Marching With Caesar-Pax Romana

by R. W. Peake

  "Pluto's cock," I muttered; that was more than ten percent of our Century dead!

  I sensed a stirring beside me, and I looked down to see Domitius, staring up at me with a frown.

  "You woke me up!" he said grumpily, but I suppose my expression told him something was amiss, because he asked, "Titus, what is it?"

  Sighing, I hesitated, then decided he would know soon enough.

  "Caecina is over there, checking on the dead," I said quietly.

  Domitius frowned, clearly struggling to understand my meaning, reminding me how hard it is to concentrate when it feels like a lit torch is being thrust into your body.

  "Oh," he finally said softly, closing his eyes again. "Oh, fuck. How many?"

  I kept my eyes on Caecina, and saw him stop at another body, then reach down into his coin purse.

  "Two," I replied, then under my breath, added, "so far. But he's not at the end of the line yet."

  Thankfully, he continued down the row without stopping again, which also put him near the end where Domitius lay, and he turned to head directly for us. At least he's not smiling this time, I thought.

  Because of the way he was approaching from behind Domitius' head, my body was partially turned away as I looked over my shoulder at him, but when he was still a couple paces away, I asked him, "Who?"

  He slowed, although he understood the question and said softly, "Nigidius," he hesitated, then, "and Dentulus."

  Both Domitius and I gasped, except in his case, it made him groan from the stab of pain, while I sat there in disbelief. Being frank, Nigidius was not that much of a surprise; during our sparring sessions, I had noticed he had a couple of bad habits, yet despite Bestia's best attempts to correct them, my guess was that one of them was his undoing. Dentulus, on the other hand, was a shock. Not only was he one of the oldest men in our Century – which in the First of the First meant he was the most experienced – he was Bestia's close comrade and best friend. I could not count the number of times I had seen the pair working together and, frankly, I would have put Dentulus as the third best man in our Century with a sword; I will leave who ranked ahead of him remain open to the imagination.

  "How?" I finally asked, but Caecina could not help.

  "I don't know," he answered, yet while I did not trust the man, I felt confident he was being honest, nor do I believe his grief was feigned. "It was dark. They were fucking everywhere. It was," he concluded, "a real mess."

  "Who else is wounded?" Domitius spoke up, looking up at Caecina, which the Sergeant seemed to notice, because before he answered, he took a couple steps and squatted next to me so that Domitius did not have to crane his neck.

  "Mela." He held up a finger. "Didius." Another finger. "You." This, he said with a grin, and I saw Domitius smile wanly. "And," then he looked over at me, "Avitus."

  "Avitus?" I gasped, then I stood up, looking down the row before I saw him, the light strong enough now to recognize faces from that distance. I was about to move, then thought better of it, looking down and asking Caecina, "How badly?"

  "Not as bad as Domitius here," he assured me, sending another wave of relief through me, and I remember thinking that the up and down nature of my emotions was proving quite wearisome. "It's his shoulder too, but it didn't go all the way through, and it's higher up. He'll need to be stitched up, and he'll have trouble lifting a sword for a few days, but he'll be fine."

  "And this was all part of the Primus Pilus' plan?"

  The words were out before I could stop myself, the bitterness and anger I felt strong enough that even I could hear it. Caecina stood up straight; as he closed the distance between us, I had the thought that his expression was probably identical to mine, one of the few times we were of a like mind.

  "Watch your mouth, Pullus," he hissed, staring up at me with little more than a hand's breadth between us.

  That, I am sure, was when the smell hit him, because I saw his nose wrinkle, and despite the tension, he could not stop his eyes from dropping to look at my chest. Gagging, he took a step backward with what I imagine was the same look of revulsion that Tiburtinus had shown when he first got a whiff of me; by this time, though, it was light enough for me to see.

  "What the fuck is that stench?"

  I shrugged; I cannot say I had become accustomed to it, but I suppose I had already ejected all of my stomach's contents, and I was at least inured to the smell. Also, I had been careful not to look down too closely.

