by David Weber
Gaius Vibulenus screamed and jumped to his feet. The mythic battle dissolved instantly, sound and view together. The tribune stumbled and fell crosswise over Clodius Afer on the couch next to his.
The file-closer lurched upright, giving a shout and a display of muscles toughened by daily training with equipment weighted to make the real thing seem light. He relaxed at once, calmed by the change of mental scenery even before he recognized Vibulenus.
Clodius swung to his feet, permitting both men to pretend that the grip with which he had started to crush the tribune's ribs like a breadloaf was simply help in recovering the younger man's balance. "You okay, sir?" he asked solicitously, stepping away with his arms firmly clasped to his sides.
"Gnaeus," said the tribune when he had recovered enough from the grip of panic and the file-closer to speak. "I was down there." He glanced toward the pit, but there was nothing to be seen but rings of couches- more of them filled than before, though some legionaries were beginning to leave the hall. "Down there!"
"Right," said the file-closer. "Me too. Till you, you know, shook me out of it."
Vibulenus started to speak but paused instead with his mouth open, wondering how he could explain to the veteran that he had been a participant in the fantasy struggle, not merely a disembodied viewpoint.
Before he could find the words, Clodius Afer had said, "I was a mouse, myself. Were you? I've always hated slimy frogs. And look, wasn't there a poem about this, the Frogs versus the Mice? I swear I heard some old bastard bellowing it out in the public baths years ago, 'cause he liked what the echo off the tiles did to his voice."
"Let's…" said the tribune before he lost his train of thought while his eyes drifted across the figures reclining in rapt attention on something which did not really hang in the middle of the amphitheater. What would he do if he spotted Falco? He already had his knuckle and his memory to regret from the last time.
"Let's get out of here," Vibulenus said gruffly. The knuckle at least could be cured. It didn't hurt at all while he was a frog… but the scars of that experience, though mental, would never leave him.
"Let's go find the Sick Bay and see if this-" he pointed to his puffy right hand with the other one "-can't be taken care of."
As they walked up the narrow aisle, the tribune in the lead, he continued over his shoulder, "I don't know why they don't want us to fight each other. It doesn't seem to matter even if we-" he hadn't admitted this even to himself before "-get, get killed."
"That isn't true," said the file-closer in a voice that surprised Vibulenus more for its peculiar thoughtfulness than it did by its content.
"What?" the tribune prompted, pausing in the hallway outside the amphitheater for his companion to come abreast.
Clodius would not meet the younger man's eyes, however. "Well," he said, squinting down the corridor as if to estimate its length, "they offered me the centurion's slot in the Fourth Century. Told 'em I'd think about it. You know, up a rank but down a century, and I'm… you know, the guys came through real good today."
"But Vacula…" said the tribune, seeing what the non-com meant.
"Yeah," Clodius agreed. "Vacula's gone, dead as Crassus. Some others, too. They said-the voice said, you-" He shook his head angrily, trying to clear the nervous mannerism from his speech. "Anyway," he continued, "they told me it was because his brain got stabbed they couldn't do a thing for him so they just left him lay. Brains and spines, they say."
The file-closer shook his head again, this time in puzzlement. "Why d'ye suppose that should be? Brains and spines?"
"Why should any of this be?" Vibulenus answered as bleak awareness descended on him. "I don't know. But I think-" and the bluntly gleaming spearpoint swelled again as it descended on the eye of his memory "-that Rectinus Falco had heard about brains and spines too."
He shrugged. "No matter. Let's find the Medic, and then maybe some food."
"Right," said the file-closer. "It don't bother me so much now things're starting to get organized."
Vibulenus' mouth was open to ask directions from the voice of the ship. He paused and swallowed. For a moment, he tried to pretend he did not understand what the file-closer meant.
"Lead us to the Sick Bay," Clodius Afer said nonchalantly to the ceiling, where a yellow bead obediently sprang to life.
