The Sword of Jupiter (Imperium #1) - Chapter 18

The next morning Ky was in a foul mood, something his lictores  picked up on quickly. Partly it was because he’d started to push  himself too hard. While it was true, he could operate on significantly  less sleep than non-augmented humans, he had pushed this ability too  far. Even with the changes to his system, Ky couldn’t go with only a few  hours of sleep a night indefinitely. While the meeting had run late,  once it was over Ky still had hours of work left to do.

There were  mounds of technical documents in the AIs databases that needed to be  transcribed onto scrolls for the Romans who didn’t have the benefit of  an advanced computer system in their head. Since they were millennia  away from data ports and communication relays, the only person who could  get those documents onto paper was Ky.

He’d planned for his  meeting the previous afternoon to be just that, in the afternoon.  Instead, it had been after midnight when he finally returned to his  quarters. All of which left Ky with only an hour’s sleep.

His  exhaustion was only part of his ill mood, however. Today’s task was one  he’d needed to make, but he didn’t relish. Today they were heading to  the camp he’d convinced the legions to set up for the thousands of  prisoners taken during the battle.

If left to their own devices,  the Romans would have slaughtered many of these people and sold the rest  into slavery. Ky knew most of the military commanders weren’t happy  with the decision since the money made from selling the vanquished in  battle was partly paid to the legions, who didn’t appreciate the loss.

Ky  also knew it was going to get worse. Eventually, some senators would  realize the Empire was spending money to feed, treat, and guard the  Carthaginian soldiers and their various camp followers. He didn’t know  specifics, but Ky was certain it would end up being a significant amount  of money, and that the Roman politicians would not be happy about its  expenditure.

His lictores  left Ky to his own thoughts, riding slightly behind him, alert but  respectful. Ky made a mental note to apologize for his attitude and  thank them for their patience … once he was able to do it without making  things worse, of course.

Their first stop was the Seventh Legion since Velius’s men had been given responsibility over the prison camp.

The  legate, most likely notified by one of the patrols they’d passed as  they neared the camped legion, rode out to greet them. Velius began to  greet Ky in the friendly manner he’d taken to, extended a hand in  greeting when he stopped short. Ky assumed the legate had read Ky and  his lictores’  expressions and realized the mood of his visitors needed a different  tack. Ky was actually impressed with the legate’s ability to so easily  read and adapt to a situation, but it seemed unlikely someone would rise  to the position of leading thousands of men without learning something  of politics.

“Consul, I hope you are well. We’ve set up breakfast for you and your men before we begin today’s task.”

“Thank you, Velius, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer if we got to it right away.”

“As you say, Consul.”

Velius,  a handful of his officers, and several dozen legionaries joined Ky’s  small group as they left the Legionary camp and traveled the quarter of a  mile to the camp that had been set up for prisoners. Ky had already  seen the ramshackle prison camp through his drones cameras, but that  didn’t quite prepare him for how bad the conditions here were.

Their  tents were sticks with bits of cloth strung between them. A stream ran  across one side of the camp with no latrines set up. The prisoners were  literally defecating in their drinking water. What was worse was all the  women being housed with the soldiers. Even though everyone was from the  same army that had traveled together from Londinium, now that they were  prisoners instead of soldiers, many of the soldiers had taken to raping  any of the women they could get their hands on.

The women had  banded together for defense in once corner of the prison camp, viciously  attacking any man that came close. Unfortunately, they were not near  the water source, and several women got picked off and abused when they  went to collect water.

“Legate, this camp is an outrage and a stain on your entire legion.”

Velius  had the sense to look properly chastised, but several of his officers  looked more upset by Ky’s statement than they did at the scene they saw  in front of them.

“Consul, why should it matter? They’re little better than slaves.”

“Besides  the fact that these are human beings who deserve to be treated as such,  it matters because how you treat your enemies will be what decides if  Rome stands or falls. Rome cannot conquer the world and force everyone  to submit to its will. Look at the Carthaginians and how they rule their  empire with a bloody fist.”

