In a very real sense, the men and women who had built the Roman roads under the direction of Roman engineers and Roman officers had not only built the blood-red dragon, they had been born from it. Born as one unified people who understood themselves to be Britons, a far-flung but important portion of the Roman empire, the last civilized bastion in the West. It was a psychological shift that lifted them out of tribalism and re-created them as one nation, regardless of tribe of birth. The dragon of Britain—the blazing emblem of Artorius—the half-Sarmatian Dux Bellorum, was nothing less than the mighty Roman roads of war.
Emrys Myrddin's genius in tying the symbolism—and the Britons—together left Stirling in awe. Ancelotis, who had never given the matter much thought, either, marveled. You're sure it's not a Druid you are, from the Otherworld? 'Tis certain you think like one, Stirling of Caer-Iudeu.
Huh. I'm no more a Druid than this horse we're riding. But I do know a thing or two about psychology and symbolism. Let's just agree to name Emrys Myrddin the genius he is, eh?
Ancelotis agreed as they raced along the back of Emrys Myrddin's dragon, accompanied by the cataphracti who had joined Ancelotis, traveling in a thunder of hooves against the ancient Roman paving stones. As they rode, Stirling tried to reconcile the sixth century's appalling lack of exactitude with his twenty-first-century desire for laser pin-point accuracies and satellite image-mapping systems, literally accurate down to the fraction of a millimeter. He mourned the loss of technology so precise that it was used, among other things, to map the rate of continental drift across the tectonic plates. With one decent satellite photo, Stirling could have pinpointed the exact location of the Saxon army boiling up from Sussex and Wessex toward the southwest of England, using that knowledge to gauge their speed, their likeliest route, and their numerical strength. He would have been content with something as relatively primitive as aerial reconnaissance from a hot-air balloon.
You're sure you can't pinpoint Caer-Badonicus more precisely? he fretted silently.
Ancelotis tried to come up with landmarks his twenty-first-century guest might recognize. I've never been there, understand, but I'm told it's near the border between Glastenning and Caer-Durnac, farther south than Roman Bath. It's west of Stonehenge, Ancelotis added, but a good way east from the Cheddar Caves. As Stirling listened, he pinned imaginary flags into his mental map of the south of England, triangulating from those three points and coming up with Salisbury Plain. Where in that broad sweep of flat land would one put a critically strategic hill fort? Then he saw it, a probable location that elicited a startled grunt. Cadbury Hill?
As he thought about it, Stirling's smile faded, replaced with a thoughtful frown. Such a location for Caer-Badonicus made sense. An army trying to take—or hold—the southwestern portion of England would be forced to guard against any detachment of troops camped on that hilltop. Failure to do so would result in lightning attacks from the ancient hill fort's summit, requiring a full-scale siege to dislodge, and a siege of that magnitude would tie up resources the kings of Sussex and Wessex could ill afford for any length of time beyond a few days.
What he could have done with gunpowder and a few small mortars on that hilltop didn't bear thinking about, since there was no time to locate the ingredients and experiment with the formula, never mind cast the mortars—or even a few hand cannons—from iron or bronze. Of course, if they survived the battle at Badon Hill, there would be ample time to experiment, provided he could obtain the ingredients. Charcoal was easy and saltpeter could be found at the bottom of manure and compost piles, crystallizing out of the muck, but what about sulphur? Wasn't that found in association with hot springs and volcanic vents? Were there any sulphur deposits in Britain? The only hot springs in Britain were at Bath—and Stirling had never heard mention of sulphur deposits associated with the springs. What he needed was a nice, cooperative volcano. And that was one thing Britain simply didn't have.
Thoughts of volcanoes triggered another whisper at the back of his memory, something important he couldn't quite put his finger on. Something important to British history, linked oddly with Arthurian lore, and he couldn't remember now what it was. Stirling frowned, while Ancelotis puzzled over the tantalizing glimpses into the future resident in Stirling's memories. Ancelotis knew virtually nothing about volcanoes, outside of their connection with ancient Greek and Roman myth, things like Vulcan at his forge deep in the heart of Mt. Etna or Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of Vesuvius, the day it erupted to bury Pompeii and Herculaneum. Why was he remembering a connection between volcanos and Arthurian legend?
Well, if Stirling couldn't figure that out, what did he know about volcanoes in general? They tended to cluster along the edges of tectonic plates grinding past or diving under one another—he knew that much at least—and they appeared along the midoceanic ridges, as well, which were tectonic plates pulling apart, stirring up a froth of magma from the mantle, which spewed up periodically in spectacular volcanic eruptions. The mid-Atlantic ridge had produced Iceland and the mid-Pacific ridge had produced a whole necklace of volcanic islands, like Hawaii in the northern hemisphere and Easter Island in the southern hemisphere.
The rim of the Pacific Ocean had been dubbed the Ring of Fire, with volcanoes from the western shores of South America and the grand volcanoes of Chile and Peru, north to the Pacific Northwest of North America and volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens, across to Japan with its highly active volcanoes and earthquakes, south past China and down into Indonesia, where the world-famous nineteenth-century blast from Krakatoa had blown an entire island into oblivion.
That particular eruption had been heard halfway across the Pacific by the admiral of the British fleet stationed in India, who'd thought the fleet was under attack by naval guns. The explosion which had destroyed most of the island had also blasted so much rock and dust into the atmosphere, there had been a literal "volcanic winter" that year—a whole year with no summer, with dark skies and snow on the ground even in temperate and warm southern zones, and crop failures turning productive agricultural belts into wastelands—
Stirling gasped.
The wasteland!
One of the most powerful, recurring images of Arthurian lore. A land so blighted, nothing could grow, a land so sick, crops died, cattle died, and people starved to death as the land failed to produce life—a condition blamed, mythically, on the impotence and injury of the king. The wasteland was part of the Arthurian Grail lore, with the cup of Christ healing the formerly pagan king's deep physical, psychic, and spiritual wounds—and with the healing of the king came the healing of the land. He'd seen the twentieth-century movie, Excalibur, with its extraordinary sequence of the land bursting into blossom once more, one of the most beautiful movie images ever filmed.
And that image jolted loose Stirling's memory, the newspaper article he'd read on the train, heading for Edinburgh and the time-travel lab. Krakatoa hadn't blown up just once. There'd been a previous eruption—in the sixth century a.d. One that made the nineteenth-century explosion look like a champagne cork popping loose. Stirling narrowed his eyes, trying to recall exactly what that article had said. So far as he could remember, the Pacific volcano had blown itself to spectacular bits somewhere between the year 536 and 539 a.d., creating worldwide ecological devastation so severe, crops had failed and ecosystems had crashed for more than ten years. A whole decade of world-spanning wasteland. Crop failures had triggered mass migrations of people across the face of the whole earth and wars of bloody genocide had been fought over land that was still producing even marginal amounts of food.