes, occasional bawdy songs, and now and then a binge on grappa with equally loud buddies he’d fought with in Scythia. He’d started his career as a private in the CIV Legion “Sanguis” (Blood). The Imperial Magus, on the other hand, had had an extra solidus when he took his test and had to subcontract the love potion. Unfortunately for him, he picked a licensed witch, who had to look the recipe up in a book – written by another licensed wizard who’d plagiarized it from yet another book. The potion not only didn’t work, but made the lady toss her cookies right there at the banquet. The subcontractor had already left town and was on a boat bound for Thule under an assumed name. The Imperial Magus ceased his practice because he was a foot shorter and dead. The licensing system was replaced with a practical test that involved turning a potato into something that wasn’t a potato – take your pick what, maybe a beefsteak or a lizard. Venustus had the Imperial Galen, who actually had some talent as a wizard even though he wasn’t licensed, attend the stricken lady. She proceeded to fall deeply in love with Venustus. They married and lived happily ever after. And the moral of that story is that a purple robe and a gold crown are their own kind of love potion, even if Venustus did occasionally scratch his ass in public.