Robert Silverberg - The Second Wave

Drusus saw to it that he had a proper burial, as befitted a Consul who had died in the service of the Empire on a foreign shore. When the last words had been chanted and the last shovelful of sand had been thrown upon the grave, Drusus, taking a deep breath, turned to his lieutenants and said, “Well, we are done with this, now. To the ships, everyone! To the ships!”

This time, of the more than forty thousand men who had gone forth on Roma’s second attempt to conquer the New World, six hundred returned. Hundreds more were lost at sea in the return voyage, including those aboard the vessel that Drusus had placed under the command of Marcus Junianus. For Drusus that was the hardest blow of all, losing Marcus on this idiotic adventure in folly. Try as he could to look upon Marcus’s death with the dispassionate eye of a Roman of ancient days, he found himself incapable of hiding from the pain of his grief. He owed the gods a death, yes, but he had not owed them Marcus’s death, and he knew he would carry the sorrow of that loss, and the guilt of it, to his grave.

The arduous voyage home had left him greatly weakened. He required two weeks of rest at his family estate in Latium before he was strong enough to deliver his report to the Emperor, who received him at the thousand-year-old royal villa at Tibur.

Saturninus seemed to have grown much older since Drusus last had seen him. He was not as tall as Drusus remembered—perhaps he had begun to stoop a little—and his lustrous black hair was touched now with the first gray. Well, everyone gets older, Drusus thought. But something else had gone from the Emperor besides his youthful glow. That aura of irrepressible regal vitality that had made him such an awesome figure seemed to have left him as well. Perhaps it was the passing of time, thought Drusus, or perhaps it was only his own memories of Olaus the Dane, that man of truly boundless force and limitless ferocity, that by comparison had lessened the Emperor in his eyes.

The Emperor asked Drusus, in a distant, somewhat dim way, to tell him of the fate of the second expedition. Drusus replied in a measured, unemotional tone, describing first the land, the climate, the splendor of the one Maian city that he had seen. Then he went on to the calamity itself: there had been great problems, he said, the heat, the serpents and scorpions and the stinging ants, disease, the hostility of the natives, above all a terrible storm. He did not mention Olaus the Dane. It seemed unwise to suggest to the Emperor that a savage Norseman had built an empire in that far-off land that was able to hold Roma at bay: that would only fire Saturninus up with the desire to bring such a man to Roma in chains.

Saturninus listened to the tale in that same remote manner, now and again asking a question or two, but showing a striking lack of real interest. And now Drusus was approaching the most difficult part of his report, the summary of his thoughts about his mission to the New World.

This had to be done carefully. One does not instruct an Emperor, Drusus knew; one merely suggests, one guides him toward the conclusions that one hopes he will reach. One has to be particularly cautious when one has come to the realization that a favorite project of the Emperor’s is wrongheaded and impossible.

So he spoke warily at first about the difficulties they had encountered, the challenge of maintaining supply lines over so great a distance, the probable huge native population of the New World, the special complexities posed by climate and disease. Saturninus appeared to be paying attention, but from very far away.

Then Drusus grew more reckless. He reminded the Emperor of his revered predecessor the Emperor Hadrianus, who had built the very villa where they were sitting now: how Hadrianus had come to see, in the end, that Roma could not send her legions to every nation of the world, that there were limits to her grasp, that certain far frontiers had to be left unconquered. Although at first he had not agreed with Hadrianus’s thinking, Drusus told the Emperor, his experiences in Yucatan had changed his mind about that.

The Emperor no longer appeared to be listening, though. And Drusus realized that it was very likely that he had not been listening for some while. In sudden desire to break through this glacial remoteness of Saturninus’s he found himself on the verge of saying outright, “The thing is impossible, Caesar, we will never succeed, we should give it up as a bad job. For if we continue it will destroy many thousands of our best troops, it will consume our revenues, it will break our spirit.”

But before any of those words could pass his lips he heard the Emperor murmur, like an oracle speaking in a trance, “Roma is the ocean, Drusus, immense and inexhaustible. We will beat against their shores as the ocean does.” And he realized in shock and horror that the Emperor was already beginning to plan the next expedition.