Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (47 page)

For a while, the boy behind the bronze face was silent, reading the results and translating them into the language of men.

And this was the oracle engine's prophesy, delivered to the consul Crassus:

"It says yes, you should proceed and attack. If you meet the enemy in the desert tomorrow, your name and your son's name shall echo down the ages and shall always be remembered in Rome for this battle. You shall be showered with gold. By the day after tomorrow, you shall be riding on a flying machine into the Parthian capital, and that very night,you shall look down upon the king of Parthia himself, and he shall shake before you."

When the youth had spoken, there was silence in the room; it was the first time an oracle engine had delivered a prophesy.

The silence was of short duration, however, for Crassus was delighted. He set off immediately to order his centurions to prepare to march and engage.

Come dawn, seven legions left Zeugma and crossed the Euphrates on a bridge while Crassus watched from his quinquereme above, surrounded by his aerial
levitatii.
Often stories have been told of the ill omens that accompanied this departure: lightning flashed in the sky; the
aquila,
the eagle standard of the army, was jammed in the ground and would not come free without violence; the bridge across the Euphrates splintered from the many thousands of men who passed over it, and collapsed; the bull sacrificed to Mars in the night panicked and almost escaped the acolytes who held it. Crassus took no notice of these portents. Through a speaking trumpet, he reminded his men that the Parthians were barbarians, lacking all deep science, without the subtle weaponry of Rome, and without the gift of flight. Still, in the ranks below, the soldiers murmured against him and against the oracle engine, which had led him to ignore even the most obvious admonitions of the gods.

Across the plains the legions marched, while over them flit the shadows of the
levitatii,
seeking to spy the enemy in the distant scrub.

Shortly before noon, they discovered the army of the Parthian general Surenas, which stood as if waiting in the midst of the desert. They were in the region of a town called Carrhae. The Parthians looked to be an unimpressive force, dressed all in ragged skins and cloaks, standing at the edge of a forest.

The Romans drew up and prepared for battle, their flying machines hanging above them.

Crassus gave the order, and all the trumpets of the Roman army sounded, and the Klaxons, and they began marching forward. The bands of their armor shone in the desert sun, and their battle standards gleamed gloriously. Their flying ships began to rain down arrows on the enemy.

At this sign of violence from the Romans, General Surenas of the Parthians raised his hand and dropped it—and drums along his line gave forth great roars, and the Parthians, screaming, threw their ragged cloaks from themselves, revealing battle armor curiously wrought, scales covering both man and horse, masks of terrifying visage — and they charged. And then behind them from some clearing in the forest rose up a fleet of small machines, each manned by archers in peaked caps, which sped to encounter the Roman host.

Astonished, the Roman host hesitated while the armed cata-phracts galloped toward them, raising a storm of sand, while above them, the unexpected whirring air chariots advanced.

Publius, Crassus's son, had governance of the Roman flying machines and led them on a sortie against the Parthians' devices, which shot bolts with deadly force and tremendous accuracy at the legionnaires below. Publius, we may suspect, felt sure of the outcome: the cloud coursers of his Roman
levitatii
were beautiful machines, dazzling with gilt, prowed with icons of Medusa, whereas the Parthian contraptions were made of leather and looked scarcely fit to fly.

The two aerial forces engaged, and much damage was done by each side, as archers fired flaming arrows and the Romans' Archimedean mirrors swiveled to set the enemy aflame.

After the first skirmish, the Parthian flying devices fled, straggling away from the field of battle — and Publius, ill fated, followed, filled with delight at the enemy's retreat, calling out to his
levitatii,
"Do not flag! We shall cut them down out of the air!" The cloud coursers drove on in swift pursuit.

It was at this time that the Parthians revealed their tail gunners, who are famed now across the world for their deadly and destructive accuracy. It is said they shoot bolts that only gain in speed from being shot in flight—and in this way, even a retreat is turned into an assault—which is called the Parthian shot.

