Shadow Legion

by J. E. Gurley

  2

  Dawn slunk into the camp like a whipped cur, silent and afraid as it dispelled the last vestiges of the night’s clinging shadows. The sun, a searing, bloodstained orb, lifted from the desert sands as a fanned flame rises from banked embers. Though newborn, it already cast an invisible pall of heat that swept across the little rocky knoll, raising both the temperature and the level of the men’s frustration and dread. After a hot breakfast of wheat porridge, bacon, bread, and honey, they assembled bleary-eyed with little talking among their ranks. The unnatural quietness of the still desert air mirrored their dour mood.

  No one spoke of the sentry’s disappearance, as if mention of it invited a repetition of the previous night’s horror. Gaius had dismissed Flavius’ explanations for the other missing men as just an excuse for his failures. Now, he knew he had judged his optio too hastily. He had personally searched the area around the camp at dawn’s first light. No blood or footprints other than those made by the sandals of the previous searchers marked the sand. The enemy had boldly slipped into camp, unseen and unheard, and then exited with the sentry. Such an enemy would be a worthy opponent to a well-trained, disciplined legion. To a ragtag band of misfit legionnaires, they must seem supernatural, wraiths.

  Gaius did not believe in ghosts. Their enemy was flesh and blood, whatever language he spoke. To catch their enemy, he would have to be bold and cunning. His plan, however well conceived, had risks, most concerning of all relying on Flavius, whom he did not know, to follow his orders exactly. One error and he would be sacrificing more men to the desert.

  Gaius might have easily ignored the men’s ramblings about shadows if it were not for his own observations. The desert to which the Emperor had exiled him differed from any other posting he had endured in his long career, even the deserts of Mesopotamia. Men scurrying through the Sahara did not impinge upon its timelessness or register on its consciousness, if one could imbue such a place with human qualities. Its vast emptiness bore no ruins of great cities, ancient temples, or well-trodden roadways. It reduced any temporary occupant, even a Roman Legion, to grains of sand blown by the incessant wind. Its constantly shifting surface gave men no place in which to put down roots. They, too, became transient, insecure, and unsure of themselves. He would have to adapt his thinking to these new circumstances.

  Gaius felt undressed walking the camp only in a short tunic with subligaria beneath, a belt to hold his sword, and sandals. He wore his focale around his neck to catch the perspiration that poured from his face in torrents. The sun had not yet cleared the horizon and the heat was unbearable. Later, it would be abusive.

  Flavius wasted no time learning the skills of the new men, milites with little training, tirones with none, and veteran triarii with training but a deep contempt of officers. They were men from different countries, nationalities, and legions. The only thing they had in common was their resentment at that abandonment in the desert. Flavius put them through their paces, drawing deprecating stares from some and grumbles of discontentment from others, but none dared challenge the optio or test his skills.

  The camp resembled so many others Gaius had called home over the years – a cook tent, beehive ovens for baking, open fires for roasting and boiling, a supply area inside the fallen walls of some ancient abandoned structure, a corral for the horses, a valetudunarium for injured or sick, and a double row of tents for the men. A low breeze brought with it the stench of the latrine located at the far end of the camp.

  The immunes, the skilled workers, such as cooks, butchers, grooms, tailors, musicians, leather craftsmen, and blacksmiths worked with the lassitude of men waiting for death. The Tebu natives who had accompanied him from Leptis Magna maintained their distance from the others. They remained near the empty wagons, sitting in a group and watching the Roman activities with amusement. When they had rested from their journey and consumed all the Roman food and wine they wanted, they would return to Leptis Magna.

  Gaius patrolled the camp, allowing the men to see him, while he surreptitiously rated their skill with sword and lance, which he judged mediocre at best. Few had seen battle. Only three men proved adept at using the long bow, a very small Sagittarii. Flavius drove them hard, but Marcellus went from man to man, showing him the proper stance to deflect sword bows or to thrust a lance. The veteran’s patience amazed Gaius. He would have made a fitting addition to any legion. Gaius wondered why he was wasting away in such a hellhole.

