by David Weber
"What do you mean?" Vibulenus demanded as his palms scrubbed fiercely at his unlined, boyish cheeks and forehead. "There isn't any place to desert to that the crew won't find them."
The stream was so clear that the soldiers' boots could be seen against the gravel bottom. The spillage dripping from the tribune's face left whorls on the current, grime and sweat, red blood and most especially blood the color of drawn copper. The corpse against the bank, its arm tangled with a root, had bled out so completely that the water tumbling past was as pure as that upstream.
"Well, you know Helvius, sir," said the centurion. "He gets an idea and you can't shake him out of it." He looked around instinctively to see who might be within earshot. No one was. Vibulenus was almost alone in using the stream to wash instead of struggling for position at one of the water carts. Habit… The carts were always there after a battle, so there was no need to search for local water-or even to remember the creek you battled your way across an hour before.
"Pollux and Castor," the tribune muttered. He was too exhausted to control his bouts of shuddering, and he felt that his body was on the verge of wracking itself to pieces. "Let's get, get out of here," he said and began to walk carefully out of the stream, feeling flat stones slide beneath his hobnails.
Clodius offered the younger man an arm in something more than comradeship; though the gods knew, the centurion had been in the hottest part of the fighting. Even if unwounded, he should have been weary to death.
Perhaps he was, but his job wasn't over after all-and neither was the tribune's.
Together the soldiers slogged to the bank. Pompilius Niger, who had taken Sixth Century when Clodius got the cohort, was waiting there trying to look as though he were not a conspirator. His hand helped Vibulenus up the knee-high step that had momentarily looked insuperable.
He hadn't been this wrung out when he stumbled into the creek to cool off. He'd have said that he was getting old if his reflection in the water did not give the lie to that thought.
But he was getting old. His mind knew that, even if his body didn't.
"All right, what happened?" the tribune said, slapping the front of his armor to shake out dribbles of water trapped between the bronze and his chest. His studded leather apron had a clammy feel as it brushed his thighs. Whatever had possessed him to splash back into the creek?
Most of the enemy who had fallen in the water had been washed away by the current. There was a straggling rank of them just up the bank and beyond it, those who had stumbled at the edge of safety or paused when they thought they had gained it.
There was no safety for those in flight from the legion. Bare backs drew swords the way iron filings slid toward a lodestone.
"The sinkhole where we hid last night?" Clodius said while Niger pursed and unpursed his lips.
"Go on," prompted the tribune.
The Commander, who had six limbs-arms or legs as he chose to use them at the moment-had sent the Tenth Cohort on a roundabout course to what he had chosen for the battlefield. It had been a nervous journey, with no local guides and only the Commander's word that the hostile force would not ambush them.
The Commander would lie in an instant, for any reason or for none at all. Vibulenus knew that; but he also knew that the guild would not throw away a tenth of a legion's strength. The vessel itself and the floating, sentient paraphernalia it sent out in the aftermath of each victory proved that the Commander could have the absolute knowledge of the enemy which he claimed.
That put him one up on Crassus; and they, the survivors of the legion, weren't the men Crassus had led to disaster either-not any more, not for a long time.
"There was that cave off the back of it," the centurion was saying. "Some locals tried to hide there with their herd when we come up."
"And I told you to keep to blazes out of it," the tribune agreed. "Some of those places go down forever."
The peasants herded leggy beasts that looked more like donkeys than sheep. Their terror when the cohort blocked passage from the sinkhole was evident in the way they grunted and flicked their ears at one another, but they had nothing to fear.
The soldiers of the enemy were squat figures, somewhat shorter than the Commander's bodyguards but built along the same lines. The peasantry was nowhere near as bulky, either from race or from diet, and some of the females might even have been attractive if you got used to ears the length of a man's hand.
"He's been wanting to get away for a long time," Niger interjected. "He even said it to you, sir. He didn't think it was leading anywhere."
"Did he figure he was going to be consul if we got back home, then?" Vibulenus snapped.