The Roman flyers, shocked, saw holes bored through their hulls, looked down to find their own chests pierced, their own hands riveted to their shields with a bolt, a sunburst of blood upon the bright targe. The Parthians stalled in the air and so enveloped the Roman coursers, firing on every side. Airship after airship plummeted to the ground, kicking up great gouts of sand.

Crassus, watching through the lenses, saw his son go down. He ordered his own quinquereme to fall back and land.

The Parthian flyers now returned to the earthbound fray, without Romans in the air to impede them, and began to rain down bombs of horsehair and pitch upon the legionnaires. The cohorts tried to lock their shields together to form an armored turtle that might protect them from attack by air, but as they did so, the Parthian cataphracts assaulted them from the sides. The wind from machines and the sand from cavalry cast up a great sandstorm, and the legionnaires could not breathe and could not see which way to fight. They stumbled over their own dead, and their armored turtles split, revealing human meat inside.

The slaughter now was general. It is said that forty thousand men died there in the hot noonday sun. In the rear, Crassus and his advisers watched the destruction. The
oculus
set in the Roman eagle standard conveyed shadows and images from the front back along the wire: the sand; the swordplay; the towering, armored cataphracts, breathing easily through their masks while the legionnaires gagged and collapsed below.

To his ministers, Crassus insisted, "We have not lost the day."

And then, on the lens of the
oculus,
a face heaved in view, laughing — surmounted with the wild topknot of a Parthian — and a voice sneered, in broken Latin, "Surely a general who hides behind his army is no father of brave Publius, who we have just cut down out of the air. Surely there is no father of such a noble youth here, or he would come out and fight."

This insult being delivered, the Parthians shot two of the wire bearers, the line of boys who, strung back along the desert, held the
oculus
's wire aloft on forked poles so it could convey its images. The wire was cut, and Crassus's lens went blank. The Parthians had seized the sacred Roman battle standard.

At this—the loss not only of his son but of the shining, golden eagle standard, the
aquila,
symbol of Rome's might upon the field — it is said that Crassus lost heart.

Plutarch records that one of the centurions, speaking of the
oculus,
said, "The line is cut," to which Crassus replied, astonished, "Yes, by the scissors of Atropos," which is to say, the Fate who clips the mortal cord and removes each of us, one by one, from the weft of all that is.

Such was his gloomy state. Crassus, defeated, ordered a retreat.

The Romans fled the field, their few remaining flying machines providing cover as the Parthians, jeering, fell back. Across the desert a few thousand Roman men scrambled, many so desperate with thirst that they fell to the sand, never to rise. It was many hours before they reached Zeugma and safety.

That night, the Parthians surrounded Zeugma's walls. Their aerial contraptions drifted over the town, ready to drop incendiary clots.

A herald, fixing a long speaking trumpet to his wind mask, called down to the tent of the Roman commander, "We shall give you one night to mourn your son." All the legionnaires and auxiliaries, huddled among the debris left behind in the camp by their dead brothers in arms, heard this called down, and the word was among them that none of them would see the next nightfall.

Crassus wasted but little time cheering and exhorting his chief advisers. His rage swept over him so swiftly that he could scarcely restrain himself long enough to urge them distractedly to be strong, before he ordered his lictors to swarm the oracle engine and drag the Minervan Virgins before him, so they might be questioned, castrated, and slain.

When they were brought before him, they came with terrified and humble countenances. They being thrown down on the floor, and sharp points of
gladii
held to their throats by guards, they were closely questioned by Crassus. They avowed that they had in no way prejudiced the machine — and that, further, the machine could not be prejudiced, in their view, since they had removed the coin from its workings.

Then Crassus, who was livid with anger and torn by sorrow, said to them, "You claim that the machine operated perfectly. And yet twelve cohorts of men are reduced almost to nothing — a few stragglers here in the camp, and little else. The
aquila,
sacred standard of our nation, is in the hands of our enemy. The glory of the republic is tarnished. If my name cleaves to this battle and is remembered by future generations, it will be due only to the shame of this defeat, as ruinous as those at Cannae or the Caudine Forks. So tell me, engineers, as you grovel, in what way was this prophesy perfection? Or do you claim the vengeful shade of murdered Furius returned to brush the metal pins askew?"