  "Someone's guts," I said helpfully. "At least, I think."

  "By the gods," Caecina covered his mouth with one hand, then pointed to the stream, which was behind me on the far side of the ravine, "go clean that filth off! We're about to march out of here, and I don't want the men around you puking all the way back to camp."

  Frankly, I was more than happy to comply, but my hope that the moment would be forgotten was dashed when, before I had gone a dozen steps, he called out to me.

  "Pullus," he said coldly, "this conversation isn't over. But," he waved a disgusted hand, "go take care of that first."

  I did not bother to salute, nor even acknowledge him as I went to the stream. Honestly, my mind was elsewhere already, knowing that the chances of Caecina not telling Urso of my outburst were non-existent.

  It took quite a bit of scrubbing, using gravelly sand from the bottom of the stream to scrub the plates of my segmentata, yet it was still far from spotless when Tiburtinus bellowed at me to rejoin the Century. However, instead of falling into my normal spot, I went to the middle of the formation, where Domitius and the other wounded were being carried on stretchers made with two javelins and a sagum. I took the end where Domitius' head was, and I saw his eyes open, probably from the jostling as I took the two shafts from a man from the last section who, unsurprisingly, did not put up a fight. While none of us shirk from carrying a wounded comrade, it is an exhausting business, and the instant I took the weight of Domitius, my left arm screamed how bad an idea this was. For a heartbeat, I considered calling back the original bearer, but then my pride took over again. Besides, I reasoned, we're going back to the main camp, which is only about four miles away; the fact that it had taken a third of a watch to navigate the last mile coming this direction was something that I forgot.

  "Don't drop me," Domitius mumbled, and I promised I would not.

  The First began marching, but only went a short distance before we reached the rest of the detachment and, for the first time, I saw that, as tough as the fight with the First Century had been, the four other Centuries of the First, and the five Centuries of the Second and Sixth had faced the brunt of the Colapiani attack. The sun was just now fully up above the hills, giving us all a good look at the aftermath of the fight. In the same way, Urso, who had remained with the main body, had ordered men to pile the bodies of the Colapiani dead; the difference between the two scenes, at least to my eye, was that it appeared there were perhaps five times as many bodies, and that the barbarians had managed to penetrate much farther onto the ravine floor. My eye was not as experienced as most of my comrades', but I read the signs well enough. While the barbarians attacking the First Century had come thundering down the southern slope, they had never managed to push the First more than a couple dozen paces back from the northern edge of the stream, which the attackers had to cross once they reached the bottom of the slope, not that it was much of an obstacle. Such was not the case here; as we waited for the Centurions to get things sorted out, I tried to calculate how deeply the enemy had managed to penetrate our line, estimating that the last pile of Colapiani bodies were almost a hundred paces from the northern edge of the stream, actually closer to the opposite slope than the one from which they had attacked. At first, I thought that perhaps Urso had formed his line of Centuries, arrayed parallel to the stream just as we had, but farther back than the half-dozen paces Tiburtinus had ordered. A quick glance at the banks of the stream disabused me of that idea; the ground was churned up and there were dark stains, bent javelins, several shatter
ed shields, both Roman and barbarian, scattered just a couple paces from the bank of the stream closest to the opposite slope. One glance over to the northern side of the ravine told me there had not been any surprises like at The Quarry, with another force hurtling down that slope to slam into our rear; the leader of this ambush, presumably Draxo, had placed all of his strength and gambled everything in attacking down the southern side of the ravine. That was all the time I had to try to decipher the scene before me; the cornu sounded the command, and I squatted down, waiting until the man holding Domitius' feet – who turned out to be Lutatius – did the same before we stood. Then we began shuffling forward, moving westward, back to the main road where we would make a left turn and take south back to the camp. While I had a better idea of what had taken place the night before, there were a lot more questions than answers, but despite my normal impatience, I reminded myself that before too much time had passed and if I kept my mouth shut, I would learn more than I ever wanted to know about all that transpired. It was hard keeping that thought in front of my mind, but fairly quickly, I realized it would take all of my concentration and energy just to avoid dropping Domitius. With the light, I was able to see my arm, although I wished I had not looked. The rough bark had scraped against the tender, pink scar tissue, and there were several spots that were torn open, leaving crusted scabs covering almost half of the scar. At least my hand is shaped right to hold the stretcher, I remember thinking as I tried to focus on more positive things.

