by Chuck Dixon
She wrote in the book more of habit than, as it was when she began the daily chore, as a way to divulge the secret passions of her heart.
Earlier volumes were often scandalous, and were curiously made more so by her dry, matter-of-fact reportage of her dalliances. More flowery language would have made those trysts seem like romantic affairs of the heart indulged in by a young lady succumbing to the irresistible pull of infatuation. Told in her plain prose, they read like an inventory of outrages described in the basest vernacular rather than the fond reminisces of an ingénue new to the ways of love. And that was how Mme. Villeneuve wished to recall them, honestly and without embellishment. These words were for no one else to read, only her.
Her youth was behind her now. In these days of the winter of her life, she looked upon men with regret rather than hope. The last few volumes of her memoirs were taken up with luncheons or gallery exhibits or the events of her son’s life rather than her own. She was a witness to, rather than a participant in, life in her dotage and was content with that.
But today was worthy of two pages or more in her diary. The charming young woman she had brought home filled the house with life once again. And to have an infant under her roof was something that Mme. Villeneuve thought never to see. Jeannot was an intellectual, a thinker rather than a lover, and his mother did not anticipate a wedding or grandchildren anytime soon, if ever.
The widow unstopped the ink bottle and dipped the quill inside, to find the bottle contained only a gritty residue. She had forgotten that she’d used the last of the ink on the previous night’s entry. There was no real cause to call for Corrine to bring more. In any case, she was really much too tired to do today’s events justice even in her flat prose.
Mme. Villeneuve set her pen aside and made for her bed. The heavy drapes were pulled closed, turning the continuing barrage without into a series of muted thumps.
She had no way to know the changes she wrought in her future by delaying her entry until the following evening. By doing so, she forestalled, for a day, the hell her words would have called down upon her house. Upon her house and upon the heads of the young woman and infant peacefully sleeping two doors down from Mme. Villeneuve.
34
Witnesses
The Twenty-third was in disarray.
Their centurion and his second were dead. The command tent was ablaze and sending forth projectiles from within, driven by some evil wind, to punish them all. Legionnaires lay dead or dying all about from grievous wounds. The soldiers stepped back from the maelstrom of noise and death, the ring of shields parting as it grew. The shields offered no protection, as they saw them punctured through again and again; the thick oak staves riven and split and the flesh behind torn apart.
The prisoner brought in earlier by the Assyrians, the gore-splattered monster, was loping at them with a howl. He swung a sword over his head.
A soldier advanced to challenge the giant Celt with a raised shield. The madman was a long stride from him when the soldier collapsed as though struck by an unseen fist. A second soldier in the shrieking Celt’s path dropped as well. Blood flew from between the fallen’s teeth in a crimson spray.
Some force was at work here, some powerful god or devil conjured by the chants of the naked berserker rushing at them. A dark god of vengeance from the cursed pantheon of the shrieking Celt was upon them all. Any who stood before him fell to a black curse as though to a scythe.
The ring of soldiers about the tent opened further at the prisoner’s approach. Rather than attack them, the Celt dashed through the gap, making good progress despite dragging a wounded leg.
Boats limped on, cursing the agony in his leg and fighting to remain conscious. He waved the sword before him blindly as though to carve a path through the surrounding men. They made way for him, and he hobbled into the ranks of tents at best speed.
Despite the arrow shaft in his leg, the thought of the flames reaching the plastic case of 40mm grenades drove him on. He saw the case among the other gear taken from the camp and dumped on the carpet in front of the head asshole. Boats had to put distance between himself and the coming blast. He emerged from between a row of tents to make for the interior of the earthwork ring wall. The steel point of a pilum plunged into the dirt before him. Boats looked up to see the thrower drop to his knees on the rampart above, clutching a fountaining chest wound. Someone was providing cover fire from above. The SEAL stood and pointed a finger at a clutch of soldiers on the ramparts. They held javelins up and back and ready to toss.
“Pow,” he said.
One of the legionnaires staggered into his comrades with his lower jaw blown away. A second tumbled from the rampart with a hole punched through his gut. The rest threw down their pila and stumbled back, eyes wide with terror.
The concussive wave of the first blast was enough to lift Boats from his feet and send him flying. He tumbled to the ground, the air driven from his lungs. A scorching wind washed over him.
Behind him, thousands of bits of kinked wire shrapnel wicketed out in all directions, spilling men to the ground in whole and in parts. Mostly in parts. The pack of fleeing spearmen was swept from the ramparts in a red smear.
More blasts followed in a rapid chain to collapse tents and pepper the surrounding ground in a lethal storm of liquefied metal rain. A section of fortress gateway, the mortar not fully set, tumbled down crushing the men seeking shelter within. Smoke and dust spread across the camp as the few who were able fled from the sound and fury. More of them were cut down as the secondary explosions continued to erupt from the center of the camp.
His head spinning and belly dragging, Boats pulled himself over the toward for the earthworks before him. His plan involved clambering up it somehow and getting on the other side. It all got hazy after that, something about a week or two in Florida and a lot of drinking. The world was so hot and noisy, he lowered his head to rest for just a minute before proceeding to Key West. Or was it Fort Myers?
