Chapter 8

Outside Londinium

Ky made his morning stop at the tent holding Bomilcar. The general was recovering well. Ky had been checking with the healers every day after seeing the general and had given specific instructions on his treatment. His injuries had been serious, but not life-threatening if treated appropriately, and if the healers avoided causing an infection. While they were following some of the new standards he’d introduced to the physicians in Devnum, he hadn’t been able to introduce everything, and the healers were having trouble believing all of the science he’d tried to explain to them.

Through a combination of alcohol and regularly sterilized bandages, so far Bomilcar had managed to avoid any major infections, letting the body more or less repair itself. Without modern medicine, the general would always have a limp, since there was only so much a splint could do to set broken bones, but living with a limp was better than not surviving at all.

“Good morning, General,” Ky said, entering the tent. “How are you feeling today?”

“Tired and in pain.”

“Pain simply means you aren’t dead yet,” Ky said, stopping to look the general over, letting Sophus run what diagnostics on the man he could using Ky’s enhanced senses.

While it could tell a lot, such as temperature, pulse, and respiration, it was a far cry from a medical checkup. It was, however, better than anything available using present-day techniques.

“Your fever is gone. That’s a good sign.”

The general gave Ky a perplexed look as he did every time Ky did something that should have been impossible, like being able to tell that the fever the man had been suffering while his body fought to repair itself had abated.

“Why do you continue to visit me every day? You haven’t even asked me any questions. Why bother to treat my wounds?”

Carthaginians tended to let any prisoners they took who couldn’t be used as slaves simply die, often of thirst and starvation, since they didn’t believe in wasting resources on a dead man.

“Because you are our guest. An unwilling one, true, but a guest all the same.”

“How are my men?”

“Doing well. As I promised, none have been sold into slavery or executed for following the orders of their leaders. Most of the non-critically injured have recovered enough to be moved into holding camps with the uninjured soldiers who surrendered, and are being treated fairly with food, clean water, and tents to protect them from the elements. The ones still in the hands of the healers are the most injured, and I’m sad to say many will probably die of their injuries, but we are doing what we can to make them comfortable until that time comes.”

“I find it hard to believe you are treating prisoners as well as you keep saying.”

“When you are better and can walk, I will take you on a ride around the camps so you can see for yourself. Some of your men are being used in public works programs, repairing homes and farms damaged in the fighting and helping build up our infrastructure, but this is only temporary. When this conflict ends, we will allow any of your people who wish to go home to do so.”

“Do you really believe you can survive this war? Yes, you had a magnificent victory and you are a clever field commander, but my army was just a small fraction of the forces you’ll be facing. You can’t possibly believe you’ll win.”

“I can and do. Our victory in the field wasn’t a fluke and yours was the second army many times our size that we defeated. As time goes on, we will be able to defeat even greater odds and I think things might not be as easy as your emperor believes it to be. As we continue to defy his attempts to conquer the world, others will see our example and will rise up against him. Your empire has been built on a foundation of subjugation. It is a house of cards, hollow on the inside. There are more people living as slaves than there are actual citizens of the Carthaginian empire. The day the people understand they outnumber their overlords, is the day the empire crumbles. Do I think we can defeat the entire might of the Carthaginian empire? Maybe. But I don’t think we’ll have to. Once we’ve taken out enough of its supports, the empire will collapse under its own weight.”

“I see,” Bomilcar said, looking away.

Ky left quietly, knowing that was what the general did when he didn’t want to talk anymore. Ky was surprised he hadn’t considered it. Did all of the Carthaginian leaders think their empire was on solid ground, unbeatable and invincible? How could they not see the danger at the heart of their own empire and its inherent weakness? It was one of the reasons Ky pushed for the ending of slavery in Rome. As the new Britannic Empire grew, it would be a rot that would have grown with it, setting his new people up to have the same vulnerabilities that the Carthaginians had.