“It seems to be working for them,”  the same officer said, ignoring the looks from his fellow soldiers  imploring him to be silent.

“Does it? Carthage rules more land  than any nation before it, from Britannia to the far edges of the former  Persian Empire. How many troops did Carthage commit to destroying Rome?  While it was four times the legions it faced, that was only because of  good timing on its generals part, since the bulk of your forces were in  the north. Had they been here, you would have had the edge in men. They  could have brought enough soldiers to stand shoulder to shoulder across  the width of this island and twenty men deep. Why would they send so few  soldiers?”

“Because they are busy putting down revolts,” Velius answered.

“Exactly.  Carthage must maintain full garrisons in every city and an army in  every region to maintain order, and even then, they lose thousands of  soldiers to revolutionaries and revolts. That is the path an Empire that  rules through fear must follow.”

“Rome is not big enough to rule  that way and, if it were, it would not be able to do so forever. If Rome  ruled the world that Carthage now does, it would be able to hold on for  a few centuries, until outside forces weakened Rome’s stranglehold just  enough to let the people rise up and overthrow them. That is the end  result of an empire ruled by an iron fist.”

The soldiers may not  have realized Ky was referencing their historical path, or at least the  one his historical Rome took, but they at least recognized that there  was something to his words.

“While Rome must stand for what’s  morally right in the way it treats prisoners, we’re also squandering an  opportunity. Rome needs soldiers. Badly. My understanding of how the  Carthaginian army works is that many of its armies, especially those  operating on the fringes of their empire, are made up of either slaves  or unwilling conscripts from recently conquered lands, all controlled by  officers loyal to Carthage. These are people who not only didn’t want  to fight for Carthage but have a reason to actively dislike the  Carthaginians.”

“How would we know we aren’t putting possible spies and saboteurs in our own forces if we recruited from this?”

“First,  we need to skip any officers. They are the most likely to be loyal to  Carthage. We have a team of officers go through and interview all of the  regular soldiers, find out who’s from which tribe, and piece together  those conscripted against their will. I’ll talk with Ramirus  and see if he has any people who could help you with that. He knows  more about the various factions inside the Carthaginians and outside  populations to have at least some clue if people are telling the truth.  We can then give those soldiers a choice, stay in confinement until  hostilities with Carthage are at an end or join the Roman legions,  offering to let them return to their homes once everything is over or  become Roman citizens after a set time in the legions.”

“We don’t have the authority to make them citizens!” Velius said, almost scandalized.

“I’ll  worry about that part. We need a reason for them to not just fight for  Rome because it’s the best of bad choices, but to do so because it’s  good for them in the long run. We take those new recruits and spread  them across the legions, trying to not put more than a handful in any  century just in case we missed any troublemakers.”

“We can try that,” Velius said, unconvinced.

Ky  decided as long as they were willing to go along with him, that’s all  he could ask for. What he was offering was a fairly extreme change from  how armies would have treated prisoners, and it would be too much to ask  for even someone as mentally flexible as Velius to buy into  enthusiastically.

“First, though, we need to convince them that we  aren’t the same as the Carthaginians, and that starts with how they’re  treated. This war with Carthage is going to last a while, so we need to  come up with a better way of housing prisoners. We need workable living  conditions, latrines separate from their drinking water, and edible  rations. The women need to be housed separately from the men and stiff  penalties put in place if any of our soldiers take advantage of them.”

“Who will pay for that?” one of Velius’s aids asked, honestly this time as opposed to derision disguised as a question.

“For  now, I’ll talk to the Emperor about funding the setting up of a  semi-permanent prisoner camp. You’re right in thinking that won’t work  in the long run, but there are ways around that. We can talk to some of  the merchant houses and see about loaning out prisoners as a workforce,  along with guards to watch them, and using that money to maintain their  incarceration. We’ll have to ensure they aren’t ill-treated, but in the  long run, that will help out also since it will free our workforce from  doing important but dangerous jobs like mining. Those freed up workers  could then work in the new businesses that will be starting up or, more  importantly, join the legion. Against a different enemy, we might even  be able to convince our enemies to exchange our captured soldiers for  theirs, but that doesn’t seem to be an option with the Carthaginians.  Instead, we’ll have to settle with imprisoning those loyal enough to  Carthage to not switch sides until hostilities are over when we can just  release them back into the care of the Carthaginians.”

