The Sea of Grass

by Gilbert M. Stack

  “I’ll do it at the next wagon. I’m in a—”

  “Now!” Marcus interrupted him.

  “Best do as he says, boy,” Severus Lupus suggested. It was the friendly advice of a Black Vigil—the man in charge of the most experienced legionnaires in a Lesser Tribunes’ hand. It was a unique and highly respected position in any legion. The only way a man could become a black vigil was to survive in the ranks through his two years in the green band, his twenty years in the red and at least five years as a rank and file legionnaire in the black. Then a tribune—not a lesser tribune—could promote him to black vigil, although even then he usually did so only with the approval of his great tribune. They were in many ways the backbone of the legion officer corps with the experience to mentor green and red vigils and even lesser tribunes. Marcus had benefited from Severus’ guidance from his first day in the legion and he’d been very pleased when the man had agreed to take a leave of absence and accompany him on his journey to the Jeweled Hills.

  Gernot whirled even more angrily on the older man. “Who asked you?”

  Severus was not impressed. “The Tribune is trying to do you a favor. It’s a lesson he often has to teach young officers. Putting off the record keeping in an important task often leads to trouble—and in your case that would be serious trouble. Imagine for a moment what would happen if you forgot to record the Tribune’s payment. Your father would check that scroll, see the blank next to this wagon, and come to collect it. The Tribune would then inform the Caravan Master that he had already paid. This would put your father in quite a bind. After all, he had trusted you, his son, to collect the money, so it would be reasonable for him to believe that the Tribune was trying to cheat him out of his just fee. But does he call the Tribune on this disgraceful behavior? Does he stand up for the honor of his son and refuse to let the Tribune’s wagon travel in his caravan? And if he does, what will the Tribune do in response? He’ll file formal charges of theft against you and your father and since he was robbed—however unintentionally—and Tribune Marcus is a patrician, you and your father would be crucified.”

  At that final word, Gernot’s anger gave way to incredulity as his eyes grew round and wide.

  “Now isn’t that a lot of trouble to court just because you’re in too much of a hurry to note that the Tribune has paid his fee on your scroll?” Severus finished in not unkindly tones.

  “But, I, he’s,” the young man stammered.

  “Always listen to a Black Vigil,” Marcus suggested in the same almost-fatherly tone that Severus had adopted. “I have never known one to give bad advice.”

  Gernot removed a quill and ink bottle from his box and quickly made the suggested notation. He then put his implements away and hurried on to the next wagon.

  “He’s awfully young,” Severus commented as they watched him leave.

  “I hope he listens to you,” Marcus said. “It just might let him grow a little older.”

  ****

  Kuno parked Marcus’ wagon at the end of the long line and turned to address his employer. “It could be a long wait still, Tribune, but the roads are good for the next twenty miles or so. Even with a late start, we should be able to reach the Sea of Grass by nightfall.”

  “When do you think the caravan will get moving?” Marcus asked.

  Kuno stood in his seat at the front of the wagon, and picked his nose as he looked back at the jumbled confusion behind them. “I’d say before high noon. Not a lot before, but it shouldn’t be too much later.”

  “We were supposed to leave shortly after dawn,” Marcus complained.

  Kuno shrugged.

  “Auxiliaries,” Severus complained. “It’s the same as with the auxiliaries. Why is it that no one outside of Aquila knows how to organize anything?”

  Marcus patted the older man on the shoulder. “Remember that idiot Castor in the Fire Islands? The foreigners don’t have a monopoly on incompetence.” He checked the sun and figured he had at least two more hours. “Come on, let’s see who else we’re traveling with.” He raised his voice. “Calidus! You stay with the wagon for now!”

  Calidus was actually already talking to the owners of the wagon directly ahead of him. He quickly pressed his fist to his heart in the legionnaire’s salute to signal that he understood his instructions then went right on talking.

