by Chuck Dixon
It was an unforgiving set of options, but everyone on the team knew to move on. Mission creep is inevitable, and shit happens. All the bitching in the world won’t unscrew the pooch. They settled into positions to keep watch on the Roman fort and camp.
The sun rose behind them and the shadow of the headland receded, revealing more and more of the land between the fort and the line of trees. As Lee predicted, men emerged from the forest leading a line of horses, their horses, with all the gear they left in camp back in place atop the packies.
As the column of men moved closer, they could make out more details and saw something that Lee had not foreseen. Atop one of the horses rode a man. He was stripped naked. The man’s hands were bound before him. A loop of rope ran under the girth of the horse attached to either ankle. A prisoner.
Boats.
Mettius Trivian Bachus ordered the barbarian brought to his tent. The man appeared to be a Celt. The flaming red hair and beard were common among those people, but the man was exceptionally tall for that breed. Though his skin was marked with ink in patterns such as Bachus had seen before in Hispania. Some of the ink was artful but strange, including a quite realistic female figure wearing nothing but some strips of cloth marked with a pattern of stars and red bands. Another showed an eagle tearing at a snake and was very striking. If the man lived, Bachus would ask him about these grotesqueries.
Two soldiers threw the man roughly to the carpet. His body was covered with bruises received at the hands of the Assyrians. There was also the point of an arrow sticking obscenely from his leg.
“He’s bleeding on my carpet,” Bachus growled. The Celt was lifted and tossed to a section of bare earth.
Also in attendance were Bachus’s prime optio and the headman of the archer auxiliary, an oily brigand named Raman. The centurion also asked for Brulo, a brawny Sabine from his century.
Brulo was a dull-witted brute with a flair for creative cruelty. Titus, the prefect’s lictor, was also with them in the tent. The man said little, but Bachus had caught him time and again scratching with a stylus at a wax tablet. Scribbling notes for Valerius Gratus, no doubt.
Soldiers brought in some of the strange objects found amongst the prisoner’s belongings. These were tossed in a pile before Bachus’s camp chair where he sat warming his hands over a brazier to take the morning stiffness from them. He leaned forward to retrieve an object, a bottle of translucent blue glass made with impressive craftsmanship.
Bachus fiddled with the top of the bottle and found the metal seal atop it turned in his hand until it came free. It was secured in place by a series of grooves worked into the thin metal in a manner most shrewd. He sniffed the contents and recoiled at the pungent chemical smell. Some sort of medicine, he imagined, and set the bottle aside.
“He killed my men with this,” Raman said in his atrocious Latin and held forth a long object of dull steel worked into some sort of wooden device.
Bachus took it in his hands but could make no sense of it. It was a machine of many moving parts but had no visible blade or manner of projecting missiles. He lifted it to his nose and found an oily smell along with the scent of sulfur. There were blood and hair matted on the broad wooden end of the weapon. Was it some sort of Celtic ceremonial club he was unfamiliar with? He tossed it aside. There were other objects in the growing heap, but none of them meant anything to him.
The centurion stood and strode to where the naked man lay glowering up at him.
“Do you speak Latin?” Bacchus said in vain hope. The man spat a string of words that meant nothing to anyone in the tent. His optio had spent much time in Gaul and could make no sense of it. It was certainly a language, but not one known to anyone in attendance. Titus set aside his wax tablet. There was nothing in the prisoner’s gibberish worth recording.
Raman, the archer headman, stamped on the man’s wounded leg. The Celt bit off a cry of pain then spoke under his breath to the Assyrian who raised his eyebrows.
“What did he say to you? In what language?” Bachus demanded.
“It was Persian, sir. A most vulgar Persian, spoken as a dog might utter it.”
“And what did he say, Raman?”
The archer hesitated. “He told me to have sexual congress with my mother,” Raman said.
Brulo brayed with laughter at that and clapped a hand to his mouth at a flash from the centurion’s eyes.