“I’ll have  some of our surveyors look for a location for a semi-permanent prison  camp that meets your requirements,” Velius said, still unenthused but  willing to be a good soldier.

“For now, put some more men on  guarding them, including a guard around the area the women have  separated for themselves, and ensure they have access to enough food to  not drop dead from starvation. That I want done right away.”

“As you say, Consul.”

Ky  felt better about the situation as he rode away from the camp. He  couldn’t fault Velius that much for the state of the place, since the  very idea of interning prisoners instead of killing or enslaving them  was, in itself, such a foreign idea to anyone of this time. Beyond  setting a new goal post for the Romans, it served as a reminder for Ky  that these things would have to be done in stages since he didn’t only  have to introduce new ways of doing things, but also had to change the  basic Roman beliefs of ‘the right way to do things.’

After  pointing out a few more changes that needed to be made to the prison  camp, Ky returned to the Seventh Legion’s camp with Velius. While he  still had a lot left to do, Ky took the remainder of the morning touring  the Seventh Legion camp and talking to the soldiers. He was going to  ask a lot from these men very soon, both in fighting once winter passed  and in heavy training leading up to that, which made spending some time  with the rank and file worth doing, regardless of his busy schedule.

Ky  only stopped his tour when Strabo and his men showed up to take over  from Sellic, carrying the news that he was needed back at the imperial  complex. Ramirus and the Emperor had come through with their promise to  get some of the senators together to sit down with him, and they wanted  to do it today.

Ky had already come to the conclusion that the  single hardest group to convince of everything he had planned would be  the senators. They had a lot invested in the way things were currently  going, both in their land-based wealth and the power, that they  aggressively protected from further weakening by the Emperor. Starting  with the Emperor’s great-grandfather’s elevation from Consul to Emperor,  each generation of the Germanicus line had increased the power of the  Emperor at the expense of the Senate. Their appropriation of senatorial  prerogatives had always been to deal with an emergency, but they had  never returned that power when the emergency passed.

As things  stood, the balance of power between the Emperor and the Senate stood at a  precarious balance. A good example was the military. The Emperor was  the supreme commander of the legions with all legates answerable only to  him, including the naming of commanders. The Senate, meanwhile,  controlled all tax revenue and got to decide how much of that went to  the legions. The Emperor could use his own vast holdings to pay the  legions, but even his holdings paled in comparison to the money  controlled by the Senate. If they cut off funds, it would not take long  before the legions ran out of money to pay the soldiers, which would  almost always mean unrest.

From what Ky had read, the Senate  threatened to withhold these funds regularly to force the Emperor into  specific action, the last time being when the Emperor hesitated to send  more than one legion north to deal with the Picts. Thanks to Ramirus,  the Emperor had been aware that the Carthaginians were putting together a  force to attack the Romans. He’d attempted to send a single legion  north, retaining the other five legions at Devnum to repel the attack  when it came.

When the Senate had demanded the Emperor send all  but one legion north to deal with the Pict incursions, things had come  to a head. Eventually, the Emperor had been forced to blink in the face  of unrest among the legions when the money stopped. He’d managed to  convince enough senators to let two legions stay behind in exchange for  sending the bulk of the Praetorian Guard in their place.

Ky  couldn’t wrap his head around the short-sighted decision to prioritize  protecting northern Roman holdings over the possibility of complete  annihilation at the hands of the Carthaginians, but that had been  exactly what they’d done.

Now it was Ky’s turn to face the Roman  elite. Carus had already briefed him on the basic state of the Senate  and their anger over Ky’s appointment as Consul. Most of the things he  needed to do, such as the tax changes he’d proposed and the creation of a  patent system, required the Senate to pass new legislation. The meeting  today was going to be the easy part. The senators Ramirus had lined up  were already in the Emperor’s camp and would be predisposed to work with  Ky on his ideas. They were also one of the smaller factions in the  Senate and didn’t have enough power to do anything by themselves.

