𐍄𐍉 𐍄𐌷𐌴 𐌴𐌽𐌳: 𐍆𐌹𐌽𐌹𐍃 𐍄𐌴𐍂𐍂𐌰𐌴
The year is 409 C.E. and the world is crashing down all around you. Endless war fomented by fickle, corrupt politicians makes it almost impossible to keep track of whom to hate. The one thing you do know is that Roma – the Eternal City – has fallen for the first time in nearly a thousand years. You were there. You lost almost everything in the siege, including some of your sanity.
What would you do?
Irena’s solution is to run away. Safety awaits, she’s sure, if she can just hike across Hispania to Finis Terrae – to the “end of the world”. First, she just has to survive a swarm of bloodthirsty children, an overzealous arsonist, a few thousand rampaging barbarians, and the personal demons of other war-weary souls she meets along the way. Will it all be worth it in the end?
Enjoy this sample from my upcoming novel! Feel free to share any comments – what you liked and/or what you think I should change.
A.D. III KAL. IAN. MCLIX A.U.C. ~ December 31, 406 A.D.
A wind was born at the top of the world. For a moment, it glimpsed art and culture to the south, fracture to the east, and an endless stream of displaced nomads to the north trickling ever westward.
Subsolanus, the East Wind, followed, racing the rising sun down one mountainside and up the next. Eventually, snow gave way to rocks, and trees, and lofty walls. A great general named Alexandros once devastated the Persian Empire for control of these lands and died immediately afterwards. Traianus, who boasted little more than a great ego, had similarly claimed this land and found himself expelled before the ink had time to dry. Now, the Sassanian Persians thrived anew in the eternal ebb and flow of civilizations.
Not knowing any of this, the wind puzzled at prickly defenses between ancient rivals. The heat of simmering tensions buoyed Subsolanus to dizzying heights the farther west it traveled. Soldiers in red cowered behind the standard of a fierce eagle under the shadow of endless hordes of men and horses that blackened the opposite bank of the Danbuius. While politicians stalled and Attila the Hun cooed in his cot, King Uldin’s men tired of shooting rabbits through the eye from two hundred yards on horseback. Honor demanded courage, and courage meant nothing without real risk. They yearned – ached – to prove their mettle in battle. The promise of gold didn’t hurt either.
Patience. At a time when the most powerful man in the Roman empire was half barbarian himself, the Goths, too, dreamed of ultimate authority. Why play by the rules when their “allies” kicked the foederati like dogs no matter what? Striking too greedily into the heart of Italia herself, however, had cost Radagaisus his head.
The entire frontier roiled like a child in the womb, a new world order impatient to be born. Tribes of Scirii stumbled into clans of Gepidae, who shoved against the Langobardi, who bumped the Rugii, who riled the Thuringi, and so on from the Angli to the Iutes, Iazyges, Quadi, Silingi, Macromanni, Alani, Asdingi, Alamanni, Saxones, Burgundi, and Franci. Tighter and tighter each community squeezed, until they jumbled together at the edge of the Roman world, indistinguishable in their misery.
“Germanicae,” authorities dismissed them all as one. “Barbarians.”
Dazed from despair, once-proud warriors wore the same glazed look as rabbits. Starving children cried out, but the family farms had long been overrun and the towns they stumbled past had no food to spare. The wind blew bitter cold over the heads of a hundred thousand men and women pressed against the Rhenus River, not permitted to move forward, unable to turn back.
Subsolanus blasted the castle walls that controlled the bridge at Mogontiacum, nearly knocking a young officer over the parapet where he spied with trepidation bordering on panic. Ducenarius Flaccus commanded the last two hundred defenders in the city guard. He’d spent the last week shepherding as many citizens as possible to allied Frankish fortifications in the north, but time was up. Throwing his men’s lives away wouldn’t save the rest. He, too, had known true hunger – for food, for freedom, for a chance. Howling, desperate starvation that twisted the mind, tainted the soul, and toppled empires.
New Year’s Eve, the temperature plummeted so low that the Rhenus River, famed for its fearsome flow, fully froze. Fearless fighters – Suebi, Alani, and Vandals – forged across on foot, while the majority simply walked across the bridge like the sensible, civilized people they were.
In the scrabble for food and supplies, however, nothing was sacred. The townsfolk shouldn’t have been so quick to scorn the barbarians’ money when they had the chance. Now, they died in the street. Pagans torched a church. The smoke-stained prayers of hundreds shrieked unanswered into a starless void.
Propelled by thermals, Subsolanus fled high above the fire and ice. It caught up to the retreating ducenarius and wiped a secret tear from his scarred cheek. There were no heroes that day.
They raced together through the night, no time nor desire to celebrate the new year.