Then he was gone, the gladius still firmly clutched in his fist.
Jimbo and Bat used their Winchesters from atop the escarpment. They sighted and fired, sighted and fired, working the bolts as fast as they could to bring down any direct threats to Boats. The big SEAL seemed to have no real plan but flight. He was making his way from the burning tent using a peculiar crab-like gait. He was also bare-assed naked and gleaming red with blood from head to toe.
The Romans were looking to bolt as well. Jimbo could see it in their body language as they backed from the fire, gaps showing in their hedge of shields. Something was pop, pop, popping inside the burning tent—rounds cooking off. Strays were bringing down soldiers all around. Some of them stepped aside, creating an opening to let Boats through. Jimbo brought his crosshairs down on the soldier nearest the SEAL to widen the gap further and discourage any heroes.
Boats drew up when some guys in the wooden walkway along the earth wall began flinging spears his way. Bat took down one thrower, then watched as the crazy SEAL stood, pointing a finger at other soldiers on the boards above him. Jimbo sighted and made a messy headshot where Boats was pointing, Dirty Harry style. Bat brought down another with a snapshot to the guts.
The Pima was lining up for a second shot when his view through the scope vanished in a white flash. The ground quaked beneath his feet. He and Bat backed away from the ledge as a series of explosions ripped a hole in the air. A pall of dust tinged with the sharp chemical stink of high explosives bloomed up from below. They recharged their rifles and watched the cloud creep over the top of the escarpment toward them. They dropped their NODs gear onto their heads and switched to digital. As the thunder died away, they trotted to the ledge and swept the fort through their scopes.
The lenses revealed, in a monochromatic pixelated display, the figures of men stumbling, crawling, and running from the fort and surrounding camp. Many more lay still on the ground, most of them in various states of dismemberment. This unit was all over, routed and running back to their Rom
an mamas. The horses followed the stream of men out through the gate made in the earthworks. Those that were left in any case. Among the men below lay three of their mounts. One was still alive despite having no rear legs below the haunch. She was whinnying in panic and trying to rise. Jimbo placed a shot through her head, and she dropped to the dirt and remained still.
“Hate to see that,” he said and jacked a new round. Bat swung her view down the slope to find Lee and Chaz. Over the open sights, she saw two figures moving down the field of scree toward the fort. She locked on them through the scope. They were already on the move before Boats emerged from the tent. The plan was for the two Rangers to move in close for a recon while she and the Pima provided overwatch. That had gone to hell when the shotgun blasts started cracking off within the camp. Now they were humping toward the SEAL’s twenty as fast as they could manage over the rough ground.
“I’m going down to back them up,” Bat said and swung her rifle onto her shoulder.
“I’m staying here to make sure these bastards keep running,” Jimbo said.
She started down the steeply angled slope to join her boyfriend for the endgame.
Bat caught up with the Rangers as they picked their way through the crop of sharpened stakes that lined the trench at the foot of the earthworks. Together they worked up the slope of packed soil to find the wooden planks of the ramparts empty of soldiers.
Through their NODs, they pierced the spreading black smoke for signs of resistance. The repeated booms from Jimbo’s rifle reached them from above. The Pima was picking off targets of opportunity to urge any Romans remaining to flee as fast as their sandals could carry them.
They quickly crossed the camp with guns up. Lee came across a man stumbling through the smoke. The man was no soldier and wore no weapon. He wore a finely trimmed beard and appeared soft. He dropped to his knees and held hands before him in mute surrender. His nails and fingertips were stained black.
Lee put a round through his head and moved on. “That was cold, bro,” Chaz said.
“Dude had ink on his hands. That means he was literate. You want to be in the history books?” Lee asked.
The Rangers found the SEAL lying unconscious against the far wall. There were bodies all around him. Some were blasted to meat, cut down by the blizzard of shrapnel. Others lay drilled through with a single wound to head or center mass. These were victims of Jimbo’s unerring eye. Bat helped them turn Boats over. He groaned, and his eyes fluttered.
“Did we win?” he croaked.
“We kicked their ass, sailor.” Chaz smiled.
“Hardly a fair fight,” Bat said.
“If you wind up in a fair fight, then your plan failed,” Lee said.
“There was a plan?” Boats muttered before passing out again.
“Good news first,” Lee asked the group.
Bat and Chaz worked on stabilizing Boats. Jimbo had come down from overwatch to join the others in the camp.
“The fort is ours. The captives are still in place. The enemy is severely hurting and on the run,” Jimbo said.
“Bad news,” Lee said.
“Our transport is scattered to hell and gone. A shitload of our ordnance went up in that fire. The enemy could regroup, and we know there’s a relief force out there that could show up any minute,” Chaz summarized.
“So, we’re all on the same shitty page then,” Lee said.
“And we have a man down, non-ambulatory with severe wounds in need of more and better treatment than we can provide here,” Bat said.
“I can hack,” Boats said feebly.
“The way I see it is we move on the quarry,” Lee said. “If we don’t use this momentum we have, then we’ll have to do this all over again when the reinforcements come down the road. And we’re running low on ammo, no horses, and a man down.”