His anger was always close to the surface now. Here it had the advantage of sending a surge of warmth through his shaking limbs. The willowy shrubs fringing the creek had been trampled flat or leafless during the fighting. Their bare silhouettes marked but did not block the huge sun which was bloating into a red oval on the horizon.
"If we were home," the tribune said, arguing with himself rather than his listeners or even his memory of Decimus Helvius, "he'd have died on campaign, or on a farm. Now, well, there's fewer choices but the payoff doesn't have to be anytime soon." He looked up from the hands he had clenched in front of him.
"He could have raised sons," said Clodius simply.
"Well, he can't fucking do that here either, can he?" the tribune blazed. "If we ever get back somewhere I recognize or somebody recognizes, then we'll talk about ransom or maybe even running. But not here."
The stars above them as they bivouacked in the sinkhole the night before had proved to anyone who cared to understand that they were very for from home indeed.
The battle had gone according to the Commander's desires and perhaps even his plan-though probably not. The hostile force had marched straight toward the sinkhole, apparently intending to laager a camp there, instead of arraying themselves against the nine cohorts which were counterfeiting the entire legion.
That wasn't by plan either: the enemy was moving in utter ignorance. Their scouting was quite as abysmal as that which led Crassus' army, and so many Roman armies before his, into disaster. Though Vibulenus had lived through a major intelligence failure, it was not until he became used to working for the guild that he realized how valuable knowledge of hostile dispositions could be.
That didn't help when you were in command of four hundred men, and almost ten thousand heavily-armed opponents were headed for you.
"I thought I saw Helvius during the fighting, though," the tribune said in puzzlement. He fingered his dripping scalp and remembered that he needed to pick up his helmet, tossed to the stream edge when he decided to duck himself. No need to look for his shield: it had been literally hacked to splinters by the swords and axes of the enemy.
"Oh, he wouldn't desert us," said Niger in real surprise. "Nor Grumio and Augens neither. But afterwards, I saw them jogging back toward the sinkhole and I knew what that meant." He paused, then added, "I was looking for bees, you know."
"That's who the others are, then?" Vibulenus asked struggling with the pin under his right shoulder that would unlatch his body armor. It caught with an inch or more still within the interlocked tubes of the breast and back plates. "Grumio and Augens? And you think they'll try to hide in the cave in the end of the sinkhole."
"Yeah, that's right," said Clodius.
"Here, I'll get it," said Niger, reaching for the recalcitrant pin with short, strong fingers. His hands and forearms were drenched with alien blood that fell deeper into orange and red as it dried and scaled away.
"Leave it," said Vibulenus, batting away his friend's hand when he had meant only to block it with his own. "Let's go find the cursed fools before the crew decides it has to."
The little Summoners with blue beacons atop were beginning to drift over the field, calling men back to the ship. There would be no immediate alarm, but the sight was enough to spur the trio back in the direction from which they had marched that morning
in battle order. Vibulenus' legs were weary, but his arms were so weak that they flopped like wooden carvings unless he made a conscious effort to control them.
The enemy's course had eliminated any chance of striking their army from the rear while they were heavily engaged with the rest of the legion. To cower in the sinkhole would have meant massacre by missiles hurled down unanswerably from the rim.
Vibulenus had marched the cohort out to a hillock with enough wood to shade them. They stood there, bristling like a bronze-flanked hedgehog, while the hostile force broke against them in furious waves. The legion, double-timing to the clash of weapons regardless of the heat, smashed into the attackers' rear with nine times the force and a hundred times the effect that the Commander had planned.
The tortoise which chose the badly wounded and the repairable slain was still hovering over the hill the Tenth Cohort had defended.
"They wanted us to come along, too," Niger blurted suddenly.
The older centurion struck him a fierce blow in the ribs with the heel of his hand, driving the breath out despite the leather-backed mail shirt. "Shut up and move," he growled.
"Why didn't you?" the tribune asked, pretending that he had not felt an impulse to slap both the centurions for hiding the plan from him. They of all the men in the legion should have known better!
