The Sea of Grass

by Gilbert M. Stack

  “To what end?” Marcus wanted to know. “We’re still all going the same way to the same place. So what’s the point of hiring the scout away from the Caravan Master?”

  Evorik scowled. “I don’t know, but I don’t like Burkhard and I want to know what my options are if he turns coward again and deserts us.”

  Day Seven

  How Bad Do You Think It Is?

  “I tell you it was a fluke!” Caravan Master Burkhard shouted. He was surrounded by close to twenty frightened and angry Dona and Gente merchants and backed only by about five of his guards. “The Aquilans broke the savages weeks ago.” He glared at Marcus as if somehow his predicament was the Tribune’s fault. “This attack was a fluke!”

  “Then where did the savages come from last night?” one of the older Gente asked.

  Catching sight of Marcus, Señor Alberto called out to him. “Tribune Marcus, you were the one who saved the caravan last night. What do you say? Is it safe to continue?”

  Marcus had been approached by a half dozen Gente last night with a similar question. He decided to try to put an end to this sort of talk right now. “I have to admit that I’m confused by this gathering. When you paid to join this caravan, did not Caravan Master Burkhard tell you that part of what you were paying for was protection from the savages on the trail?”

  The gathered only stared at him, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with his statement.

  “And did not many of you bring a man or two along as added protection?” Marcus pressed them. “The truth is that raids by savages have always been a danger to anyone traveling on the Sea of Grass. Aquila has tried to reduce this danger by establishing forts on the trail, but they’ve only reduced it.”

  “But the legions broke the savages,” somebody shouted.

  Obviously not, Marcus wanted to tell them, but that was not the way to build morale. “Two months ago the savages gathered in unusual numbers and tried to destroy the legionnaires stationed at Fort Segundus. They failed and were beaten quite badly. But that doesn’t mean they were broken. Last night shows us they were not. At the very least, they have returned to raiding caravans.”

  “So what do we do?” Someone asked.

  “You have two choices,” Marcus told him. “You can go forward with the caravan or you can attempt to return to Dona on your own.”

  “On our own?” several voices cried out.

  “Yes, Caravan Master Burkhard agreed to take us north. I doubt very much that one small raid will change his mind on that, will it Caravan Master?”

  The Caravan Master seemed relieved that Marcus was succeeding in calming his customers, but his son, Gernot, continued to fume beside him. Burkhard stepped forward. “Yes, Tribune, we will continue to travel north. We should reach Fort Segundus tomorrow. Anyone who absolutely wants to return to the south would be well advised to travel that far with us and wait for a caravan traveling in the opposite direction. It is not safe to travel the Sea of Grass alone.”

  “That makes good sense,” Marcus agreed. “We’ll learn a lot more about the trail ahead of us when we reach Segundus.”

  Grumbling unhappily, the merchants began to return to their wagons. After they departed, Burkhard approached Marcus. “That was good of you. You could have turned them on me and taken control of the caravan there if you’d wanted to.”

  And why would I want to do that? Marcus wondered. What he said was, “You made a major mistake last night. It would have cost you nothing to mobilize your men to support me. If I were wrong, you shrug it off and say that was a good drill. But I wasn’t wrong and your men stood by with dumb expressions on their faces while Lord Evorik and I saved your livelihood.” He glared hard at the older man. “Don’t let it happen again! And rein in your son before he gets himself hurt acting stupid.”

  Without waiting for a response, Marcus continued up the caravan to check on his legionnaires.

  ****

  “What is that?” Evorik asked squinting into the morning sun at a strange shape on the horizon. It was casting a shadow which made it harder to identify, but that was what was strange. It was casting a shadow but was nowhere near the Sturm Mountains to the east or the jagged cliffs of the Jeweled Hills still at least two hundred miles to the north of them.

  Marcus lowered his hand from his brow and looked up at the Gota lord riding—because Gota always rode—beside the walking Tribune. “I can’t see it clearly. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. How far away do you think it is?”

  “Difficult to tell,” Evorik muttered before looking over his shoulder away from Marcus. “Richimar, Odoacer, go find out what that thing is and don’t get yourselves killed.” Both men kicked the side of their horses and took off without ceremony. The Gota rode on fancy saddles with elaborate decorations sometimes etched with silver and gold, but as far as Marcus could see they gave no more control of the animals than did the savages’ blankets. They held on by squeezing the horse’s middle with their legs and guided the noble beasts with the subtlest of pressure on the reins.

  “They’ll tell us soon enough,” Evorik stated the obvious.

  Marcus just continued to walk. That was what legionnaires did. They walked without tiring for league after league at a speed that often shocked their enemies. The mobility of the legions—their amazing endurance in trekking across the land—was almost as important to their victories as their discipline and skill in battle.

  The shape—whatever it turned out to be—was still fairly far away because the two Gota rode for several minutes before pulling up and circling the thing. One of them caught something on the end of his spear and lifted it to his hand. Then the two kicked their horses and galloped back.

  By the time they returned trailing a long piece of silk a dozen or more of the merchants had gathered beside Marcus and Evorik with Brunhard and his son once more pushing to the front on their horses.

