by Chuck Dixon
“You need this more than me,” she said and offered the bota of diluted vinegar.
“I had a dream. You were in it,” he said and took a long slug.
“Did you get any shots today?”
“Chaz stuck me a few times.”
“Need any pain meds?”
“I don’t want to sleep through what comes next,” he said, tossing aside the empty skin and lying back again.
“You sure? I’d like to fast forward through it,” she said.
“Listen up,” Lee Hammond said, addressing the group. “Bat, can you translate for the locals?”
“We need to move now,” he continued with Bat alongside him repeating in Hebrew and both allowing time for the relayed translations.
“These bastards last night were an advance scouting party. They fucked up by letting us know they were here. Jim found where they marked their trail. That means there’s a force following on after. We’re going to have to keep up the pace to stay ahead of them.”
“They might have called up some cavalry by now,” Jimbo spoke up. “Or maybe sent runners to alert a legion that’s marching right now to cut us off.”
“You’re giving these fuckers a lot of credit, Smalls,” Lee said. It was always last names when he didn’t want to hear any more.
“I sure as shit am giving them a lot of credit, Hammond,” Jimbo said, low and even, biting back his annoyance. “They conquered most of their world and held it for centuries. These aren’t some pack of clenched assholes. This is the fucking Roman legion, and they will march right up your ass.”
“What’s your suggestion?” Lee said.
“I hold back as a rearguard. I use some strips of cloth like the scouts did. Lead the Romans away from your route of march to some ground where I can slow their asses to a crawl. I can buy you a day, maybe two. Enough to reach the coast.”
“It’s not a great plan,” Lee said.
“It sucks cock. But any plan is better than no plan. Just running isn’t going to work,” Jimbo said.
“Lee...” Bat started.
“What do you need?” Lee said, cutting her off.
Jimbo traded rifles with Chaz Raleigh. The Pima would take the M4 with grenade launcher and all the remaining 40mm projectiles. He’d hold onto his cut-down pump shotgun as well.
Lee stripped the M203 off his own rifle and handed it to Jimbo as an extra. They left him with ten thirty-round magazines for the rifle, a half bandolier for the pump and some baseball frags Lee had squirreled away. It would have been awesome to have some of the claymores, but they all went up back in the Roman camp. They left him a half-dozen self-heating meals and a few protein bars. Jimbo emptied his pockets of all the hard candies and Tootsie Rolls he had for the stretcher crew.
“I’ll find water on my own. You’re going to need every drop without me to find it for you,” he said.
“You just make to that pier in Caesarea,” Chaz said.
“If we’re not there, you wait. We’ll be along, right?”
“Yeah. What’s time mean to us?” The Pima shrugged.
“And give these fuckers hell, you Apache,” Lee said and held his hand out.
“You know that,” Jimbo shook first Lee’s hand, then Chaz’s. Bat stood on tiptoes to kiss his cheek.
“We shall meet again at Philippi,” Chaz pronounced with a touch of gravity when Bat had stepped away.
“What the hell does that mean?” Jimbo said.
“Julius Caesar’s ghost says it to Brutus. It’s Shakespeare,” Chaz said. “I told you before the place sounded familiar.”
“Well, dayum,” Lee said.
“Fuck you, you don’t read books with no pictures in them,” Boats called from his stretcher.
“You know what? I think I can’t wait until you dumbasses leave me alone here,” Jimbo said. “Really. Get going.”
Lee turned to the remaining tagalongs and raised a hand palm upward. The stretcher team lifted Boats. The remaining two ambulatory locals helped the man with the broken leg along. The sad procession made their way along the brow of the hill away toward the west.
Only Byrus remained behind, leaning on a bundle of Roman spears. They were pila, the deadly javelin carried by regular troops. They were six feet long, with an iron shaft ending in a pyramid point making up half their length. The iron shaft was set in a wooden handle. They were designed for throwing, and as a close-quarters jabbing weapon.
“Get your ass moving, Bruce,” Jimbo said.
Byrus stood shaking his head with vigor, a smile fixed on his face.
“I mean it, dude. Go with them.” Jimbo pointed after the group. Only Bat turned back to give him a last look before they were out of sight around the slope.
Byrus stamped the spears on the ground and scowled.
“Yeah. I know that look,” Jimbo said. He drew his knife and crouched to cut a number of strips of cloth from the skirt of a Roman corpse. Jimbo stuck the lengths of red wool under this belt and lifted his pack to slide into the straps. A bandolier of grenades went over one arm, and he held out the other to the grinning Byrus.
“If you’re going to be in my army, then you hump your share of gear, Bruce.”
Byrus took the bandolier and settled it over his broad shoulders with an expression of consuming pride. The Ranger hung his rifle in the combat sling, the Macedonian hefted his bundle of spears, and together they set off back east at a trot into the trees.
43
Farewells
The toll at House Villeneuve was great but could have been far worse.
Claude was dead. He died in the kitchen of the house but was not alone. The corpses of three of the intruders lay in the kitchen, pantry, and rear entryway in the wake of his retreat. A broad smear of blood led away from the pantry and into the alley, where a fourth man lay dead with the blade of the saber still lodged in his chest.