“You will ask him only the questions I say to you,” Bachus said, and the Assyrian nodded.
Raman relayed question after question. How many are with you? Who has sent you? What is your interest in the slaves? Are you allied with the Jewish rebels? The Sanhedrin? How did you create the killing thunder?
The Celt gave no answer but to further insult the Assyrian. Bachus insisted that Raman repeat each outrage to him in full detail.
The prisoner had, in his responses to the questions, suggested that Raman touched himself in inappropriate ways, had carnal knowledge of a goat, was the issue of a camel and a backward monkey, consumed his own feces, and bathed in his own urine.
Brulo bit his own hand to stifle laughter with enough force to draw blood. The two soldiers in attendance turned red in the face and studied the carpet beneath their feet with exaggerated interest.
“We shall take more expedient measures,” Bachus said, unamused by any of this. He did not care for mysteries, and this man was indeed a mystery.
“I want this man scourged, but not so harmed as to prevent his speaking,” Bachus said to Brulo.
“Branding, sir?” Brulo said, licking a fleck of his own blood from his lip.
“That will do.” The centurion nodded and returned to his chair.
The fire in the brazier was restoked while Brulo departed to retrieve his tools. The Celt levered himself to a sitting position and gazed at Bachus with an open expression of bold appraisal. Was that animal cunning or true intelligence the centurion saw there? This man was dangerous, to be sure. And how many more like him were there out there on the desert even now? What was their purpose in being so close to a Roman encampment? Was this the vanguard of a larger army? Were they Celtic mercenaries hired by the Jews?
“Leave us,” Bachus said to Titus. The chubby scribe goggled wide-eyed.
“But why, sir?” he wheedled.
“Because I do not care for you to report every military matter to your master,” the centurion growled. “I am in command here, not the prefect by proxy.”
Titus, his face red and twisted with resentment, bowed and exited the tent.
Brulo returned shortly with iron brands, tools used to burn postholes for the assembly of wooden structures. He balanced four of them in the brazier and blew upon the coals there until they glowed red. After only a few moments, the tips of the brands were an incandescent orange. The odor of hot metal permeated the tent. Brulo held the end of one of the irons with a swath of wool and plucked it from the brazier.
“Hold him still,” Bachus instructed the two soldiers and leaned forward to watch with interest. Raman stood by, smiling eagerly. The optio appeared to be bored by the tedium of it all and held a strip of scented linen to his nose in anticipation of the odor of singed flesh.
The soldiers moved to brace the Celt as Brulo closed on him with the brand. Before they could get a firm grip, the bearded man bolted to his feet and launched himself forward to slam his forehead into the bridge of Brulo’s nose. The Sabine went down hard with the Celt’s weight atop him. Blood jetted from Brulo’s nostrils in a crimson mist. The soldiers and Raman drew blades and advanced on the Celt, who had rolled off the inert torturer to the pile of pillage that lay at Bachus’s feet.
“No!” Bachus bawled. “He is only to be subdued.” The soldiers shoved Raman aside and beat on the naked man with the flat of their blades. The Celt rose on his knees with a roar and clumsily tossed a thick belt of some material at Bachus, who fell backward in his chair in surprise. The throw fell short, and the belt landed in the coals of the brazier. The Celt dropped to the
floor with the blades of the soldier’s swords pummeling his back and shoulders.
Bachus rose to his feet, his face red with rage. He ordered the soldiers to stop their bludgeoning. Brulo appeared to be quite dead from the single blow to his face. The amount of blood was astonishing from so innocuous an injury. The centurion turned as a stink filled his nostrils. A most noxious smoke was rising from the thrown belt lying in the hot embers of the brazier. The belt was fashioned to hold lozenge-shaped objects of some unknown description.
He reached to remove the belt from the fire.
There was a deafening explosion.
Bachus was astounded to see his hand vanish in a spray of flesh, leaving only a ragged stump behind.