And the blithe acceptance of their situation which the tribune felt also within his own heart frightened him as much as the spear plunging toward his eye had done.
BOOK TWO
THE FIFTH CAMPAIGN
"Get your fuck-"
KA-BANG! rang Vibulenus' helmet under the impact of the crossbow bolt.
"-head down!" completed the new commander of the Third Century of the Tenth Cohort, Gnaeus, Clodius Afer, hunching along the rampart.
"Oh," he added as the tribune rolled out of the sprawl into which the bolt had knocked him, helmetless and recognizable. "Sorry, sir, but one a' those bastards has the communications ramp like he'd taped it."
Local auxiliaries, slightly-built bipeds like those who held the fortress with skill and tenacity, began banging shots over the rampart in what was obviously a pointless exercise. The light bolts sparked against the stone walls of the fortress or flew wildly over the crenellations.
It was notable that none of the auxiliaries raised their heads above the earthen rampart which protected them. Their right hands jerked the cocking levers of their repeating crossbows, while their left hands clamped the fore-ends to the fortification to roughly steady the weapons. As the archers' muscles worked feverishly, the dark green of their skin showed beneath ruffles in the short, almost translucent, gray fur that covered them.
A bolt slightly longer and heavier than those the auxiliaries were shooting-and much better aimed- grazed the timber parapet and thudded into the guard-walk so close to the tribune's boots that he jerked them closer to the wall. The auxiliaries ducked down again also. A film of greenish poison colored an inch or so of the shaft above the buried head.
"Sorry," muttered Vibulenus, snatching up his helmet which had been ringing softly on the guardwalk where it had fallen. Near the crestholder was a dent with a gouge and a smear of poison in the center of it. The bronze was already beginning to verdigris where the poison touched it. The tribune sucked in his lips and rubbed the metal clean against the turf. "I forgot how damn much that tower overlooks us since they burned us out last."
"This's the sharp end, right enough," the centurion agreed grimly. "We're supposed't' be issued some oxhides't' cover the guardwalk so at least they can't see us so easy from up there."
Vibulenus nodded upward in agreement, then donned his helmet again. The blow had not hurt him as much as it surprised him, but three inches to the side and the quarrel would have been through his forehead.
The tribune's sweat was as cold as the morning air. There were no small mistakes; only times you were luckier than you deserved to be.
There were times you weren't lucky as well, and in the air as a reminder hung hints of the charred ruin of the siege ramp which the present one replaced.
Twenty-seven legionaries had been caught in the conflagration which wrapped the first ramp in flames so hot that corpses could not be recovered, much less reanimated. Hundreds of the local auxiliariesarchers mostly, like these-had died at the same time… but that didn't matter, because they were bound to die some day, finally and irrevocably, unlike the members of the legion.
Unlike Gaius Vibulenus Caper, whose fingers traced the dent in his helmet as he thought and shuddered.
Clodius Afer was thinking along the same lines because the breeze carried a whiff of roast flesh on the cleaner odor of wood smoke. It was there if you knew to sniff for it… and that was as hard for a legionary here to avoid as it was to keep from picking a scab. "Looked so simple," said the centurion.
"This much timber around-" Afer continued as he nodded toward the hills sloping everywhere within his arc of vision, covered with the stumps that had provided materia
l for the siege works "-wasn't even a risk, just hard work muscling the frames into place and backfilling with dirt."
A trio of ballistas fired from the battery a furlong behind the rampart on which Vibulenus now crouched. The artillery's arms slammed against the padded stops, lifting the rear mounts from the platform until gravity thudded them back.
Two of the missiles were head-sized stone balls which crashed into the battlements of the tower. One ball disintegrated while the other caromed off nearly whole, in a shower of fragments battered from the wall. It would be possible to breach the fortress with ballista stones, but it would take bloody forever…
The third ballista sent a pot trailing smoke in a low arc over the wall of the fortress.
"Eat that, you bastards!" shouted a legionary farther down the guardwalk, but the sight did nothing to improve Vibulenus' state of mind.