Jeannot had been struck unconscious in the melee at the foot of the stairs but recovered by morning with nothing more than a headache and blurred vision. A concussion, certainly.
Anatole, the chef, had a face swollen with bruises from where he was beaten near senseless by the invaders. But he was far more concerned that the Madame had seen him clad only in his nightshirt. Inès and Corrine were reduced to tears and shivers and only recovered somewhat after several draughts of cognac.
Mme. Villeneuve took to her room where she remained in bed succumbing, Caroline suspected, to draughts of wine mixed with laudanum to dispel her pain and shock.
In addition to the wreckage caused by the home invaders, the house was a slaughterhouse of bloody corpses. Including the four men shot dead by Caroline— three hired villains and the man who hired them—there were four more victims of Claude and Claude himself to be disposed of. Anatole left the house when the sun came up and brought back some rough and silent men.
Corrine assured Caroline that these men would be discreet. They were frequently hired to do work about the house and garden and could be trusted to keep their secrets especially when paid with the gold coins found in the pockets of the slain intruders.
All would be taken to the mass gravesites set about the city for those unnamed dead who were found in the rubble or who fell on the day of the forlorn counterattack against the Prussian lines. The winter ground was frozen too hard for burial. The corpses would wait until the thaw before being tipped into trenches and covered.
Only Claude remained behind. Anatole, with the help of Corrine, the less squeamish of the maids, sewed the big man in sacking and placed him in a shed in the alley where the cold air would freeze him solid until a proper funeral could be had.
A few young men came to visit Jeannot. They were fellow students from his university. They were appalled that Jeannot himself answered the door. Where was that dour footman who usually greeted them? Jeannot told them that Claude was dead. They shrugged at this. So many dead in Paris these days. They made a few remarks about the state of the house, and their host mumbled a few remarks that d
id little to assuage their curiosity.
Caroline gave them their privacy by withdrawing to the small library room with Stephen. Through the closed doors to the adjoining room, she could hear them talking as young men will in dramatic and lofty terms. She assumed from their bluster and Jeannot’s relative silence that none of them had participated in le sortie torrentiale. Not one of them had seen or experienced what had turned Jeannot from fervent firebrand to sullen automaton in a single morning. There seemed to be more life in the young man after the previous night’s events. It was as if they served as a tonic to restore some of his resolution. The look of one who is lost was gone from his eyes despite occasional vertigo brought on by the head injury. The repulsion of the intruders, though it was mostly Claude and Caroline’s actions that routed them, gave him a renewed strength, a restoration of his manhood.
Despite this, Caroline overheard only brief contributions from him in response to the heated discussion of his friends. They spoke of capitulation and surrender. They would probably have spat in the floor were they not in a house as well regarded as that of the Villeneuves. Rumors were rife that Prussian troops would soon occupy the city, and that the upstart Wilhelm had been proclaimed Emperor of the Germans at Versailles. It was a deep insult to all Frenchmen. A halfwit puppet of the Krupp family, and this Bismarck crowned him at the winter residence of the kings of France. A bloody Prussian dressed up as a Napoleon from a comic opera. What were Prussians, after all? Only damned Poles who spoke German. It would be absurd were it not so profoundly loathsome.
Inès brought a tray with a bottle of wine and the few mismatched glasses that had not been broken in the previous night’s siege. Jeannot apologized both for the glassware and the vintage, as the Villeneuve cellar was rather depleted. This set the students off on politics again, damning the mayor and the generals and the enemy. There would be no vintage this year. The Germans had seen to that.
Caroline lost interest in the conversation. Translating the words in her head was tiring and the speakers were bores; like the young anywhere and at any time who see the world only through the passions of their own personal politics. She dozed, the comforting warmth of the baby radiating in her arms. She could feel Stephen’s gentle breath on her breast.
A muted clanging noise awoke her, sounding once, twice. The dinner gong rung by Inès. The library was dense in shadow. The early evening of winter was on the city. The young men were still talking in the next room, and their voices rose excitedly at the prospect of dining. Caroline suspected that this was the purpose of their visit all along—to mooch a meal from a friend’s kitchen. There would not be much left in the Villeneuve larder, but she doubted this would matter to the uninvited guests.
She waited until she heard them depart from the drawing room before emerging from the library. Stephen was stirring and would want to nurse again soon. Caroline was surprised at the bottom of the stairs to see Mme. Villeneuve descending. The widow’s eyes were glassy, and she required a hand to the banister rail to keep her steady. Despite that, there was a hard look to her eyes and the set of her mouth.
“My dear, whoever you may be,” she began. Her voice was thin but resolute. “I must ask you to leave my house. At once.”
“I understand, Madame,” Caroline said.
“I do not understand all that was said last night. I understand that they came for you, and they came for the child. Claude was murdered, and my son very nearly so.”
“I will get my bags and we will depart this evening,” Caroline said with a lowered head.
“It sickens me that I brought you into my house, assuming you to be but another innocent victim of this horrid war. Instead, I invited the horror to act out within my own walls.”