Ky’s  hope was that they would have ideas of how to pull together a big  enough coalition of factions to get the laws he needed written and  passed.

Ky arrived back at the imperial complex and was led to the  one major area he hadn’t spent time in yet, the forum. The AI had shown  Ky some pictures of both the ruins of the forums still preserved in his  time and pictures of what scholars believed the forum to look like in  ancient times.

Ky wasn’t sure if it was the scholars who were off  or if the forums here in Devnum were a poor copy of the original, but  the room was a shadow of those images. It was generally smaller than the  pictures of ruins he’d seen and much darker than artist renditions had  made it out to be.

That was Ky’s first real impression of the seat  of Roman government, how dark it was. Thinking about it, calling this  room a shadow of the original was fairly on the mark. The main forum  room was filled with shadows cast both by the people in it and the very  room itself, making the whole place feel somewhat ominous.

The  building itself was built up with a series of steps leading up to a flat  area that circled the building with large arched doors spread around  the rectangular building. The doorways lead to more stairs that lead  down to a flat area in the center of the building, tiered stone benches  flanking on either side of the walkway. Senators would sit on the  benches surrounding whoever was speaking at the moment from the flat  center area, the speaker looking up at his colleagues.

The design  had the benefit of allowing all the spectators to see the presenter and  the presenter to see everyone he was talking to at the moment, but it  also meant that all light came in through windows and the doorways well  above the speaking area, leaving that the darkest part of the forum.

Scattered  around the stone steps were ten senators, a number lower than Ky had  thought there would be. Rome currently had ninety senators, all  appointed by the Emperor. There wasn’t a law that mandated a specific  number of senators but it tended to stay fairly constant by tradition,  except for periods when the size of Rome decreased, such as the loss of  the lower half of Britannia, which had dropped the Senate from  two-hundred members down to the current ninety.

The only official  requirements for someone to be a senator was based on the value of the  land and buildings they owned. This tended to favor landed Romans such  as those who owned large plantations over wealthy Romans who made money  off of various trades but didn’t own much beyond perhaps one warehouse  or factory.

During the days of the Republic, before the Romans had  been forced off the continent entirely, there had been a separate  legislative branch called the assembly, which was elected by the people  through direct democracy. One of the early decrees of the first emperor  was to get rid of this body, passing its powers to the senate that the  then Emperor controlled.

Ky was sure the plan had been that since  the Emperor controlled appointment to the Senate, that he would control  the Senate entirely and through them, control the laws that governed the  state. That is, in fact, how it had worked in the historical Rome of  Ky’s timeline. Unfortunately, things didn’t work quite that way.

One  problem was that appointment to the Senate was for life. Unless the  Senate unanimously voted to expel a senator, they could not be removed,  even by a decree from the Emperor. The other was that, even though the  Emperor could appoint who he wanted to the Senate, it wasn’t always that  simple. Emperors began needing favors, often money or political  support, from powerful men and used Senate appointments to ensure those  favors. Sometimes the vote of a sitting senator would require admitting  their ally or descendant to the legislative body.

Piece by piece  over the hundred years since the republic became an Empire, the Emperor  lost control of the Senate, until it became an active check on his  power. Perhaps, given enough time and careful planning, the Emperor  would be able to use his power of appointment to weed out the  troublesome parts of the Senate and reform it into something more easily  bent to his will, but Rome didn’t have time for that process.

What  that left was coalition building, which is what brought Ky here to  these men. The immediate problem was that ten loyalists out of ninety  senators was not even close to enough to get anything Ky needed done  accomplished.

“Consul,” Ramirus said, standing up from one of the  benches where he’d been talking with one of the assembled senators. “I’m  sorry to take you away from your business with the legions on such  short notice, but I knew how urgently you needed to talk to these men.”

“You  did the right thing. We have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it  in. The campaigning season is only a few months away and there is no  doubt the Carthaginians will march as soon as conditions allow it.  You’re right that we have a lot to accomplish between now and then.”