The locals in this place, where the sun was too white and the days too long, brewed a liquid that burned like the air of the Jews' Gehennum. Pitch, sulphur, quicklime, bitumen, and saltpetre were dissolved in heated vats of naphtha, the foul-smelling fluid that pooled like water in many of the valleys hereabout. Shot over the walls in firepots like the one the ballista had just flung, it destroyed the defenders' housing, panicked their livestock and-who knew?-perhaps killed somebody.
But the same fluid, poured by the hundreds of gallons from the top of the tower, had devoured in flames the original siege ramp across which the legion had expected to storm to victory.
It wasn't that a flame attack had been unexpected. Galleries had protected the soldiers as they built the ramp closer to the walls. They were covered with raw hides over a layer of green vegetation that acted as a firebreak, as well as a cushion against heavy stones. The framing of the siege ramp was timber and theoretically flammable, but no one had believed that freshly-cut logs, none of them less than eighteen inches in diameter, were at any real risk.
The defenders had waited until the face of the ramp had advanced within ten feet of the fortress and the log-corduroyed upper surface of the Roman construction was nearly on a level with the battlements of the wall proper. Then, despite arrows showered by the trading guild's local auxiliaries, they had thrust spouts through the crenellations of the tower defending the vulnerable angle on which the Roman attack was centered.
From the spouts, dispersed and carried outward by gravity, came the fluid which clung and blazed and could not be extinguished. Water only spread the flames and made them burn the harder by igniting the quicklime. Even dirt and sand, shovelled desperately onto the fires by some of the quicker-thinking legionaries, rekindled only minutes later when the hell-brew soaked to the surface.
There was an hour of havoc and terror, men lost and equipment destroyed-tools, battering rams, and the galleries which were meant to protect them. But, as the defenders continued to spew fluid on the ramp from which every living thing had been driven, the framing timbers themselves caught fire. The flames continued to spread until the entire quarter-mile width of the siege ramp had become involved.
The flames rose higher than the granite tower which had spawned them, and the smoke lifted a thousand feet before spreading into a pall that hid the sun for three days and wrapped the corpse of the legion's expectations. Artillery on platforms a furlong back from the nearest flames was ignited by the radiant heat, and the ramp's filling of earth and rubble turned to coarse glass which crumbled and gouged when the legion finally began the task of rebuilding.
The defenders' artillery was light, catapults which shot arrows from ordinary bows instead of using the power of springs twisted from the neck sinews of oxen. As a result, they could not hurl firepots against their besiegers and spread their yellow flames along the teams of men and oxen dragging fresh material up the ramp. Few of the legionaries doubted, however, that this attempt would end in as complete a disaster as the first, once the siegeworks advanced to within ten or so feet of the tower's face.
"The trouble is," said Vibulenus, "these little furry wogs know what they're doing."
He was on a needless tour of the advanced works, to inspect them and report back to the Commander. The tribune could by now have figured within a foot how closely the ramp approached the fortress, calculating from the amount of material that had been carried forward since the most recent tour of inspection. Timber was the limiting factor since the nearer slopes had been denuded to form the initial works. The legionaries were stretching the available wood this time by using fascines of rolled wickerwork to bind each advance of the siege ramp; but even so, heavy logs were needed as pilings to anchor the fascines against the weight of the fill behind them.
The unsteady ruin of the former ramp was more detriment than gain as a foundation, and Vibulenus was not alone in dreading the way the wicker underpinning would burn, despite the layers of sod intended this time to cover the works on the final approach.
"Too right," Clodius agreed, giving the trembling arrow a nod which showed that he mistook the tribune's meaning. "I don't think much of their bows-they're quick, sure, but they're no problem with armor the way the Parthians, they shot us't' dogmeat. But some of 'em could shoot out a crow's eye, looks like."