  That was fine with Marcus. He trusted Calidus. The man was smart and capable with oodles of initiative—which was why he had made him his adjutant despite not even coming from the equestrian class. He’d promoted him to Red Vigil in the aftermath of the massacre of the legion in the Fire Islands and like Severus he’d acted as a Full Tribune while they rebuilt the legion out of native forces. Calidus would be fine.

  Marcus and Severus walked up the long line of wagons taking note of the sorts of people who had joined the caravan. Most were actually Gente of the Jeweled Hills—merchants and their guards he gathered—and sometimes their families. He had a better than rudimentary grasp of the native language and decided to use the trip to further improve his skills. He was naturally gifted in picking up foreign tongues and he didn’t think it would take him much time to add this language to the other half dozen he already spoke fluently.

  The Jeweled Hills were a strange collection of northern city states. The majority of the population were Gente, but they had been conquered two centuries earlier by a semi-nomadic people called the Gota—not the savages of the Sea of Grass but an entirely different race from the northwest. The Gota had taken advantage of a poorly considered invitation to aid the city of Cuarzo in one of its perpetual wars with its neighbors to get its foot in the door and then rather quickly conquered the rest of the Jeweled Hills. The Jeweled Coast had held out a couple of decades longer but like their inland cousins had not been able to overcome their age-old rivalries to unite against the external threat.

  Marcus and Juan Pablo’s father had been stationed in Amatista nearly fifty years ago as a minor member of a diplomatic mission from the Republic. His only contribution to the undertaking appears to have been getting a local Gente señorita pregnant so that he was ordered to marry the girl by his head of mission to soothe the social outrage of the mercantile elites. Such marriages were literally meaningless in the Republic since the wife (Juan Pablo’s mother) was not a citizen and when the mission ended in failure, Marcus’ father had happily abandoned his Amatista family, returning home without them. He’d then repeated the pattern in Aquila so many times that he’d developed a reputation as the most divorced man in the Republic. Marcus frankly couldn’t figure out why any woman would have anything to do with him. Supposedly he was quite charming, but his track record should have decisively frightened off any potential mate.

  “That one looks awfully young to be a magus,” Severus said, pulling Marcus’ attention back to the here and now.

  Ahead of them, a young man—really a boy perhaps a year older than the caravan master’s son—looked about him at all the wagons with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. He wore an expensive green robe with two lines of stars adorning it as if he were purposely calling attention to his magical abilities.

  The young man caught sight of them and some of the tension apparent in his face eased away as he almost charged down the line of wagons in their direction. “A man of Aquila,” he trumpeted. “Now this is a pleasant discovery. I was beginning to think that I would have to start my sojourn to foreign lands completely surrounded by…well…foreigners.”

  Much to Marcus and Severus’ surprise, he stepped completely past the tribune to try and shake the hand of the Black Vigil.

  Severus did not accept the offered hand, but the magus did not appear put off by his lack of courtesy. “I mean, one expects to be surrounded by foreigners when traveling to places outside the Republic, but I just expected there to be more of my fellow countrymen around on the journey.”

  The Black Vigil took a step back from the overly enthusiastic young magus and looked to Marcus for help.

  “
And you would be?”

  The young magus jumped in surprise, whirling about to face Marcus. “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t notice—I mean, of course, I noticed you, but I guess when I saw the strong and experienced face of this gentleman I just naturally assumed…”

  His voice trailed off and he wiped his sweaty hands on the front of his robe, then tried to start again. “I am Seneca Liberus,” he introduced himself pausing as if he expected to be recognized. When neither Marcus nor Severus reacted, he repeated himself, “Seneca Liberus.”

  Marcus racked his brain for something that might satisfy the young man’s ego. It was not the name of one of the great senatorial families which meant the man was probably of the equestrian class. Since magical talent often ran strong in families, Marcus fabricated what he hoped was a polite and accurate guess. “Not the great family of magi?”

