by David Weber
Clodius Afer was standing on stones piled at the base of the wall in order to hook out another with his pick while Niger balanced him. Every time they removed a block, the next one came easier. The crumbled mortar would have made a ram's job more difficult, because individual blocks had enough play to absorb shock without cracking or shaking the whole wall down.
Against the legionaries with picks, the structure had no protection save the weight of individual blocks. Those were no match for men with the strength and boarhound determination of Clodius Afer and his fellow volunteers. Including Gaius Vibulenus, who "Watch it!" ordered the centurion, jumping down and back as the block he was dragging teetered on one corner.
Vibulenus stepped clear and glanced around. To the left of his own little group, a thirty-foot length of facing shuddered down and outward, battering and pinning a number of the legionaries whose individual efforts had combined to something unexpectedly great. The gap rose jaggedly to a peak twenty feet up the surface, a corbelled arch sealed by the wall's rubble core.
The tremors and release from that slippage sent down not only the block Clodius was removing but three of those above it as well. "Come on, back," the tribune shouted. He bumped into a soldier who was trying to cover them both with a shield.
Feeling sudden panic at being trapped between moving rock and immobile bronze, Vibulenus slapped the legionary in the middle of the breastplate and screamed, "Back, curse you! Backl"
The shadow slicing across the ruddy inferno above them snapped the tribune's eyes upward.
The teams had released the ropes which held the hollow log poised just short of the tower battlements. That effort was unnecessary now, especially since the defenders were beginning to desert the remaining walls of the fortress in despair. A collapse of the enemy's will to fight was more devastating than a breach in his walls-but it had to be exploited immediately, and a few hundred additional legionaries boosting and dragging one another up temporarily undefended fortifications could be worth a week's grueling siege work after the defenders regained their courage.
The log struck the tower just beneath the flame-wrapped battlements and clung there. Heat threw ripples in the air and made it seem that the whole tower shook. Or else "Retreat!" the tribune said, his voice raised but his tone again that of emotionless command as his mind distanced itself from everything physically immediate.
Niger, braced by the centurion, was clambering up the pile of tumbled stone to pry loose another series of blocks. The soldier, still looking younger than the eighteen he had been when captured by the Parthians, had lost his helmet, but sweat plastered his hair to his scalp in a black cap.
Vibulenus gripped Clodius and Niger, each by an elbow. The tribune's thinking processes were too orderly and multiplex at the moment for him to be surprised that he held two strong men without strain. "The wall's about to collapse, I think," he said into the rage-distorted face of the centurion. Clodius was drunk with haste to accomplish his business, and that monomania turned to fury at anything which attempted to frustrate it.
"Get them moving," the tribune continued coolly, unconcerned that reflex had lifted the pick in Clodius' hand for a stroke to clear his arm. "Just away from the tower-don't try to climb back up the ramp. You too, Niger. Get on with it, boys."
The tone or the look in Vibulenus' eyes penetrated Clodius' mind before he recognized the tribune as a friend. He looked up, swore, and dragged the willing Niger with him toward the troops milling to the left of the gap he himself had torn.
"Get moving, ye meal-brained fuckers!" roared the centurion. "This fucker's about't' fall on our fuckin' headsl" Using his pickhandle as a cross-staff and his bellowed certainty as a goad, the squat non-com set up a motion in the troops like that of a wave sucking back from the shore over which it has swept.
Bricks blew out of embrasures midway up the face of the tower. Another floor had collapsed onto a further store of flammable liquids.
Vibulenus turned toward the right flank as Niger and the centurion bullied men to safety in the other direction. He saw no one he knew by name, though soot, helmets and emotion were effective masks. "Run for it, boys!' he called in cool arrogance, gripping a pair of the nearest men by the shoulder. One of them wore a centurion's red cross-plume on his helmet. "Get 'em moving before the wall comes down!"
Fragments of adobe brick and headsized chunks of the stone battlements tumbled with as much as seventy feet in which to accumulate momentum. Legionaries raised shields if they had warning, but this was little protection against the heaviest pieces. One legionary bounced to the ground screaming, his left forearm broken in a dozen places and the thick plywood of his shield in splinters held together only by its felt backing.
For all the injuries, at least one of them fatal, the scatter of debris was probably the best thing that could have happened to the men at the base of the tower.
Nothing the tribune could have said-no command, even if all the signallers in the legion had delivered it-could have so effectively gotten the attention of those most at risk.
In the pause that followed the crashing impacts, Vibulenus shouted, "Run or you'll die, boys! Run!" He thrust the men he held in the direction he wanted the whole force to go.
That pair moved, the centurion first glancing upward and then braying, "Mithras save us, she's comin' over!"
A full-sized block, tumbling and as big as any in the lower part of the wall, plunged down with just enough outward momentum to keep it clear of the tower's batter. It struck a pile of stones dragged from the base of the tower with a crash like the world splitting. Neither the block which fell nor the one it hit broke up to absorb the impact.
The block sprang outward in an elastic rebound that gave it virtually the same velocity it had at the climax of its seventy foot drop. It caromed through the legs of the centurion with the energy of a builder's dray, scarcely slowing in its crazy, corner-bobbling course into the fascines of the siege ramp which caught it harmlessly.
The man turned a truncated cartwheel, his arms flung wide by the weight of shield and spear. The stubs of his legs, both amputated at midthigh, spurted arcs of arterial blood as they described their own courses around the center of motion. When the centurion crumpled in a pile, his helmet fell off as if in benediction.
The upper face of the tower swayed like a curtain in a breeze, rippling toward either edge from where the hollow log leaned against it. More bits fell from the top, tiny until their velocity swelled then into blocks as big as a man and heavier than a dozen men.
