Ranks of Bronze э-1

by David Weber

  There were two men on horseback, Falco and another of the tribunes. The rest of the command group was mounted on beasts which bore far less resemblance to horses than the four-horned draft animals of the enemy did to oxen. They were carnivorous, beyond doubt: giant lions, perhaps, or even huger dogs. They wore coats of iron scales, like the horses of the richest Parthian cataphracts. The score of inhuman riders mounted on them, the Commander's bodyguard, were armored in jointed suits which must have weighed hundreds of pounds apiece.

  Gaius Vibulenus had not known where his place was. He still was not sure, but he knew he did not belong here, behind the legion, with Falco and those who had bought the Roman prisoners from their Parthian captors.

  The young tribune began to jog down the remainder of the slope, clutching his sword but leaving his shield behind with the bodies. Every time his foot hit the ground, it pumped his skull airily lighter so that the pain resonating inside it became diluted to heat and a mild pressure.

  When he opened his mouth to cry, "Rome!" he found that his constricted throat would not pass even a croak. He tried to shout anyway as he staggered like a drunk or a madman, reaching the sixth rank as its legionaries dodged the more numerous trees at the low point of the valley.

  There were sounds of further fighting ahead, but the upward slope blocked vision. The slight decline from the opposite side of the valley had given the rear ranks an almost theatrical view of the start of the battle.

  Gaius Vibulenus was an inch or two taller than most of the line soldiers, because his family could afford to feed him well as a child. That was not enough of a height advantage to permit him to see over the helmets and crests, short black brushes for the legionaries and red transverse combs to mark the centurions. He struggled through the ranks, bumping and once pushing aside the troops who were doing their best to keep their order: the only task they were called on to perform at this moment.

  Ahead were the shouts of men and the clattering of weapons, brilliants of sound embroidered on the thunderous background still shuddering from the enemy camp. The young tribune thought of hogs stumbling through chutes toward the slaughterer's knife, fearful and unable to see anything but the gap toward which they plunged between high board walls.

  But even if the victims knew their fate, they might run to it for the sake of certainty in a universe of spin and chaos; and for Vibulenus, there was nothing certain except that he wanted the identity of a man who was in the forefront of this battle rather than one who hung back when he had the opportunity to hang back.

  As he dodged a legionary who was unconsciously swinging his sword back and forth in an arc which threatened everyone on his right side, Vibulenus slammed into another of the serpentine trees. Its top nodule waved, showering the tribune with gooey, sweet-smelling fluid. Vibulenus swung himself around the bole, unconcerned by the glue-like smear the bark left on his arm and breastplate and unaware that his hair was now gummy with effluvium from the tree as well as with his own blood.

  The third and fourth ranks had closed up so that the legionaries stood almost shield to shield as they mopped up spearmen still living in the wake of the front ranks. There had been an attempt to open out again as the advance continued unimpeded, but there were still clots and gaps like the pattern made by frog eggs on a still pond.

  The portion of Vibulenus' brain which was in control functioned like a racer's, not like that of a man in the midst of battle. It sent the young tribune through one of the gaps. Ahead of him he could see the standards and the leading elements of the legion already coming to grips with the hostile infantry.

  There was a shower of stubby javelins from the enemy lines. One of the missiles, weighted near the head with a lump of stone, hit Vibulenus in the middle of the chest. The bone point shattered against the molded bronze of his breastplate, but the shock threw him back a step and brought him to his senses. Then he took the remaining two paces forward to join Clodius Afer as the file-closer hacked through the ribs of an enemy.

  The tribune has lost both his helmet and his shield, but the hostile infantry were just as naked as they looked from a distance. They were taller than the Romans, but they were by no means the size of the spearmen who had ridden to battle on the war cars. Some wore peaked leather caps and bandoliers which held half a dozen javelins like that which Vibulenus' breastplate had stopped; but none of those whom the tribune saw carried shields or wore any armor that would slow an edge of Spanish steel.

