She lifted her goblet. "To our tomorrows, may they be better than our yesterdays."
They drank in turn.
Suddenly her arms went around him and her mouth was hot on his. "I meant this to be leisurely with much fine play," she whispered. "But that would be wrong with you. I see it now."
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This might have happened. The Cimbri are still remembered by the old district name Himmerland. Plutarch describes the battle at Vercellae, which took place 101 B.C., and its immediate aftermath. Other classical writers, such as Tacitus and Strabo, and a treasure of archeological material enable us to guess at the Cimbri themselves. Apparently they were a Germanic tribe from Jutland, with some elements of Celtic culture; by the time they reached Italy they had grown into a formidable confederation.
King Mithradates the Great (more commonly but less correctly spelled Mithridates) is, of course, also historical. His expedition into Galatia in 100 B.C. is not mentioned by the scanty surviving records; but it is known that he had already fought with that strange kingdom and annexed some of its territory, so border trouble followed by a punitive sweep down past Ancyra is quite plausible.
At that time the area now called southern Russia was dominated by the Alanic tribes, among whom the Rukh-Ansa were prominent. They are presumably identical with the "Rhoxolani" whom Mithradates' general Diophantus defeated at the Crimea about 100 B.C.
The tradition described in the epilogue may be found in the thirteenth-century Heimskringla and, in a different form, in the chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus.
Otherwise my sources are the usual ancient and modern ones. I have tried to keep the framework of verifiable historical fact accurate. For whatever brutality, licentiousness and unreasonable prejudice is shown by the people concerned, I apologize, adding only that by the standards of the modern free world the era was a good deal worse than I care to describe explicitly.