  “The very same!” the young man pounced excitedly on the answer. “The very same!” Abruptly he seemed to remember his manners. “And you are?”

  “Tribune Marcus Venandus and this is Black Vigil Severus Lupus.”

  “Military officers!” Seneca exclaimed as if there could not possibly be a better answer to his question. “You must be going to take up your commands in one of the forts we’ll be passing through on our journey north. Are those your men I saw marching toward the front not so long ago?”

  “Alas, no,” Marcus told him. “Severus and I are on leave while I handle some personal business in the north. What, if I may ask, inspired you to make this journey?”

  This question appeared to deflate some of Seneca’s enthusiasm. “My magisters at the Collegium Magicae decided that I would benefit from a period of study abroad—an exotic apprenticeship, if you will—so I am traveling north to the far off city of Amatista to study with the renown magus, Efraín Estudioso. You know, learn a bit about how the foreigners do things to make certain our own magi are up to snuff when it comes time to defeating their magics.”

  The more Seneca tried to justify his exotic apprenticeship, the more Marcus became convinced that the young man was not at all pleased with his assignment. He decided it was time to move along. With a long journey ahead of them, there would be plenty of time to learn more about the apprentice magus.

  Clapping the young man on the shoulder, he said, “Well it’s good to meet you, Magus. It’s always a benefit to have a student of the arts around in case there’s trouble on the trail.”

  Seneca started at the suggestion as if the idea that his magical talents might be needed had never occurred to him, but Marcus affected not to notice.

  “We’ll have to talk more after the wagons hit the road, but in the meantime, if you’ll excuse us…”

  The young man nodded vigorously. “Of course, of course, don’t let me keep you from your important business. I’ll just wait here near my things in Señor Joaquin’s wagon. It was very good to meet you both.”

  As soon as they were out of earshot of the young man, Severus whispered, “I’ll bet he did something embarrassing and got himself expelled from that fancy school.”

  “It’s possible,” Marcus agreed, “but I’d guess his family really is influential enough to get that expulsion turned into some sort of academic exile. I know if I’d been expelled from the lycee I would have gone out of my way not to associate myself with it in the future. It would have been too embarrassing.”

  ****

  The wagons began to pull forward a little after the sun reached its zenith. The day was hot and more than a hundred teams of horses kicked up a substantial cloud of dust which both added to the heat and cut down hard on their vision. It also made them readily visible to anyone looking from as far as twenty miles away—more if the viewer had the advantage of a bit of elevation. The heat was an inconvenience which any legionnaire of Marcus and Severus’ ranks had long before become inured to, but the dust worried the military men. They’d been warned that the savages were acting up and they hated the ease with which any hostile could mark their passage.

  All three legionnaires walked beside their wagon with the easy stride of men who’d spent their lives on their feet. It hadn’t even occurred to Marcus to buy them riding horses. Not only would the animals consume their store of water—and Marcus had upset Calidus by insisting that they carry twice the recommended amount of consumables in their wagon—but riding on a cross country journey went against the grain. It was not that Aquila did not employ cavalry. In fact many still viewed it as the elite branch of the service because only the wealthy could afford the horses and kit that the cavalry man required. However, the people of the Republic had long ago figured out that the true legionnaires were the infantrymen who were the decisive factor in all of the big battles. The cavalry had important roles to play, but in the end it was the strong shields and sharp swords of the infantry which decided the course of nations. Marcus, raised by his maternal grandparents, had had the option of joining the cavalry as his father had, but had happily passed it by to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.

  It was a decision he would never regret.

  Day Three

  We Are Familiar with Your Brother

  The caravan was starting to get a little better organized. On the third day out from Dona they finally got started within a long hour of dawn. Marcus would have never accepted such blatant lack of discipline from his own men, but he had to admit that the problems facing Caravan Master Burkhard were more severe than those facing the typical tribune. Civilians really didn’t like being told what to do. They didn’t seem to grasp the importance of following orders and immediately obeying those in command. And to make matters even more difficult for the caravan leader, one of his charges was a Gota nobleman who seemed to take it as a point of honor to demonstrate repeatedly that he was not under the commoner’s command.