  "You still stink, you know."

  I looked down, surprised to see that Domitius had opened his eyes again; it was a strange sight, looking at him directly underneath me but upside down, with his mouth above his eyes instead of the other way around, the normal way.

  "Shut up," I grunted, but then, to my horror, I stumbled a step, my foot striking a partially buried rock.

  "You bastard," he yelped. "You did that on purpose!"

  Although I truly had not, I told him, "Then you might want to be nice to me. We still have a long way to go." I could not help giving him an evil grin as I finished, "And you know my left arm is still weak. I just hope it holds out."

  "You wouldn't," he gasped, but when I saw his eyes searching my face, I felt a stab of shame at teasing a wounded man, so I assured him he was in good hands.

  "I'm not going to drop you," I promised.

  "Good," he replied, but I saw his eyes closing again, and although he mumbled something, I could not make it out.

  Maybe they gave him poppy syrup anyway, I thought, hoping that was the case, instead of him becoming weaker from his wound as it continued to bleed but inside his body. I spent the rest of the time carrying him continually glancing down to make sure he was breathing. Thankfully, he was.

  I cannot really say at what point on that march that took almost two full watches to go five miles I started paying more attention than to just not dropping Domitius. But when I began glancing about and, more importantly, watching and listening to the other men who were acting as stretcher-bearers talking, I learned quite a bit about a number of matters. The first thing I noticed with my eyes was that our column was not as long as it should have been; the nearest men behind us were men in the Second Century, and it was from them we learned that while Corvinus' Fourth was still with us, the Second Cohort, along with the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth had left shortly after dawn.

  "I don't know why for sure," the man from the Second told us, "but I heard the Centurions talking that they're going ahead because they have so many wounded they wanted to give the medici back in camp the chance to take care of that bunch before we show up." He shrugged. "I don't know if that's true."

  "Did you see how many stretcher cases they had?" I asked him.

  "A lot," he answered glumly. "Maybe not quite as many as us, but close."

  From behind us in the next rank of men carrying wounded, I heard someone say, "I heard that it wasn't supposed to be like this, because the Third's bunch was supposed to come from the west." He paused to spit on the ground to show what he thought of that. "But they supposedly got lost in the dark."

  I could not risk looking back over my shoulder to see who had said this, not that it would have mattered all that much. Yet, the surprises were not over.

  "That's only part of it," a new voice, also behind me, exclaimed. "If that idiot Tribune hadn't panicked, it wouldn't have mattered if the fucking Third and the rest showed up."

  From the bottom of my vision, I saw Domitius' head move suddenly, and I glanced down to see that he was awake again, clearly hearing the man behind us.

  "What do you mean?" he asked, but his voice was too weak, so he looked at me and repeated the question, which I passed along.

  "I mean," the unseen informant said disgustedly, "that the cocksucker," as normally happens, his voice dropped lower at the use of the epithet, just in case there were nearby unseen ears underneath a transverse crest, "panicked when those barbarian cunni came barreling down that fucking hill. Oh," he allowed, "there were a lot of them, and they were moving faster than I've ever seen before, and they were making a lot of fucking noise. But the Primus Pilus had us all prepared for everything." He paused as we navigated a particularly bumpy stretch of ground, yet despite my best efforts, I saw Domitius wince in pain as I stumbled.

  "Sorry," I muttered to him, but he waved his right hand.

  "You're doing your best." His attempt to make me feel better actually made me feel worse, although I did not say anything.