The beating hurt like a motherfucker but was worth it, Boats thought to himself as the twelve-gauge rounds began to cook off in the fire. There were screams and oaths, and the SEAL hugged the floor as the tent rocked to a firecracker stream of explosions. A lifeless body dropped on him in a sticky shower of hot blood. The rounds went off like mini grenades, sending lead pellets everywhere. Boats felt the body atop him judder under the impact of one buck load after another.
The blasts died away, and Boats slid from under the body. The guy was missing everything from the shoulders up. All around the tent, men lay still or writhed. The big cheese who had been asking all the questions was motionless in a pool of blood. His second in command sat on his ass, crying like a baby at the bloody mess of jagged bone and ripped flesh that was all that was left of his legs. The little archer was crawling across the carpet, using a hand to hold his guts in place and leaving a greasy loop trailing behind him leaking shit.
The SEAL stood and plucked a gladius from the hand of one of the dead soldiers. Then he picked up his bottle of Revolucion tequila. Standing balanced on one foot, he undid the cap and took a long pull from the blue bottle. Then he emptied the remaining contents on the little Assyrian bastard who was leaving a snail trail of gore across the carpet. Boats hobbled to the brazier and tipped it over. Embers reached the pool of hundred-proof agave, and the archer was instantly engulfed in flames.
Boats tossed the empty aside and stepped through the flaps of the tent into the cool, clean morning air.
All around, soldiers stopped in their tracks to see a naked giant emerge from the centurion’s burning tent. The man was covered over every inch of his body in drying blood. He held a sword in his hand and eyed the ring of armed men as though mildly surprised to see them. Inside the tent, flames reached other combustibles among the heap of items pulled from the prisoner’s camp. Muffled thunderclaps rumbled within, and holes were rent in the cloth walls all around. A few legionnaires were struck down where they stood, blood gushing from wounds made by forces unseen.
The soldiers withdrew, some taking cautious steps back while others threw down their weapons and ran for the partly completed walls of the fort. More fire erupted from inside the centurion’s tent, and running men were felled by blows from invisible blades that tore at their armor and flesh.
Through it all, the red-headed madman stood unflinching. He finally spoke in a guttural tongue none could understand.
“Veni, vidi, vici, huh? What a load of bullshit.”
33
Passion and Procrastination
The Villeneuve home was in the center of a block along the Avenue Bosquet. It was technically a townhouse, Caroline supposed. It felt more like a mansion, with three expansive floors and large luxurious rooms topped with high, sculpted ceilings. Mme. Villeneuve revealed that she was a widow of five years. Her husband had been a captain of industry who had managed his family’s holdings in land and shipping to build an even greater fortune.
When the war broke out, the widow had been in Paris and chose to remain in the city rather than return to their country home in Versailles. Just as well, as it turned out, since the former imperial palace was now home to the Prussian general staff and, rumor had it, Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig himself.
The cavernous house had more than enough rooms to house Caroline and Stephen. Mme. Villeneuve lived here with her son Jeannot, a student at university. There was also Claude, the tall man with the boxer’s face, who served as a bodyguard as well as carriage driver and footman. His job was entirely the former now as they had sent their two carriage horses to the knacker’s weeks before and had been living off steaks and soup made from their flesh.
A chef named Anatole resided in the house as well as Inès and Corrine, the plump downstairs maid and the petite upstairs maid, respectively.
Caroline was shown into a sumptuous boudoir straight out of a movie. A massive canopy bed dominated the center of the room. A fortune in finely carved furniture in black wood accented in silver lined the walls beneath paintings—mostly traditional landscapes, still lifes, and portraits—all hanging crookedly due to the recent tremors. A thick-pile Persian carpet trimmed in silk of Belgian blue lay at the foot of the bed. Corrine was running a cloth over a child’s crib that had the most charming images of rabbits worked in the wood in bas relief with mother of pearl inlays.
“It was Jeannot’s,” Mme. Villeneuve said wistfully. “I could not bear to part with it.”