“I said I can hack.” The SEAL sounded pissed now. “Sure you can, Boats,” Chaz said as he stabbed the man’s leg with a morphine dose followed by a cocktail of antibiotics and vitamin K. “We’ll just roll your naked ass out there and you can do your wild thing.”
“Fuck you,” Boats murmured before surrendering to his weakened state and the painkillers.
“We come at the quarry from above or head on or both?” Jimbo asked.
“I say we take a cue from what Boats did earlier.” Bat smiled.
The men in the quarry camp, slaves and keepers alike, were in fear.
They were already at work cutting and hauling stone from the walls of the cleft in the earth made by decades of labor. All work ceased as the ground shivered under their feet, and the roar of thunder reached them. They dropped to the ground in expectation of further tremors that might drop the high walls above down upon their heads.
Yasak ben Zakai was chief among the masters here and the only one who remained standing. If his god meant to take him today then so it would be. He squinted up into the sky for a sign that this might be his time and saw only early morning sky with not a cloud in sight. It was not thunder, then. He turned to the west, in the direction of the Roman camp, and saw a gray cloud rising above the top of the table of raised land. It rose thick and dark and brought an oily smell toward them on the wind.
The slaves and their guards and foremen rose to their feet and gazed at the cloud. They spoke low, trying to divine its meaning. Was this something the Romans caused? The cloud continued to climb into the sky, even as the thunder died. More sounds reached them, sharper like the cracks of a whip. Then they too died away, and all was silence.
Yasak ordered one of his cousins to run to the Roman camps and see what was happening. The man looked at him with whites all about his eyes. Yasak picked up a stone and flung it at his cousin who turned and ran to the quarry opening to the road. Yasak climbed the ladder to the watchtower where two more cousins stood guard. This vantage point offered him nothing but a view of the roadway where it turned away down the deep canyon to the exit where the foreigners’ camp lay. He could see his cousin trotting reluctantly away and finally out of sight around the curve.
The slaves were driven back to work, the more experienced to use hammers and mauls to cut and shape the uniform blocks the Romans desired for their fortress. The less skilled, the new arrivals, to haul slabs for cutting and to fill baskets with gravel to clear the field of scree.
It was dangerous and punishing labor and injuries were a daily occurrence. Many slaves were killed or crippled and had to be done away with. Thus the quarry needed new laborers constantly. Even with the high price of human flesh, the Zakais made a healthy profit selling to the occupiers. These Romans seemed to be building constantly and consumed stone and brick and even gravel with an insatiable appetite.
The sun was rising and the shadows receding from the cut of the quarry. The full heat of the sun would bake the western rock face until later in the day when it moved to the eastern wall. Atop the open watchtower, Yasak took the full brunt of the sunlight on his face. He wiped his brow with a cloth to remove the sweat from his eyes.
He blinked at the place where the road turned in toward the quarry. A figure moved there. To Yasak’s astonishment, it was a woman. She wore black armor and carried the banner of the Roman legion. The polished horse affixed to the top of the crosspiece caught the rays of the sun.
Behind the woman came two men. They walked easily, boldly. Each carried in his arms a black rod that was too short to be a spear. Yasak turned in the tower and called to his cousins and others to take up arms. They answered his call with swords and lances and rushed to the foot of the tower to defy the intruders standing where the canyon widened, well out of range of even their slings.
The woman, lewdly bare-legged and wearing her black hair free to her shoulders like a whore, stood with the Roman banner upright in her hand.
“We have come for your slaves,” she called in stilted Hebrew. “We have slain the Romans. We will spare you only if you free the slaves you hold.”
The overseers glanced at one another in consternati
on. Who was this bitch, and what was she saying to them? They were Jews, but most of them spoke only the local dialect of Aramaic, and only knew the old language from the words sung to them in the Holy Days.
Yasak’s father was a man of God and letters and insisted that he and his brothers learn the old language.
“You are mad, woman!” Yasak called back in kind. “The Romans will see you nailed up for this intrusion!”
“The Romans are dead,” she called back. “As you will die unless you free all within this place.”
Yasak repeated her words for the others and, after a moment to consider the absurdity of it, all barked with laughter.
“You will die,” the madwoman said when the men recovered from their mirth. “And I will choose the first to suffer my wrath.”
With that, the woman raised her empty hand and pointed a finger at the clutch of armed men gathered before the watchtower in a ragged line.
“This one!” she called.
A peal of thunder sounded and, simultaneously, one of the men, a second cousin to Yasak, stumbled backward to fall to the ground. He lay there for a moment, his legs kicking and his life’s blood pumping from a hole in his chest. Then he was still.
“Now that one,” the woman called with hand raised.
A second sharp crack, and another in the rank of armed men dropped as though struck with an ax, his arm near torn from his body and a spray of blood splashing over those close enough. The men parted in terror from their fallen cousins.
Yasak looked from the two still bodies bleeding out in the dust to the three strangers still standing on the roadway. The two men held their strange black rods to their shoulders. Wisps of white smoke rose from the rods as though they each contained a hidden flame.