  “It’s a fucking wagon!” the Gota with the piece of silk exclaimed. Marcus was pretty sure that this one was Odoacer, although with their full beards he found it a little hard to tell the northern barbarians apart.

  “And it’s not the only one,” Richimar announced. “There’s a whole string of them—probably a whole caravan.”

  Merchants groaned and muttered to themselves in fear.

  “They didn’t even steal all the cargo,” Odoacer added. “It’s like the damn savages don’t know what’s valuable.”

  Greed flickered into the expressions of many of the men who’d been worrying only moments before. Marcus grimaced, his disgust for their lust for profits overcoming his normally ironclad self-control. Not one of them appeared to have any real brains. Their wagons were full. They couldn’t transport this cargo anyway no matter how valuable it might prove to be. And speaking of value…the savages were out to make war so this ability of their leaders to stop their warriors from plundering the caravan was an ominous sign of the enemy’s discipline—not proof of their alleged idiocy.

  Evorik glanced down at Marcus, meeting his eyes. He too understood what the report really meant. Marcus gave a slight jerk of his head back in the direction they had come to get a sense of the man’s disposition toward their journey. The Gota lord gave his head the barest of side-to-side shakes. Marcus nodded.

  “How bad do you think it is?” Caravan Master Burkhard asked.

  Marcus studied him trying to understand his game. Burkhard had to be a hard man to make this trip again and again, but the Tribune guessed that the savages did not usually attack a caravan. That meant that the journey was like a game of chance—perhaps the dice rolled snake eyes, but it was more likely that you got lucky sevens. And generally speaking the savages probably were interested in plunder, content to cut off and break a few wagons before retreating. Do enough damage and the caravan would be forced to leave some goods behind. Therefore this determination to destroy everything and leave the booty on the plains must be especially troubling.

  “I don’t see how this changes anything,” Marcus told hi
m aware that the side conversations had just ended as merchants strained to hear what he was saying. “It really gives us little more information. We knew there were hostile savages out here—yesterday we killed a number of them. Possibly we killed the same group that attacked this caravan. If we want to know the real score in this area, we have to push on to Fort Segundus.”

  Burkhard nodded glumly but the merchants, unlike this morning, seemed excited for the chance to push on.

  Marcus wondered how much time they would lose plundering the remains of the unlucky caravan ahead of them.

  ****

  The wagons had definitely been traveling south and some of them, poor fools, had tried to run for it as if the heavy and ponderous land-ships had any chance of outpacing the quick-footed ponies of the savages. The remnants of the carcasses of horses still strapped into their harnesses showed the preferred method of keeping the wagons from escaping. Kill even one of the animals pulling the burden and you stop the wagon in its tracks.

  Most, but by no means all, of the wagons had tipped over, some splintering as they crashed and some looking as if they’d be ready to roll if you pushed them back onto their wheels. All of them had had their cargo pulled out and broken open—which suggested some limited plundering had occurred as men searched for light, portable, goods to steal. Not necessarily a sign of poor discipline—Marcus would let his own men plunder what they could carry under similar circumstances—but further evidence of how committed the savages were to purging foreigners from the plains.

  “Not enough bodies,” Evorik noted. “That’s a bad sign. The savages like to torture prisoners to see how tough they are. It brings credit to the captor if he takes a strong man.”

  Marcus began to weigh the pros and cons of giving his green legionnaires this information—assuming someone hadn’t already told them back in Fort Prime. On the one hand, the sort of fear the thought of being tortured to death instilled was a powerful motivator to keep fighting, but it also could undermine morale and weaken discipline. Then he realized that there was no way to keep the information from them. If they didn’t know already, someone would have overheard Evorik’s comment and the news would be up and down the length of the caravan faster than a bird flies.

  Merchants jumped off their wagons to begin sorting through the remains of the cargo.

  “We’d better put a stop to that,” Marcus suggested. “Let’s find Burkhard. He’s still supposed to be in charge. I want to keep pushing toward the protection of Fort Segundus. We don’t know there aren’t other raiders out here in addition to the ones we bloodied yesterday.”

  Evorik grunted and together the two men went to find the caravan master.

  Day Eight

  Might As Well Let the Savages Kill Us

  It was late the next day before the caravan reached the remains of Fort Segundus. Despite Marcus’ best efforts, he had not been able to convince the Donatan and Gente merchants to stop pillaging the remains of their unfortunate brethren. They’d lost half a day and rolled out with badly overloaded wagons which advanced at a crawl as the horses strained against this new and unnecessary weight. And Burkhard had only shrugged and let it happen. He had to know how stupid the merchants were being. Perhaps he thought they would come to their senses and throw off the extra burden the next day on the trail, but if that was his hope it proved futile. And instead of pushing on and reaching Fort Segundus a couple of hours after dark, they reached it near dusk on the eighth day on the trail.

  It was not a reassuring sight.

  The gate had been torn down or more accurately, blasted apart like a great oak splintered by lightning. And the dead—the dead legionnaires were everywhere—laying where they had fallen. Still wearing their armor, some with weapons in or near their hands, the only things missing from them were their heads. These formed irregular ranks in the middle of the long central street that bisected the castrum. Planted on pilum, most of the legionnaires still wore their helmets which made the grotesque scene all the eerier.