  By midday, the heat beat down on them like a tempest, and the sand scorched their feet through the leather. Gaius’ focale and tunic were soaked, but at least he had stopped perspiring. The thought troubled him, but he could not remember why. The horizon danced as he stared at it. The stark line tilted first one way, and then the other. It became difficult to orient himself.

  “You must find shade, Centurion.”

  Gaius looked up into the blurry face of Flavius trying to make sense of his optio’s words. “What?”

  “You are sun sick. You must remember to drink more water to remain hydrated.” Flavius took his arm. “I will help you back to your tent.”

  Gaius struggled to clear his mind. He closed his eyes to quell the illusion of motion and shook off Flavius’ hand. “No. I will not let my men see me weak.” He straightened. “I can make it to my tent.”

  It required all his concentration, but he managed the short distance to the privacy of his tent. He collapsed onto his cot, exhausted by the effort.

  Flavius poured a goblet of water from the skin hanging by the entrance and handed it to him. “Her, drink this, slowly,” he added, as Gaius gulped down a few sips, his hands trembling. The water, though lukewarm, tasted like chilled ambrosia to his parched lips and throat. Flavius handed him a piece of salt. “Swallow this. Remember to take salt daily. This is not Mesopotamia. The Sahara is a murderous bitch searching for a victim. She is indiscriminant and vicious.”

  Gaius swallowed the salt and leaned back against the tent wall. “Thank you Flavius. I forgot where I was.”

  Flavius grinned. “I doubt that, but you forgot for a moment that you are but a man.”

  “What do you think of the troops?”

  Flavius squinted at Gaius with one eye. “A practical question. You saw them. They have some skill at weapons, but believe skill will not save them. The disappearance of Vincennes is fresh on their minds. This is a battle of minds.”

  The water and salt refreshed Gaius. He had learned a valuable lesson. Against the heat and the desert, he was nothing. He would not forget. The fog faded from his mind, but his body was still weak.

  “Let them rest.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Inform them that as soon as the sun sets we will add two more layers to the unfinished wall. Perhaps that will give them a stronger sense of security.”

  When Flavius had gone, Gaius stretched out on his cot. His body had betrayed him. He felt like a fool for underestimating the deep desert. He was no novice to deserts, but the Sahara seemed the most inimical of them all. It was larger, hotter, and drier than the deserts of Mesopotamia or Arabia Petraea. It could swallow entire armies and leave no bones. In Mesopotamia, a caravan could find watering holes or streams every few days. It had taken him three weeks to reach Castro Augustus from the coast, and though no Roman had ever ventured as far, natives swore the desert continued south for three times that distance. The enormity of the sandy expanse was overwhelming.

  He stifled a yawn. He had not slept after the incident during the night. He needed rest. A short nap while the others were sleeping would revitalize him, allowing him to remain active later in the day. Sleep took him as soon as he had closed his eyes.

  3

  The next morning, the ten men chosen for the patrol fell silently into a ragged double line behind their commander sitting atop his white steed, while those who remained behind watched on in uncomfortable gratitude at not being among them. Gaius rode Apollo with his back held straight to present a scene of dignity to his men. Follow
ing Flavius’ advice, he wore only a tunic, his Lorca hamata to ward off Berber arrows, and his helmet. The rest of his armor he left behind. He would not be fighting trained soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, but desert rats who preferred killing under the cover of darkness. Two pack animals followed the small column, tethered together and led by one of the soldiers.

  As he passed the stone wall with its newly placed double layer of stones, he gazed back at the camp and at Flavius with a touch of jealousy. The camp, as pitiful as it was, represented a degree of safety, an oasis against the unknown. Ahead, lay many leagues of burning sand, empty except for their unseen enemy. He badly needed an enemy to battle. Confinement to the deserts of North Africa demeaned any Roman officer. The road to Rome and to redemption lay in victory.