  "Anyway, where was I?" Our informant broke the brief silence, and we reminded him. "Yes, that's right. So, the Primus Pilus actually had us lie down, right enough, but we were all still wearing our armor, and not one of us was asleep. Except for Pomponius." He laughed. "That bastard can sleep through anything. But the rest of us were ready and waiting to jump up, quick as fucking Pan, and it was no accident that he had us lying in our normal spots in formation, I can tell you that!"

  A flicker of unexpected admiration hit me as the thought rose unbidden in my head that, no matter what his other failings, Primus Pilus Canidius knew what he was about when it came to fighting.

  "But then that fucking Tribune, the uppity one; what's his name?"

  "Paullus," several of us supplied, and he continued, "Yes! That's the one! The Primus Pilus had stuck the three of them on the far side of the ravine, away from any of the fighting. But that cunnus Tribune thought he heard men crashing around on the other slope, and he ran to Varo," he named Urso's cornicen, "and ordered him to sound the orbis!"

  "Why did Varo do it?" I demanded, but in truth, I was not the only one.

  "Because it's a fucking Tribune ordering him to do it, isn't it?"

  I heard the defensiveness in the man's tone, which reminded me that this man and Varo were friends when off duty; I had seen them often out in Siscia, carousing together. Regardless of that connection, I forced myself to acknowledge that Varo had been in a tough spot no matter what.

  "That's why we heard the cornu giving the command," Domitius spoke up from his spot; I had not realized he was paying attention.

  "So, naturally, all the Centuries who were lined up in relief, waiting for the Primus Pilus to order them up to support the first line, went running the other way," our informant continued. "It was fucking chaos, I can tell you that! But the only reason those fucking savages managed to break the first line was because we didn't have the support. They got into our midst, and it was a right fucking mess."

  "Didn't the Centuries who formed the other side of the orbis realize there was nothing going on over on that side?"

  I could not see who asked it, but I thought it was a good question.

  "They did," the supplier of this piece of information agreed, "but when they tried to come back, that fucking idiot wouldn't let them move. Swore that he'd see every Centurion who moved his Century from their spot not just busted back to the ranks, but executed! He kept shouting, 'Don't you know who my father is?' over and over." To my surprise, he had don
e a creditable job of sounding like Paullus. "So none of them moved."

  "What happened?"

  "The Primus Pilus came running over to find out what the problem was. Oh, I thought he was going to run that Tribune through!"

  If we had been lucky, I thought grimly, that would have solved two problems very neatly.

  "They screamed at each other, but then one of the other Tribunes, the one with the curly hair…"

  "Claudius," I supplied the name.

  "…yes, him. He came running up and, without saying a word, he punched that Paullus right in the mouth! It not only knocked him down; he was out before he hit the ground! Well," he finished, "that settled things nicely, at least for the Primus Pilus. With the other Centuries, we managed to push those bastards back."

  "When did the Fourth show up?" I asked.

  "About the same time," the man admitted. "But we already had it in hand. They just put the finishing touches on it."

  I glanced down at Domitius, who winked at me, telling me he was thinking along the same lines. No Legionary worth his salt is willing to admit he ever needs help. It might have been just as the other stretcher-bearer described, but I also knew it was just as likely that the Fourth and the other Cohorts had been what was needed to shatter the attack. That, I knew, would be the fodder for many an argument through the winter.

  We arrived at the camp around midday and, as we marched in, we were surrounded by the men of the Cohorts who had already marched back, including the previously missing Cohorts. Whenever I saw such scenes, it reminded me of how tightly knit the men of the Legions are; whether just friends or blood relatives, we are all brothers. Of all the things I find difficult to explaining to citizens who have never served and who only have either seen or heard tales of brawls between men, this is at the top of the list. No matter how much we squabble with each other, no matter how bloody those quarrels become, when there is an enemy from without drawing blood, we are as one. Those who had already returned to camp lined the street from the Porta Praetoria all the way to the Quaestorium, and the men not tasked with carrying the wounded stopped in the forum, while the rest of us were directed to the hospital. Lutatius and I carried Domitius into the tent, which was a scene of even greater chaos than normal. The physician, naturally the same man who treated me, was standing there, assessing each man as he was brought in.