  One of the enemy swung his stone-weighted javelin at Clodius like a mace. It glanced off the file-closer's neck guard, making the man stagger and his helmet ring. Vibulenus stabbed upward through the enemy's belly and watched its feathers flutter as the creature toppled backward and died.

  Gaius Vibulenus Caper had just killed someone-not a man, he supposed; but it might have been. And all that mattered to him at the moment was that his sword caught in something and he had to jerk very hard on the hilt to clear the weapon.

  "Bastard," snarled Clodius, slashing at the dead foe who had struck him. His voice was hoarse, and he gasped out the epithet between huge breaths through his mouth and nose together. "Bastard!" and he waded forward over bodies still quivering and oozing fluids from their wounds.

  "Rome," wheezed the tribune in what was meant to be a shout. He hacked down the enemy who had just stabbed his left arm.

  Hostile infantry higher on the slope volleyed bone and flint-tipped javelins, but those in contact with the Roman lines attempted to use theirs as hand weapons. The points could deliver a nasty or even fatal gash, and their stone weights might have been heavy enough to crush an unprotected skull. Against Romans with shields and full armor, they were singularly ineffective.

  For a minute or two, Vibulenus and the leading elements of the legion cut at opponents as thickly packed as wheat in a field-and as defenseless. Then the rearmost ranks of legionaries launched the javelins most of them still carried, arching them well beyond the line of hand to hand combat. The enemy reacted like a glass tumbler struck by a paving stone,

  Roman javelins had been reasonably effective against the warriors in the first stage of the battle, creating confusion even when blocked by shields or body armor. In the naked infantry, anyone hit was a victim, and the enemy was packed so densely that most of the missiles punched through two or even three of them. More of the hostile infantry had probably died on Roman swords already, but the suddenness of this disaster in the heart of the mass blew the troops who saw it into panicked flight.

  When the pressure of their fellows behind them ceased, the front line of the enemy gave up even the pretence of resisting the legion. Vibulenus fell to his knees when his sword slashed only air. The victim he had tried to decapitate fled backward before the stroke in a great rubbery bound, his feather plumes fluttering like miniature wings as he flung away his bandolier of missiles.

  None of the enemy within fifty feet of the tribune were still standing when he got his own feet under him again. The ground writhed with bodies trying to stuff bright-colored intestines back into sword-cuts or withdraw javelin heads which extended as far behind as the shaft did in front of the wound. Survivors of the hostile infantry were loping away in all directions, faster than even the handful of Roman cavalry on the wings could pursue after the slogging effort of battle.

  Within and ahead of the fleeing infantry were the war cars, empty now save for the drivers who were as furiously bent on escape as any of their fellows in the infantry. The vehicles (those which the legion had not overrun at first contact) had been drawn up behind the infantry, awaiting the signal to retrieve the warriors whom they had carried to battle. Now, like birds from a blazing forest, they bolted away with nothing behind them save raging disaster.

  The thunder from the enemy camp ceased. Legionaries from the right flank were climbing over the low earthen wall, unresisted by those within.

  Vibulenus tried to stagger forward in pursuit of the enemy. Someone grabbed him by the left shoulder. When the tribune attempted to
brush off the contact in single-minded concentration on his task, he found that he had a nasty wound in the left biceps which he could not remember receiving.

  All the strength and determination drained out of the young tribune. He slipped into a sitting posture on the ground. The lower edge of his breastplate gouged him as he slumped, but at the moment he did not have the intellect to care or the energy to do anything about the discomfort.

  "That's right, boy," said Clodius Afer, releasing Vibulenus' shoulder and sprawling down onto the ground himself now that he had stopped the younger man. "We've done our job-leave the rest to those as are fresh."

  The filer closer took off his helmet and gestured with it at the rear ranks of the legion streaming on in distant pursuit of the enemy. The legionaries would not catch many of their naked foes, but their pressure would keep the enemy from regrouping and launching an attack on men exhausted by victory. "You get so tired," Clodius went on musingly, "you run right up on a spear and you don't know you've done it. Got to know when to stop, boy." He began to massage the back of his neck. Vibulenus could see the skin there had been scraped when the hostile mace drove down the helmet edge.