"Sir," said Clodius Afer in the embarrassment the tribune had hoped to spare him by ignoring the dereliction, "we thought we'd talked 'em out of it. And you had a lot on your mind just then. We all did."
"Don't know what I could've done to change their minds if you couldn't," Vibulenus said. Nor did he, now that he thought about it, which made his initial fury all the sillier. He grew angry too easily, now. He hadn't always been like that.
The skirted another straggling pile of bodies, all of them hostiles when alive. The victims wore helmets and most had, besides their ironbraced shields, body armor: scales sewn to leather, or a plate (often cast in a fanciful shape, bestial or geometric) strapped to their broad chests. The few who fought naked did so as a statement of courage like the Celts, charging at the front of the army and gnashing their teeth as if they intended to gnaw through the Roman line.
Hie enemy had been ill informed and ill commanded- all the chiefs, bright with gold armor and capes of brilliant scarlet, had been in the front rank, facing the lone cohort, when the remainder of the legion began butchering the force from behind. But the enemy had never been negligible, soldier by soldier, and there was Death's own plenty of them.
Without the volleys of javelins which fouled their shields and dismayed troops unfamiliar with missiles of such weight and accuracy, the native army might even have been able to reform after the first shock had worn off. It would have been a tough fight for the legion; and just possibly a losing fight.
Sometimes Vibulenus speculated in the darkness about what would happen if they were ever defeated.
The enemy's baggage train stood where the troops had abandoned it to attack the Tenth Cohort. A few legionaries were poking through it, from curiosity or even a desire for loot. Some habits were too deeply ingrained to be eradicated by repeated proofs of their pointlessness.
The teamsters and other noncombatants among the baggage were of a physical type with the peasantry. They had so little initiative that they had simply waited, with no attempt to laager their wagons, when the soldiers boiled out of the train to attack the waiting Romans. They seemed scarcely less apathetic than the gangs of neck-chained slaves attached to the back of some of the wagons.
The sinkhole was half a mile from the battle site. Vibulenus had not noticed the distance when he marched the cohort out in close order after a chilling discussion with the pickets who had rushed in breathless with news of the enemy. Everyone had been too frightened- he had been too frightened-to feel fatigue.
It was a staggeringly long way back; he regretted not taking Niger's bloody-handed help in stripping off his body armor. "Publius," he said as thinking about the hands cast his mind much farther back along the path of his history with the junior centurion, "if you just possibly did find some bees and some honey, how in the name of Faunus do you suppose you'd get it back in the ship? Or them back?"
There was a commotion behind them in the baggage train, cause for a glance over the shoulder but not concern. Several vehicles from the merchant vessel, looking like slightly larger versions of the water carts, were gliding among the wagons. They carried half a dozen passengers apiece, men or not-men of a variety even wider than that of the legion's successive commanders. Each individual was clad in monochrome, but the selection of single colors ran the gamut from violet to a red so dark it was nearly black.
"Oh, it wouldn't be hard, Gaius," said Niger as rolling ground dropped them out of sight of the train and the field. They were not tribune and centurions at the moment; and Niger, too, was happy to return to the terms of boyhood.
"You see," he explained, so intent on his subject that he would have stepped into a flat-stemmed, spikey bush had not Clodius steered him aside, "the guards at the Medic's check, they don't care about anything 'cept fighting or pushing in line."
"Or," Vibulenus said tartly, "if somebody tried to slip contraband into the ship proper after they've gone through the Sick Bay. I've seen them collar people doing that, and sometimes it meant another trip through the booth to get fixed up."
"Niger, if you don't watch where you're going," the pilus prior interjected sharply, "you'll fall down the fuckin' side. And by Apis' dick, I'll let you lie there. If you can't talk and walk at the same time, shut the fuck up."
"Sorry, sir," the junior centurion answered, abashed. They had reached the sinkhole. While the trail winding down its side was occasionally wide enough for three or four men abreast, it was never regular enough to be safe for someone talking over his shoulder instead of keeping his eyes to the front.