Caroline had no reply to this but to stand aside to allow Mme. Villeneuve to pass and make her way to the dining room and the male conversation booming from there. “Immediately, Mademoiselle,” she said without turning. A final insult.
Eyes stinging, Caroline hurried up the steps to her borrowed room and flung all her belongings into the carpetbag. The revolver she left behind. She didn’t remember how to reload the awful thing, and was frankly relieved to be shed of it. She bundled Stephen into layers of blankets and herself into her brocaded coat and broad-brimmed hat to return to the ground floor and slip quietly from the house. Uncaring laughter pursued Caroline as, unseen by her, the young boors around the dining table made idle jests and consumed the last of their hosts’ hoarded victuals. She stood in the biting cold and pushed the door closed behind her. The mallet-scarred surface was rough under her gloved fingers.
She stood upon the walkway before the house deciding which way to turn; a decision that seemed entirely inconsequential as she had no idea where she might find shelter in this city in spiritual as well as physical ruin. Tears started in her eyes and ran in chilled streams down her cheeks. She was afraid for her baby and for herself. The illusion of security provided by Mme. Villeneuve’s household was shattered—an illusion. Caroline and, now she knew, her child were hunted. Her enemies knew where to find them and had, literally, all the time in existence to locate them and...
“Caroline.”
Caroline looked away, dropping the carpetbag and clutching Stephen tighter. She was moving to bolt away when the voice spoke again.
“It’s me.”
She turned to see a man in the tattered livery of a coachman stepping from the street toward her, a hand held before him and a smile creasing his face.
It was Dwayne.
44
The Arbor Path
The children’s game that first optio Gaius referred to was being played in earnest.
Two centuries of the Thirtieth and an additional two centuries made up of survivors of the Twenty-third began their march before dawn. They moved into the woods following strips of red cloth left at intervals along a narrow game trail through the trees.
They were forced by the confines of the pathway into marching in a rank two men in width. The line of men snaked through the woods in a column over a mile long. Men in lighter armor and without shields trotted through the dark forest on either flank. More men ran ahead as scouts to find the sign left by Critus and his advance party.
Centurion Pulcher secured horses for himself and his optios and aquilifer from the local village. They paid a dear price for them, made dearer when Pulcher was informed that these were the same mounts captured earlier from the rebels they were pursuing.
Pulcher rode at the head of the column, ramrod straight in the saddle, to give the men an example to follow. The legionnaires of Caesar and the Senate were courageous to a fault, but their faults were many. They did not like surprises, and they did not like marching through close terrain like this damned wooded country. Pulcher had seen men under his command sleep through the night even though knowing they faced a pitched battle the following day. Their bravery was not in question, and, in combat, they would die before yielding an inch of ground.
He also knew from bitter experience that they could be routed like sheep by a sudden change in fortune. Each man was valiant with a code of personal conduct that was inviolate. But often, as a unit, they would succumb to a kind of contagious terror—a hysteria. And so the centurion rode high in the saddle, head erect and looking neither left nor right. His aquilifer rode behind to his right with the banner of the Thirtieth held uncovered and aloft for all to see. The men following would take strength from that.
A scout returned down the path ahead with another man in his company. The man was soiled and bathed in sweat. His hair was matted black with dried blood.
Pulcher motioned for the column to halt and dismounted to meet the scout and his bloodied companion on foot and out of sight of the men. He did not need omens and portents to weaken the will of the soldiers.
“Is this one of the men who accompanied Critus?” he asked.
“He is, sir,” the scout replied. “We found him on the trail ahead. He says he was coming to meet us.”
&
nbsp; “Is that true?” Pulcher asked directly. The man was missing an ear that had quite recently been sliced or torn away. His eyes were wide and shifting. His hands shook as though palsied. There was the stink of piss about him.
“I was sent back, sir. To warn you, sir,” the man stammered.
“Warn me?” Pulcher sniffed. “Of what?”
“We encountered the rebels last night. There was a battle, and many were slain. The enemy fled to the west.”
“And you did not pursue?”
“They were many in number, sir. Hundreds or maybe more, sir. Critus continues on after them even now, sir. He leaves the strips of cloth for you to follow as you ordered, sir.”
“And this is true?”
“Every word, sir.” The man bit his lip. By the gods, he was close to weeping. The display repulsed Marcus Pulcher.
“Where is your sword?” the centurion asked.
The man looked to his empty scabbard but offered no answer.
“You may have the temporary loan of mine,” Pulcher said and withdrew his own gladius from the sheath on his girdle.
He grabbed the coward’s proffered hand by the wrist and jerked the man toward him, at the same time driving the flat tip of the sword up under the man’s ribs to rip open his lungs and heart. The man sank lifeless to his knees. Pulcher twisted the blade hard and pulled it out with an obscene sucking sound. There was no blood. The man died where he stood.
“Drag this trash from the trail,” he said, stooping to wipe the blade of his sword with fallen leaves. “I won’t have my men offended by the sight of him.”
“What orders follow, sir?” the scout said.
“We continue on. We see if this dog was telling the truth that we might expect the way to our enemy marked with ribbons.” Pulcher turned then and walked back to where the aquilifer stood holding the reins of his horse.