The Minervan Virgins, huddled before him, exchanged their pallid looks and hesitated to speak; but they being urged by the points of the
gladii,
the chief among them struggled to explain himself. He delivered this speech, during which the faces of all the soldiers who stood there sank, realizing their doom: "Sirs — Consul — and Your Excellencies. If you slay us, we are dead in vain and without cause, for we performed the calculations as directed. Recall that we share your fate. We, too, shall face the Parthian sword and dart if the engine's 'Yes' should prove to have been misleading.

"We have, in the hours since we first heard of your . . . let us not say defeat, but setback . . . frantically reviewed the intelligence we gave the machine and its replies. We can find no explanation, except this, sirs . . . this.

"Marcus Furius Medullinus spent weeks telling the machine stories of battle — and weeks more telling the machine stories of tragic fate. He fed it all the tales of murder paying for murder, and generation slaying generation, and the laughter of the gods at those they have destroyed. The machine was weaned on revenge and suckled on tragic irony.

"Marcus Furius did not have to jam the machine for it to destroy you — in fact, had the coin been left in, we have discovered, the oracle engine would have malfunctioned and warned you against this confrontation. We would all have been safe. But Marcus Furius knew you would kill him. He knew you would find the coin. He knew you would remove it, seeking a clearer reading. And he knew the machine, trained in cycles of revenge, would work
itself
into its calculations as an agent of satisfying, self-fulfilling, and cataclysmic doom. It would play upon irony. It would figure its own prophesies and their effects into fate's equation — indeed, if it did not figure in its own role in the outcome of the battle, it would be remiss, partially blind. It operated perfectly according to its training, and it arranged a fitting catastrophe.

"This engineer, Marcus Furius Medullinus, has made us all — machine and man alike — the apparatus of his vengeance."

The lictors, the advisers, the boys stretched upon the floor, Crassus himself— they all looked about them and realized that what the young man said was true: the machine had taken stock, found its materials, and produced a tragedy. They all were cogs in its dumb operation — and the desert itself was its etched plate — the lines of legionaries in their strict formations—
hastati, principes,
and
triarii —
were strung like abacus beads in rank, sliding back and forth to tally some unimaginable disaster yet to come. The workings of the engine were vast, and in days, would reach, with driveshafts and pivots, across the seas even to Rome itself.

The prophesy, almost certainly, would come true, with a disaster in every clause. All that remained was to wait for the inevitable cheap ironies to come.

The rest of the story is well known, and it is attested both by Plutarch and by Cassius Dio.

In the morning, the Parthian general Surenas drifted over Zeugma in a chariot bedecked with plumes and painted eyes and called down to the tents below that he would accept the surrender of the Roman army, offering them safe passage if they would embrace their own defeat.

Crassus sought to make some speech to his centurions about the unflagging Roman spirit and the need for strength and the desire for death and glory. The soldiers, however, had heard the story of the
stochastikon
from those guards who had listened to the dismal revelations of the Minervan Virgins, and they did not wish to die in service of the lunatic's machine. When they threatened to rise up against him, Crassus relented and, with his lictors and a few of his officers, went out of the gates to parley with Surenas.

We have all heard how Crassus, on foot, met General Surenas, who hovered in a machine; and that Surenas made much of the fact that the Roman had debased himself by walking upon the dusty ground. Surenas bade Crassus step into his craft, so they both could be whisked to Ctesiphon for negotiations.

We have heard how, when Crassus went to raise himself up on the mounting step of the flying ship, Surenas jolted forward by several inches, so Crassus stumbled. Surenas apologized elaborately; but when Crassus stepped upon the machine again, Surenas shot up by several inches, so that once again Crassus fell in the dirt. We have heard how the Roman ministers drew their swords to avenge this affront to their general. We have heard how a melee followed, and the small Roman party was all slain, Crassus lying facedown among them, weeping.