  The tribune looked at Clodius. The younger man's vision had, since he sat down, been an apathetic blur for want of brain capacity to process what he was seeing.

  Now the non-com's face sprang into sharp focus. The skin was flushed, and ghostly red and white outlines remained from the pressure of the helmet rim and cheek pieces during the battle.

  Clodius' eyes were open. They held no expression, but the crow's feet at their corners belied the youthfulness suggested by the man's thick black hair.

  The file-closer was breathing through his mouth, though the breaths were controlled and not the gasping spasms which thrust Vibulenus' ribs against the inside of his body armor. The non-com had the look of an ox in the traces, tired but stolid and immensely powerful.

  The tribune remembered the way Clodius had struck Rufus as the legion deployed. He realized now that the veteran had known too well what the next hours would be like, and his knowledge had made him savagely intolerant of lapses in discipline.

  Vibulenus glanced at his sword. Fresh, the blood on it had looked normal enough; but as the fluid dried, it took on a purplish sheen. His face stilled to hide his awareness that his right arm to the elbow was covered with the same inhuman fluid, Vibulenus began to wipe the flats of his weapon on the grass and gritty soil. His left arm was too stiff to use, and when he tried to move it, the scab and exposed muscle crackled painfully.

  "What's that?" demanded Clodius Afer in amazement, his fingers hesitating in the midst of releasing the laces that held the shoulder straps to the front of his mail shirt.

  The tribune shifted his whole body to follow Clodius' gesture, finding as he did so that it was much more comfortable to be facing back down the slope anyway. Coming toward them was a device that resembled a piece of siege equipment. It was circular and turtle-humped, twenty feet in diameter and as high at the center as a man standing. The tortoise-like object was a saturated blue in color, and-though this might have been a trick of the angle-it appeared to move by drifting a foot or more above the ground.

  "I don't know," Vibulenus admitted. He did not have enough emotion left to be concerned. "Maybe it's something like what they loaded us onto." And had later marched them out of, though neither he nor any member of the legion to whom he had talked could remember anything about the intervening period. "A boat."

  He reached up to unfasten the studs of his cast-bronze body armor. Pain in his left arm brought the motion to a wincing halt.

  The file-closer grimaced at the tortoise drifting over the bodies on the slope. Then, turning his attention to something within his experience and therefore not frightening to him, he said, "Here, let me bandage that," and took a folded strip of two-inch linen from the wallet he carried on the back of his equipment belt.

  "Hold still," Clodius added sharply as Vibulenus turned his head with a bland expression and an unstated desire not to look at the damage to his body. The older man X-ed the fabric below the wound and began crossing the ends upward toward the shoulder as if he were wrapping leggings.

  The front-rank legionaries who had not simply flopped on the ground were wandering in a daze of exhaustion, some of them dragging their shields and many with their armor unlaced. A line of shouting, laughing men climbed back over the wall of the enemy camp, carrying above their heads a single sheet of bronze three feet wide and at least ten times that length.

  "Their drum," said Clodius, glancing in the same direction. His fingers, dark with blood and grime, tied off the bandage in a neat square knot. "Their signaller."

  "Hey, Gnaeus," said one of the soldiers nearby, brought to awareness by the file-closer's voice. "Where do we get water? We're-oh. Hi, sir."

  The last to Vibulenus, recognized also, and the legionary who spoke was Pompililius Rufus with his cousin Niger beside him. Both men carried their helmets in their right hands. Rufus' was missing its crest: the whole socket had been sheared from the peak of the otherwise undamaged headgear.

  "They didn't bring the servants on the ship with us," said Gnaeus Clodius Afer, lifting his head and peering back in the direction from which they had deployed. The huge metal vessel onto which they had marched under Parthian guard and which they had exited again in a very different place was out of sight in a canyon lying parallel to this much gentler valley. "I lost three good slaves. Would've brought me a nice bit of coin back to Rome… if we'd gotten back to Rome…"

  "I'll," said Vibulenus, alert enough again to be an officer responsible for the well-being of his men, "go demand-"

  He tried to get up. Everything went blank for an instant, until the shock of his buttocks crashing onto the ground returned him to buzzing consciousness. His skin felt as if it were expanding because someone was stuffing it with hot sand.