  He thought back to the ill-fated campaign in Parthia. At stake were Armenia and Mesopotamia, both recently invaded by the Parthians. After the bitter defeat of Attidus Cornelliaus, he had followed General Martius Verus’ III Legio Parthica and crossed the Euphrates River into lower Mesopotamia. The fighting had been hard and bloody, but they had finally taken the city of Duras-Europos. The Parthians fled in defeat. Martius Verus tasked his command of two cohorts of five hundred men, plus an additional maniple of one-hundred-seventy men with routing the retreating Parthians at White Rock Pass. In spite of credible reports of a much larger enemy force than believed, Martius Verus ordered him into the pass. Fearing the worst, Gaius ordered all but two maniples to hang back in case of ambush.

  As he had feared, the Parthians were waiting for them. The mid-morning sky grew dark with Parthian arrows as his men died all around him. He rallied them to his side, but a charge from the Parthian heavy cavalry broke their ranks. Faced with death from above or death from their beleaguered flanks many of his men fled. He remained with those who had not. By late afternoon, three hundred of his men lay dead around him. By the time his cohorts arrived, only he and fifteen men remained standing.

  Enraged by his failure and his men’s cowardice, Imperator Martius Verus had ordered his cohorts decimated; executing one of every ten men, and stripped him of his rank. He then sent Gaius back to Rome in disgrace to face the wrath of the Emperor. Rather than a quick death, Marcus Aurelius had decided to make an example of him. Now, forgotten in a desert wasteland, he led a band of equally forgotten soldiers against an unseen enemy, bringing the Pax Romana to an empty land.

  After the Jewish Bar Kokbha Revolt in 132 A.D. and the Egyptian Revolt of 139 A.D., Rome had decided that a firmer hand in her outlying provinces would prevent a repeat of such rebellions, establishing a series of small fortifications, Limes, between Judea in the east and Mauritania in western Africa. Castra-Augustus was technically part of Limes Arabiscus and Limes Tripolitanus protecting Roman interests along the coast from the dangers of the deep Sahara. That nothing lived in the deep Sahara made little difference to the methodical Roman military planners. Their models called for a fort south of Marzuq, and thus one came into existence.

  Saharan Africa had once been a lush, fertile land. Petroglyphs found in caves and canyon walls depicted giraffes, crocodiles, hippopotami, and lakes and rivers of fresh water where now only sand rock and prevailed. Too vast to cross from the south, the Sahara itself became a vast lime dividing Africa. Renegade Jews, Tauregs, Berbers, Egyptians, and Nubians called the desert home, but even they avoided the heart of the desert. If an enemy existed, he would find them and redeem himself in the eyes of the Emperor.

  Within a day’s march, they came upon the remains of the first patrol on the leeward side of a large, curved dune. Tattered, bloodstained clothing, a few pieces of armor, and discarded weapons lay scattered around the cold ashes of a several-day’s old campfire half-covered by the blowing sand. A pair of dice and several copper coins lay on a soldier’s focale, the scarf he wore around his neck to prevent his armor from chaffing. Gaius bent down and picked up a sword, thinking it odd that their attackers had not taken the weapons. In disgust, he thrust the sword into the sand, the only monument the dead men would receive and better than they deserved.

  “The fools,” he muttered. “They didn’t even post a guard.”

  He spent little time mourning their loss. His time in Rome awaiting the Emperor’s pronouncement of his fate had greatly diminished his tolerance for fools and their folly. Plebeians, Patricians, Senators, and common citizens had all demanded war with the Parthians, but none had insisted on proper rations or clothing for the troops or additional legions when the Parthians proved formidable opponents. Their frenzied mob zeal for revenge and wild-eyed fanaticism had turned them into fools, but he had been a bigger fool for obeying orders.

  It would have been far better to have slit Martius Verus’ throat with his pugio, and then face the punishment for killing an officer. His fingers caressed the pommel of the dagger thrust through his belt, as his mind replayed the image of Verus’ imagined death for the hundredth time.

  When Gaius ordered the men to camp in the same spot on which the patrol had died, they became nervous but remained vigilant, just as he hoped they would. The ghosts of their dead comrades kept them awake. He did not make the mistake of the patrol. He posted two sentries on the crest of the sand dune and another at its base.