“I am certain that Stephen will adore it as well,” Caroline said.
“What do babies know or care of luxury?” The widow shrugged. “We indulge ourselves when we spoil them so.”
“Still, it is all so generous of you.” Caroline set Stephen in the crib on crisp, clean sheets that Corrine had laid inside.
“It is my pleasure to have the sound of a child in the house once more,” the widow said. “Now, you and your baby will rest. I will send Corrine in a few hours to let you know that the late meal is being served.”
Caroline leaned back on the bed and watched the two women depart the room. When the door was closed, she went to the window, which afforded her a panorama of Paris that was still breathtaking even though marred with columns of smoke. She could see across the trees of a park to the silver band of the Seine. There was something wrong with this view. It took a moment for her to realize that the Eiffel Tower was absent. That structure would not rise to dominate the skyline for decades.
The sky below the low ceiling of clouds was crisscrossed with the contrails of artillery fire. They formed loops and arcs that were marked by smears of smoke where they ended like evil and destructive rainbows.
She pulled the heavy drapes closed, throwing the room into comforting shadow. Caroline lay back, fully clothed on the bed and sank into its lush embrace. The canopy above was bare of curtains, allowing her to see the domed coffered ceiling. A fresco was painted there, an idyllic scene of shepherds and their flock crossing a pasture down to a winding river and a picturesque stone bridge. She smiled as she counted the sheep.
She drifted off before reaching the tenth sheep despite the occasional growl of the bombardment outside.
Dinner was served that evening in the formal dining room. Caroline suspected that the chunks of meat in the consommé were from the former carriage horses, but she was too famished to care. There was fresh bread and even butter, and the chef worked miracles with dried vegetables and beans to create a medley baked in a flaky crust. Dessert was a compote of figs and honey topped with clotted cream. It was hard to believe that she was in a city under siege by an enemy invader. But Jeannot, the Villeneuve son, served as a reminder of that. It was all he could talk about.
“The generals are fools,” he proclaimed. He was a tall, reedy young man of perhaps nineteen. His cheeks were covered with an angry blush of acne. “De Bellemare is the only one with nerve, and they will punish him for his boldness. All they do is fall back and fall back. Fall back to what? They will soon be left with nowhere to stand yet they make no effort to break the ring of steel the Germans have constructed about us.”
Mme. Villeneuve glanced at him occasionally but said nothing in reply. Caroline wondered who Jeannot was addressing, then realized that it did not matter. The boy was an activist student. Back in coll
ege in London and Chicago, she’d seen her share. With his unruly hair and opinionated nature, Jeannot would be at home marching in organized protests and arguing in spirited debates on any campus she’d attended. It might be over immigrant rights, the environment, or the injustice of fur used in fashion. For some, it was a phase they grew out of. She sensed that perhaps Jeannot was not one of those. He liked to hear himself talk too much.
“Trochu petitioned Moltke for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds. He sent word to the Prussian monster informing him that their cannon fire falls upon hospitals where wounded soldiers and citizens lay helpless. Do you know what Moltke said in reply?” Jeannot’s eyes swept the table, but the two ladies sat mutely dining.
“I will tell you!” As if any force on Earth might stop him. “He said that they use the red crosses on the flags atop the hospitals to sight their cannons! He said that! He said that he murders innocents with relish, and looks forward to more murder! Enough to make the Seine run thick with blood!”
“Jeannot! Please!” his mother cried out. “Madame Rivard and I are dining, and cannot do so in peace under the assault of your unspeakable analogies!”
“I only speak the vivid truth, Mother! While we enjoy our meals, Paris starves. And the generals do nothing to stop the potato-eating swine who come to bayonet us in our beds and rape our women!”
“Jeannot! For God’s sake!” Mme. Villeneuve slammed her fork down on the table with enough force to slosh wine from their glasses.
“What would you propose that they do, monsieur?” Caroline asked, as much to break the current course of his colorful ramblings as to satisfy her curiosity.