Devnum

It was late in the day when Lucilla got back from the seventh legion’s camp. She’d spent the past two days working with Velius and the other legates to coordinate transportation and logistics for getting the legions across the channel to Ériu and sending messages to their counterparts on the island for getting the legions landed and ready to fight.

It was clear this was going to take longer than she could have anticipated when pushing the Imperial Senate to move quickly. Velius seemed to take it in stride, which meant this was probably a common occurrence when moving large armies that the average person didn’t see. Although she’d been involved in the training of the Caledonians over the winter while they prepared for the Carthaginian invasion, she hadn’t been involved in the actual movement of troops, so she didn’t have exposure to the logistics involved until now.

Thankfully, Velius and the other legates did have experience with it and seemed to think everything was going well, so she left the operations in their more experienced hands and returned to Devnum to the politics she did understand.

She was almost to her quarters in the rebuilt palace complex when one of her father’s guards, who maintained watch on the entire palace complex and not just her father unlike her and Ky’s guards, came towards her at a jog.

“Has something happened?” she asked, unable to keep the worried sound out of her voice.

It was hard not to have flashbacks to the insurrection, when her father’s guards had barely gotten her into the main section of the palace before the revolting legionaries showed up in force with instructions to kill her, her father, and any officials they could find.

“No, my lady. Your father asked that we relay a message from Hortensius. He came looking for you earlier in the day, and asked that you come see him when you returned from the legions.”

Lucilla gave a sigh. It wasn’t really that late in the day and the sun had another two hours before it finished its journey across the sky, but she’d been going non-stop for days trying to make sure everything was in place for the legion’s journey to help the Ulaid, including several long discussions with Ky that lasted well into the night.

While it was helpful to be able to talk to both him and Sophus, she could only do so when she was alone. Sometimes, she could clear a room to get space to hold discussions, but people would notice if this happened too often, so usually, that meant she had to wait until she was back in her quarters at night, with her guard safely on the other side of the door and out of earshot. Ky might have had some special ability to go for days at a time without sleep, but she was merely human and couldn’t keep this pace up for long.

Still, her sleep would have to wait. Ky had entrusted her with overseeing the development of various inventions and she knew how critical they were to the war effort. Hortensius wasn’t one to call for someone just so he could show off his latest success. If he asked for her, especially if he left a message with her father’s guards for her to see him when she returned, then it was a safe bet that whatever he needed was urgent.

She made her way to the machinist’s main factory, which also held a small room he used as his main office, her guards in tow. It spoke to the pace of the work happening across the Empire that the factory was still going full tilt. She knew Hortensius was running shifts throughout the night, but it was something else to see the factory still full of laborers, producing an impressive amount of noise.

She was also happy to see some of the projects were civilian in nature, including the new heavier plows made from the stronger steel Ky had already introduced, next to the military production. It was a sign of the security the people were starting to feel, now that they’d effectively kicked the Carthaginians off the island.

“My lady, I’m glad you came,” Hortensius said, hurrying over from a huddle he’d been in with some of his foremen.

“It sounded urgent, so I thought it best I not keep you waiting.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s urgent, but I wanted to get your take on the new works we set up outside of town for manufacturing this ... gun powder the Consul described,” Hortensius said, pronouncing the alien words carefully.

She noted that the words weren’t Latin and she had to admit it sounded strange to her ears as well.

“You moved the production out of town?”

“The Consul made it clear it was dangerous. I did a test with our first batch and I think, if anything, he undersold how volatile this substance is. I took a small batch out of the factory to test it, since he’d been so insistent that it was dangerous and it was amazing. I used a very small pile of the substance, although it was just the raw mixture; I didn’t wet it down to make the cakes that he described later in his instructions. I still kept the candle far away from the powder, several hands span in fact, and whoosh, it went up instantly. I never touched the powder. If just the dust in the air from it that made it go up like that, we can’t possibly have it near our other works or inside the city. It also means we can only work on it in the daylight with the windows of the building open for light. Any flame in the building is too much of a danger to our entire operation.”