  Their first night in the open proved uneventful. The men seemed in better spirits as the sun rose to dispel the last shadows of the night. They resumed their march south toward the low hills that lay like a dark smudge across the distant horizon. The soft crunch of sandaled feet on the burning sand and the quiet rustle of their uniforms were the only sounds of their passing. The wind sliding down the faces of the dunes hissed at them like thousands of unseen serpents.

  Gaius feared that the occasional flash of a burnished shield in the sunlight might alert their enemy, but he could do little about that. Relieving them of the burden of the heavy, 22-pound scutum by having the already overburdened pack animals carry them would leave the men vulnerable in case of a surprise attack. In a tight formation, shields interlocked, a phalanx of Roman soldiers could withstand a mounted cavalry assault or force back a determined enemy on foot. A man without his shield was of no use to his companions in battle and of little use to himself.

  As they neared their destination, the row of low hills resolved into deceivingly high bluffs riddled with numerous caves, some with ornate carvings framing their dark openings. The ruins of an ancient city, half-swallowed by the encroaching sands, sat at the foot of the bluffs. No, not swallowed by the sands, he decided looking at the uninviting ruins, emerging from them, as if a corpse rising from a grave.

  “Tombs,” Gaius said aloud, noting the caverns’ appearance, but regretted it immediately. The men overheard his comment and began to mutter among themselves. He turned on them quickly. “The dead cannot harm you. Best be warier of live Berbers than of dead ghosts.”

  The ruins were neither Carthaginian nor Egyptian, nor were they Greek, Roman, Persian, Mesopotamian, or of any other architectural style that he recognized. Rather than built of blocks of stone or of brick, the buildings had been carved directly from an outcropping of the same chalky, blood red rock comprising the cliffs. Wind-etched fluted columns fronted open entrances. The windows were mere slits set high in the walls. The symmetry of the single doorway in each building seemed oddly out of proportion to the buildings, being singularly tall and narrow. No windows adorned the featureless lower walls, giving the buildings the appearance more of fortresses than domiciles.

  Gaius stopped his horse before one such building, the largest structure still standing, and gazed at the grotesque beast carved above the door lintel. The eroded head slightly resembled that of a human, but the eyes were narrow slits, and short, truncated tentacles surrounded a wide mouth lined with multiple rows of needle-thin teeth. The elongated head possessed no ears, just a tuft of skin where ears might have been. As he stared at the anthropomorphic figure, a sense of trepidation overcame him. Why a thing carved of stone should unnerve him more than a live enemy, he could not fathom.<
br />
  “What manner of creature did these people worship?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Demon worshipers,” one soldier suggested.

  Gaius rebuked him with a stern look but said nothing. With no answer of his own to offer, he could not admonish a man for saying aloud what he himself thought.

  “Scout around by twos. Find a suitable building in which to make camp, a well-defended position with a clear field of view.”

  He watched them go, saw their fear in the way they walked, not with the self-assured saunter of a Roman soldier, but cautious and uncertain, peering around each corner and into every opening. Perhaps caution and uncertainty were called for, he thought. He dismounted, grabbed a torch from a packhorse, and entered the structure with the carving, which he assumed was a temple. Inside, the building proved darker than he thought possible. More than the mere absence of light, it seemed as if the walls exuded darkness as a suppurating wound oozed puss, cloying and putrid. The room smelled of death and decay.

  Smudges of light dotted the fuliginous walls entering from slits high in the ceiling, but cast little light on the stone floor below. He ignited the torch with flint and steel, and by flickering torchlight, explored the room. Sand blown in by the ceaseless winds filled one entire corner, blocking a door he presumed led to another room. The torch did not illuminate the large room’s entirety. He scanned the walls first, examining them for more carvings or writing, but found them all oddly bereft of ornamentation save one.

  Near the center of that wall, beneath a duplicate of the outside carving, a large block of dark stone rose from the floor of a different material from the soft stone of the building. Cursive writing decorated its smooth, glass-like sides. The script flowed like a serpent around the stone and like a serpent, repelled him. He loathed touching it. The top of the stone bore a shallow bowl-like depression. As he drew closer, he noticed the depression stained darker than the surrounding stone. Holding the torch forward, he saw to his horror that the stain was blood, some still glistening and wet, not quite congealed.