“You  have already stirred up quite the controversy, Consul,” one of the men  said. “Rumors are already circulating about some fairly drastic changes  you are proposing.”

“This is Quintus Trebatius Taenaris, one of the longest-serving senators, currently.”

Taenaris  was an old man, with thin grey hair and dark grey eyes. His face was  weathered to the point of resembling old leather, with dark spots dotted  across his face and arms. The AI highlighted several and put up  percentages that were not favorable, suggesting the possibility of  late-stage skin cancer. There was no way to be sure without a more  thorough examination, but the current level of technology wouldn’t allow  Ky to do much about that even if it was diagnosed successfully.

The one thing that really stood out on the man, however, was the sharp intelligence in his eyes.

“Is it true you want to change the way taxes are assessed?”

“Yes,  which sounds extreme, I know. I’m not sure what Ramirus has told you  about some of the things I’ve proposed, but many of the new technologies  and theories that I’m introducing will create a wave of change that  will ripple out across Rome, and probably through other nations as well.  Right now, the majority of the wealth of Rome and most of your  population is centered on agriculture. Once all the technologies I’m  introducing are implemented, you will find that the situation will have  changed radically. Most of the wealth in Rome, along with a large  percentage of the workforce, will switch from agriculture to  manufacturing. This will happen because changes in agriculture  technology will make the production of a larger output per hectare  possible with a fraction of the workforce; while new inventions, both  martial and civilian, will create a greater demand for workers, and will  open up new markets. I know it’s easy to say that, and much of the push  back I’m going to get is because people either won’t understand or  won’t believe that will be the eventual outcome of these new  technologies.”

“We’ve heard about some of the new weapons you’ve  suggested and some of the new business models, but you’re right, I’m not  sure I believe those alone are enough to produce the change you are  talking about.”

“Those alone wouldn’t be, but I have only begun to  put my ideas and inventions into practice. Because of the threat facing  Rome, I, of course, started with the military aspects, but that will be  only a small part of what I’m introducing. These changes will come in  stages, since some technology I plan to introduce requires other  technology to be in place first. As a taste though, I will be sharing  technologies for stronger plows for faster planting, new fertilizers,  new threading and processing technologies for agricultural products, new  manufacturing techniques for a hundredfold spread of creating parts  that are so identical as to be interchangeable, and new metallurgy for  creating stronger and more versatile metals. That is, again, just a  small list of what I’m talking about; but each of those will have an  effect on how money is generated in Rome, which means the tax laws must  follow as well.”

A different senator spoke up, saying, “There are a  lot of very powerful people in Rome who will fight these changes. Men  whose fortunes, and power, are based on their land and slaves.”

“That’s why I need your help in putting together the votes to get these laws passed.”

“There  are some groups of senators that I think we could get to support at  least some of what we’ve heard about,” Taenaris said. “Even with them,  I’m not sure it will be enough.”

“For now, let’s talk to any  senator where there’s even a slight chance they might join us on some of  the legislation. We’ll have to worry about the rest when we get there.”

“Fine.  I think our best course is the new patent law Ramirus and Lurio told us  about. Some will oppose it just because it’s new, but since it doesn’t  touch existing prerogatives and will create more imperial purchasing  they can skim off of, some of the Emperor’s opponents will support it.”

“Good,”  Ky said. “That is what we need first anyway, since many of the new  inventions I will be introducing need to be started on sooner rather  than later, as they’re needed before we can go to the next stage of  inventions. We also need the money from that to begin to rebuild the  legions, which is our first priority.”

“I’d suggest letting me  work on that, alone. Since it comes from inside the loyalist block,  it’ll be clear the Emperor is behind it, but having you involved will  put off some of the hard-line senators. While I work on that, we will  put together meetings for you and everyone but the hard-liners for your  other proposals. Be aware the hard-liners under Mercurialis are by far  the largest voting bloc in the Senate, and many senators of the other  blocs will stick with Mercurialis, regardless.”

“I’ll have to be convincing,” Ky said, in grim determination.