  So each morning, men and women got up late, took too long eating their breakfasts and getting their wagons prepped for the trail, and generally moaned and complained whenever Burkhard or his son, Gernot, prodded them to get moving.

  Much to Marcus’ surprise and disappointment, the legionnaires were part of the problem, not the solution. They were all green—seventy-seven of them—replacements for losses in the northern forts, and they had foolishly all been sent under the command of one green vigil straight out of the lycee. The man was in way over his head and foolishly viewed Marcus and his two experienced officers as a threat, not a potential resource. He’d obviously heard of the disaster in the Fire Islands and feared that any contact between him and the exiled Marcus could taint his entire career. So the three legionnaires watched with a combination of amusement and concern as the Green Vigil continually failed to capture the respect of his men and get them to perform with the efficient discipline of true legionnaires.

  The big exceptions to this pattern (aside from Marcus and his men who were always ready to start their wagon rolling an hour before dawn) were a handful of the most experienced merchants. They wanted to get on the road and cover as many miles as possible before they stopped again at sunset. Every day lost to traveling was a day they couldn’t be selling their wares and buying the goods they wanted for the return trip. They also knew that provisions could run out on the trail and were always looking for the chance to replenish their water containers—huge ceramic amphorae like the ones that contained Marcus’ wine. Too many of the other travelers didn’t seem to understand that as they entered the Sea of Grass proper, the opportunity to replenish their supplies would be few and far between.

  And so they walked beside the slow moving wagons, making between twenty and twenty-five miles per day, and Marcus wondered what would happen if they actually did run into any savages.

  ****

  “Calidus, please tell me we brought replacement axles for the wagon.”

  The wagon they were rapidly catching up to had broken its axle and the man standing beside it looked hopeless and lost. He was Gente, by the look of him, with very black hair, a neatly trimmed beard, well tanned features, and
an amethyst stud adorning his ear. His clothing was silk—far too fine for the trail—and there was a softness about the man’s hands that suggested he had little experience with manual labor.

  “We have a dozen,” Calidus answered him.

  The number was much higher than Marcus had expected. There were four spare wheels tied to each side of their wagon but he hadn’t noticed any axles.

  Calidus read his surprise and shrugged. “They don’t take up a lot of space and it seemed like it was better to have and not need them then to want them and be forced to do without.”

  Marcus nodded with approval. “Correct as usual, go get one out of our wagon while Severus and I go borrow a dozen legionnaires.”

  Without stopping to talk to the family in trouble, he and Severus double-timed it up to the straggling tail end of the long line of green legionnaires—all pretense at walking in a column had fallen out of them. They had abandoned their armor—presumably to the wagons—and none even wore a sword. It was pathetic and seeing the lowly state of preparedness brought back bad memories of the lax conditions Marcus had had to contend with in the Fire Islands.

  “Green Vigil!” Marcus bellowed in his best parade voice.

  Legionnaires whipped around to look for the officer, saw Marcus and Severus striding toward them in their civilian clothes, and reacted in a half dozen different ways—all but one of which further annoyed Marcus. Most ignored them. A few continued to watch warily. Only a few reacted to the voice of command by attempting to fall back into the column formation in which they’d been trained.

  From further up the formation, Green Vigil Phanes Kimon turned and made his tired way back down the line of his legionnaires. “Yes,” he said with a sigh of impatience, notably failing to salute his superior officer—a bad practice despite the fact that Marcus was on leave. “What can I do for you?”

  Marcus had not yet decided how much control he would assert over these troops. This wasn’t his duty and the young man’s commanding officer would be justified in complaining if Marcus interfered too blatantly with his troops, but Marcus had never been particularly good at accommodating fools.