The Second Wave

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They were the second wave of the invasion. The first had vanished like water into the sands. But now the Emperor Saturninus had sent another fleet to the New World, far larger than the first, and there would be more to follow if need be. “We will beat against their shores as the ocean does, and in the end we will conquer.” So the Emperor had declared, five years before, on the day news of the disaster reached the capital. “For Roma is an ocean, too: immense, inexhaustible, irresistible. They will not stand against our might.”

Titus Livius Drusus had been at his father’s side that day at the Senate when the Emperor made that speech. He was eighteen, then, a highborn young man of Roma who had not yet settled on his path in life. The Emperor’s words had left him profoundly stirred. A far-off new world awaiting conquest—whole unexplored continents far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, brimming with the treasure of mysterious copper-skinned people! And there before the Senate was the towering resplendent figure of the Emperor, magnificent in his robes of Imperial purple, crying out in that wonderfully resonant voice of his for brave men to carry the eagles of Roma’s legions to these alien empires.

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