  "Steady there, sir," said one of the legionaries. Clodius had caught the tribune's left wrist as he fell, so that the wound did not bang against the breastplate.

  "Hercules, I felt fine," Vibulenus muttered. He still felt fine, no pain except for an embarrassment that was worse than the transient burning sensation.

  "Sir," asked Niger, "where did you get these?"

  The young legionary's hand brushed Vibulenus' hair and then proudly displayed his capture, a glossy brown insect whose wingtips were now pinched together between thumb and forefinger. It was trying to arch its tail back against the prisoning fingertips, though the tribune did not see a sting.

  "Well, that's a wasp, Niger," Rufus said with a tinge of "of course" in his voice.

  Vibulenus reached up to squeeze the right side of his scalp, which had a crawling sensation in contrast to the severe throb on the left side where he remembered the spearshaft clubbing him. Maybe that was why he felt dizzy…

  "Who this side of Hades-" the file-closer began.

  Rufus interrupted, "Watch that, Gaius!" and grabbed Vibulenus' wrist, treating him in an emergency as a boyhood friend rather than superior officer. "There's three on you and maybe they bite."

  "I'm not sure it's wasps," Niger said, transferring the first-plucked example to his left hand and reaching for another. Something buzzed away from the tribune's scalp, brushing his ear as it did so. "They've got just the two wings, see-" He held out a second squirming captive.

  His cousin reached for the tribune's head with thumb and forefinger extended, saying, "Well, these men we're fighting. They don't look like-"

  What Vibulenus hoped was the last of the insects escaped ahead of Rufus' fingers, its wings beating what seemed to be an angry note. Perhaps he was projecting his own irritation onto the wasp.

  "That's what I mean, don't you see?" explained Niger, gesturing with both trapped insects like a priest conducting some sort of bizarre rite. "Things don't look like what we're used to in this part of Parthia-"

  Vibulenus glanced sharply at Clodius, but the file-closer appeared to have heard nothing t
o which he would take exception.

  "-so maybe these're bees, not wasps, and I can make mead, honey-wine, if I can find their hive," the legionary finished triumphantly.

  His cousin grimaced, then said apologetically to the tribune, "Niger's been fancying his chances to make mead ever since we boarded ship at Brundisium."

  "Well, what are the damned things doing on his excellency?" demanded the file-closer. The respect in his words was mostly formal, because as he spoke he unceremoniously squeezed at the edges of the pressure cut on Vibulenus' scalp to determine its severity. Clodius' touch syncopated the measured beat of the pain in the tribune's head, but it did not make it worse.

  "Well, we always helped Daddy make it," Niger said defensively, "and I just thought as it'd make things, you know, more like home."

  "There's something sweet…" Rufus said, touching the right side of Vibulenus' scalp gently and bringing his fingertip back to sniff, then tongue. "Don't think it's honey."

  He, his cousin, and even Clodius Afer reached out simultaneously to continue the examination. Vibulenus, feeling like a common serving dish at a banquet, lurched upright and this time gained his feet with only a momentary spell of dizziness.

  "Pollux!" he muttered as he swayed, the others rising also with expressions of concern both for his condition and the way that they, also detached from routine by the events of the morning, had been treating an officer.

  "I'm going to go over there," Vibulenus said with careful distinctness, pointing toward the command group which had at last reached the enemy camp, "and demand to know why there are no water bearers."

  "All right…" said the file-closer. He bent to pick up his helmet and shield. The vermilioned leather face of the latter had been gouged in a score of places, and a flint point had been driven deep enough into the plywood to cling there even after the shaft was broken off. "You two," he ordered the Pompilu. "Pick up your gear and come along. We're going to escort his excellency."

  "There's water, sir," said Niger, pointing in a gesture distorted by the fact that he still held an insect.