"I mean…" Vibulenus said, focusing on a great timber, an entire treetrunk over a hundred feet long, being dragged up the approach. The teamsters, locals driving the draft animals which looked very similar to the way the tribune remembered oxen looking, would halt out of arrow range until darkness.
"I mean," the younger man continued now that he thought he could phrase his statement so as not to seem to rebuke Clodius, "They're too good all over. Good with their bows-" one of the auxiliaries chose that moment to rise and pump three arrows smoothly toward the tower, ducking back before an answering shot "-good on their fortifications, good on everything. We've been fighting dumb barbs too long."
"They can't meet us in the field," said the centurion, more sharply than he would have spoken had not his pride been touched.
"We'd eat 'em for breakfast," Vibulenus agreed easily. He was watching now and thinking about the timber, suitable for a ship's keel, as it inched up the ram under the labor of forty yoke of oxen. "But we don't have anything like that fire of theirs, either."
"We don't need it," insisted Clodius Afer, misunderstanding again. "They've built with stone, and they got the height besides. We could pour the stuff down the face a' that wall all day and it wouldn't bring down the tower. Hercules, they nigh did that when they, you know… The other ramp."
The works were lightly manned since the previous disaster. The Commander might not care about the legionaries as individuals, but he must have been telling the truth about their value to his precious guild. The irretrievable loss of twenty-seven men at a blow had shocked him as grievously as it had the survivors of the conflagration. He had agreed without hesitation when the tribunes and senior centurions insisted at the following staff meeting that it was better to risk a sally by the defenders than to risk the legion as a whole in a sudden firestorm.
From the Fourth Century, picketed to the immediate right of the section which Clodius' century held, a non-com was scrambling along the guardwalk toward Vibulenus. It might be Niger, promoted to watch clerk when Clodius took the neighboring century. That would be a pleasure, because there was very little fraternization across the ranks when the legion was in the field- and they had been in the field an unexpected three months already, with victory more distant every day that brought no beneficial change…
"Maybe they'll run out of food," Vibulenus said glumly. He drew his sword and held it so that on the polished flat of the blade could be seen the reflected tower, blurred and less substantial than the reality that was worth a man's life to view from this close up. "Or water."
Three crossbow bolts spat down, thumping the bulwark, the guardwalk near the sword's shadow, and the communications ramp where the corduroy surface had been adzed smooth. "Or arrows, though there doesn't seem much risk of that."
Niger, who was prou
d of his new red-tufted crest but had better sense than to mark himself here with insignias of rank, squatted to a halt beside Vibulenus. "Third Century reports normal progress, sir. We have enough fascines filled to advance another row, as soon as it's dark enough to set the anchor posts."
Niger took a quick look over his shoulder, then rose on his haunches to be sure that no one save native auxiliaries were close enough to overhear anything he said to his immediate companions. "Hi, Gaius," the young legionary resumed. "Gnaeus. Not much happening, is there?"
"How's your mead coming, boy?" asked Clodius Afer in a tone so dry that the tribune was not sure whether the veteran was being sarcastic or just making conversation on a subject about which he was willing to be friendly.
The older veteran. Everyone in the legion had seen and survived at least five campaigns now.
"Well, you don't find bees in a pine forest, you know," Niger said, rightly doubtful as to whether Clodius did know what was to him obvious. "They nest in trees, but they need flowers to eat, and there wasn't anything open around here before we came."
Niger's eyes scanned the slopes behind them deeply gouged by run-off from the brief storms which added to the legion's misery-and replenished the defenders' water supply. "You know, sir," he went on, professionally respectful now that he was considering a professional problem, "I been thinking. If we build the ramp much nearer the walls, they're gonna burn us out same as before."
"You've got company in that opinion," Vibulenus said in something between agreement and sarcasm himself.
A ballista, reloaded more quickly than its fellows, banged. The crashing disintegration of its missile was followed, for a wonder, by the vertical collapse of part of the tower's facing. It left a patch of rock of a darker color across as great a width as a man could span with both arms. Perhaps in a hundred years…