  “They must have really respected these men to treat them with such honor,” Evorik observed.

  “Honor?” Marcus snapped. “We mount the severed heads of criminals after we crucify them. We don’t honor our enemies by desecrating their bodies.”

  “Nor do we,” Evorik assured him before shrugging. “But they are savages, remember? You can’t expect civilized behavior from them.”

  Both the praetorium, the headquarters of the castrum, and the quaestorium, the central supply warehouse, had been burnt down to the ground as had the tents of the legionnaires. Other than that and the busted gate, the castrum was pretty much intact, if Marcus had sufficient men to defend such a long stretch of wall.

  Clearly stunned by the devastation, it took a surprisingly long time for the first merchant to approach Marcus with a question that properly should have gone to Caravan Master Burkhard. “Tribune, the savages have destroyed the legion at Fort Segundus. What are we going to do?”

  Fortunately, Marcus had had time to think up an appropriate response. “First we’re going to eat dinner and then gather to sort through our options. Go spread the word. I want every wagon owner to meet at the fort’s old forum in an hour. We’ll give every man a chance to speak if he wants it and then we’ll decide what we’re going to do.”

  It would be easier if these men were legionnaires and required to follow orders, but they were civilians so he’d treat them like voters back in the Republic and try to guide them to a sensible conclusion.

  ****

  An hour into the debate, Marcus came to the firm conclusion that he definitely preferred the military’s way of doing things. He’d heard the expression like herding cats numerous times and now he understood exactly what it meant. Civilians were idiots. They seemed unable to come to terms with the simple choices that confronted them. They could go forward or go back. There was no other option.

  Some of them didn’t even seem to be able to grasp the fundamental problem. The savages had united under this shaman, Teetonka, and were determined to drive all the foreigners off the plains. They had killed the better part of a full phalanx of the legion—hundreds of well-trained men. And to all appearances they had serious magical power reinforcing their attacks—not just dust storms to conceal their movements but lightning strong enough to blow open the gates of Fort Segundus and let them ride their ponies inside. Normally under these circumstances, Marcus would be arguing for a retreat. He had seventy-seven green legionnaires—not nearly enough to succeed where a whole phalanx had failed. Yet, he’d been exiled and really couldn’t be certain of his reception if he returned to the Republic without permission. The governor of Dona might be willing to accommodate a reasonable delay or he might place Marcus in chains to be shipped back to Aquila and possibly executed.

  He abruptly realized that conversation had ground to a halt and everyone was looking at him. Rather than admit that he didn’t know what they had asked him, Marcus got to his feet and strode into the center of the circle.

  “All of this talk is wasted,” he told them. “There are two choices—and you know what they are. Onward toward Fort Tertium where we may find an army of savages laying siege to the legionnaires there.”

  That suggestion caused an eruption of protests and groans as if a great many of the merchants truly hadn’t considered this very likely possibility.

  “The second option is to return to Dona and wait for either Aquila or the Jeweled Cities to put a force together to either reopen the Sea of Grass or the shipping lanes. Neither of those things is likely to happen quickly.”

  “But you think it’s safer to go back?”

  Marcus resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Safer, but not safe,” he told them. “Right now there is likely no safe place anywhere on the Sea of Grass.”

  Other merchants started to ask questions, but Marcus cut them off. “Now before you all decide what you’re going to do, you need to ask Master Burkhard what he’s going to do. Because it makes a substant
ial difference if he’s going to move on toward Tertium or back toward Prime.”

  “He will go forward!” a Gente merchant named Adán Nacio announced. He was evidently an important man for other merchants looked to him to decide what they would do. “He has taken money to lead us north and he will lead us.”

  “That’s not exactly accurate,” Marcus corrected him. “We’ve paid him to use his best judgment to guide us—and if the Caravan Master says it’s too dangerous to proceed north he has a responsibility to guide the wagons back to the south.”

  “He must—”

  “I will continue to Topacio,” Burkhard interrupted. “Will you be going with me, Tribune?”

  “I believe so,” Marcus said. “I have business in Amatista and I can’t get there by going south.”

  “Does that mean the legionnaires will go north with you?”

  Marcus nodded. “It’s my intention to turn these legionnaires over to the commander of the next fort we reach. They were supposed to come here to Segundus but that is obviously not possible so I will surrender them to the authority of the next fort commander we meet.”

  “That means they won’t be with us for the entire trail,” someone complained.

  “That’s correct,” Marcus said without further explanation.

  The men didn’t like that and began to mutter among themselves. Marcus decided to go ahead and enrage them. “While we’re on the topic of the legionnaires, I’d like to make an observation. Almost all of you overloaded your wagons when we found the remains of that south-bound caravan. Your speed has been cut in half, or worse, and your horses are exhausted from pulling your new loads. This is not sustainable—especially in the military circumstances we find ourselves in. Speed is your best friend now. I advise you to drop all of your newly acquired goods and a quarter of what you have carried from Dona. The legion is willing to keep to the pace of the wagons only if the caravan makes a good-faith effort to keep up with the legion.”