"Here, I'll lead," said Vibulenus as he stepped ahead of his companions. He was feeling human again, tired but human. The leather backing of his body armor was clammy and beginning to chafe. As he walked down the steep incline, he tried again to pull the locking pin. It came without effort, and he flopped the breastplate wide against its left-side hinges.
"Yessir," said Niger and cleared his throat. "I mean, sure, Gaius, that's right-they grab guys with contraband. But not because they see it but because they're told about it."
"The Medic?" Clodius put in from the end of the line where he was apparently able to hear well enough.
"Naw, he doesn't care," the younger centurion replied. "No, I figure it's the whole ship, you know? It watches. But all it sees is metal, so you try to get in with gold, you get grabbed. Lots of guys bring in jewels, though, sometimes stuck up their ass but even open in their hands."
Vibulenus hadn't known that. He paused at the bottom of the trail to strip off his armor and prop it against a rock, watching Niger with interest. It seemed to be his day to learn unexpected things about the men he helped to lead but did not command.
"Sure," said Clodius, sealing the statement without room for doubt as he followed the others into the lumpily-flat bottom of the sinkhole. "But all that crap disappears when we march out after the next muster. They must, I dunno, give everything aboard a real goin' over whenever we're out. So it's really just there till we go into Transit. Whatever the fuck that is."
"But sometimes we got a couple months aboard before that, right?" said Niger. "That's time for mead to get enough of a bite to be worth doing, you know? I don't mean it'll be the vintage you bring out when your son gets married, sure… but it'll be mead, and that's all I'm after. Just something, you know. To remind me of home and all."
Vibulenus was picking his way along the track to the cave at the best pace possible under the circumstances. They had lost direct sunlight even before they stepped within the sinkhole, and now the sky above, though clear, was beginning to take on a rich maroon tinge that scattered very little sun into the natural pockmark.
Ground water had dis
solved a pocket in limestone. When that bubble in the rock had reached the surface, or an earthquake had shaken the area, the roof had collapsed to leave a sheer-sided valley a quarter mile in diameter and a hundred feet deep. The channel cut by the water at one end still ran down into the earth, probably as deep as the stratum of limestone itself.
The floor of the sinkhole was covered with debris from the roof and windblown loess trapped by the sides. Rock fragments, gorse-like vegetation, and quantities of droppings from the animals corraled here made the footing difficult even before the trio of Romans reached the cave.
A hundred yards down its sloping throat, the cave would be pitch dark even at noon on Midsummer's Day.
"Helvius!" the tribune shouted. The trio could be anywhere, not even within the cave. He stumbled forward. Breaking your neck here in the darkness might be as effectively fatal as having your spine hacked through by a slope-browed swordsman. "Helvius! Will you at least come out and talk to somebody with sense before you do this!"
"Careful here, sir," said Niger, whose night vision seemed to be better than that of Vibulenus. The throat of the cave dropped away slickly, but broad steps had been roughed into one side. The other side. The sky still looked bright if you looked at it directly, but that was by contrast with the lumpy blackness of everything on solid earth.
There didn't seem to be any peasants around-the sound and smell of their herds was unmistakable-but that made little difference. When the legion was to work with local auxilliaries, the men mustered out with the ability to speak the necessary languages as long as they kept their helmets on. Here they had been operating alone.
So, for that matter, had the enemy: a force of heavy infantry moving across the face of the land more as conqueror than defender. The politics of what they did at the guild's behest sometimes bothered Vibulenus, but he never had-the legion never had-enough information to decide whether or not they really agreed with the choices the guild had made.
For that matter, he had never been sure why they were invading Parthia. It had something to do with the Kingdom of Armenia, he'd been told, a Roman ally… or with rivalry between Crassus and the partners in his political machine, Caesar and Pompey, if you listened to other opinions. He'd been scared green himself- gods! but that had been a long time ago-but he'd have been just as scared if he were being called up because Hannibal was at the gates of Rome again. Nothing political in fear.