Whether by instinct or from the tribune's warning, legionaries had already abandoned the ground on which the missiles were falling. Many of the troops were trying to climb back the way they had come, up the face of the siege ramp. They were safe enough from plunging debris, but the whole artificial valley would be covered by rubble from the total collapse of the tower. The men who had sense enough to throw down their shields and equipment would probably be able to scramble clear that way, but the others were seriously at risk.
As was Gaius Vibulenus himself. His job was done and he was a human being again with no duty except his own salvation.
There was a cataclysmic tearing sound from within the tower, shaking the ground and sending up sparks in dazzling traceries rather than balls of flame as before. The inner stonework of the wall was collapsing and dragging with it the upper portion of the rubble core. The facing was still momentarily in place despite the way the legionaries had weakened the base of it, but that could not last much longer.
'"Help me," moaned the legless centurion.
The mangled soldier's eyes were staring in the direction of Vibulenus, but his words seemed instinctive rather than voiced in hope of a response. The eyes did not focus. The mind behind them was as droolingly slack as the lips.
Moments before, while the tribune was an intellect dissociated from every factor save the pieces he moved on the game board, he would have seen the sprawling amputee as a factor interchangeable with fifty-nine o
thers in the legion. Now he had returned to being Gaius Vibulenus Caper, who had been a boy of eighteen and who recognized the centurion as the grizzled man who had punched him in the Main Gallery of the vessel that brought them-here.
Vibulenus turned and ran two leggy strides in the direction Clodius and Niger had chivvied other legionaries clear. The face of the tower would buckle outward any instant like a butterfly unfolding a broad stone wing, and anyone caught in the path of that cataclysm would be pulverized beyond the magical skill of the Medic to help.
There were legionaries on top of the wall flanking the crumbling tower. The defenders' resistance had collapsed so thoroughly that the soldiers leading the scrambling assault were able to turn and help their fellows onto the battlements instead of struggling to survive on their dangerous perch. Horns and trumpets sounded in the chaos, but Vibulenus could not tell whether they were giving orders or simply reacting to the general enthusiasm.
Metal gleamed at the edge of the siegeworks, where the palisade had been thrown down by soldiers surging toward the fortress. The sun winked on polished bright-work, the mace-studs and hackamore bosals that left the jaws of the carnivorous mounts free to raven and tear. The smokey glare of the tower stained the iron plates of the bodyguard the color at the heart of a forge, the color of the blood leaking from the stumps of the centurion.
Now that it was safe, the Commander had come to view his victory.
"Fucking bastards!" screamed Gaius Vibulenus, and he ran back to the dying man.
Dead, the tribune thought as he slid his hands under the hooped corselet that gave rigidity like an insect's shell to a body that was flaccid within. When he shifted the armor for a grip, the mouth gave a great sigh though the eyes did not blink.
The centurion was a heavy man, even without the weight of his lower legs, and when Vibulenus had raised him waist high he found that the man's shield was still strapped to his left arm. To clear it would require dropping the centurion and starting again the awkward business of lifting a dead weight… or throwing the bastard down and running from Hades gaping behind him.
Fuck it all, he'd finish what he'd started. He twisted a fraction so that the dragging shield did not foul his boots and began striding forward again.
Vibulenus had not realized how done-in he was until he started to carry the dying man. The pains that had been covered by rushing adrenalin earlier in the assault were present in full fury, and the detachment of moments before no longer operated to free his mind from the needs of his body.
All that was bearable because it had to be borne, but the weakness in the tribune's muscles was catastrophic and the final catastrophe. He was too young and too healthy ever to have had doubts about his body. There were limits to his strength: he knew that Clodius Afer was stronger than he, and that others might be quicker or faster as well.
But Vibulenus had not realized in his heart of hearts that there would be a time when a task that was within his normal capacity would find him incapable because of exhaustion. He had expected-not planned, but expected-to run with the centurion in his arms, praying to Hercules that he would be fast enough to get clear of the tower's collapse.
Now that he was committed, he found that he was able to grip his burden only because his knuckles were locked. Vibulenus' lungs burned so that every breath flashed him an image of the flickering inferno above, and his legs were bladders of thin gelatine which were hard put to support their load-much less drive it at a run beyond the zone of destruction.
All sounds paused, as if the world were drawing in its breath.
Vibulenus did not have to look up to know what was happening, but he could no more forebear to do so than a falling man could fail to scream. The facing of the tower was coming down like a backdrop of painted fabric. The log whose weight had propped the stone curtain was tearing through, causing the halves of the wall to twist outward from the slow rending trajectories which their scale made seem lazy.
How did a vole feel when the shadow of a stooping hawk grayed the sunlight?
Human feelings had brought Vibulenus to the gates of the Underworld. There they abandoned him to die or be saved by the chill intellect of command which spared no more emotion for the body it wore than for any other.
The tribune's muscles worked to thrust him across the gameboard. The sound of moving air and rock grinding lazily against rock seemed only a distant whisper, but it covered all other noise completely as the wall prepared to bury the ground at its foot.
Striding like a distance runner, the body in his arms as disregarded as was his own, the tribune raced toward the mobile gallery. The body of the defender who had bounced off the roof-the only enemy whom Vibulenus had seen within spearlength in all the months of campaign-lay smoldering in his path. He tripped over the corpse and plunged into the open end of the shelter, scarcely aware that he was no longer upright nor that the first crossbar stripped the centurion from his arms with a smashing blow.
Boiling like the surf, stone tumbled across the mobile gallery.
The first impact was from the front, a block ricocheting up from the dead archer whom it had crushed and blended into the soil beneath. The end of the structure lifted as if it had not been a massive burden for twenty strong men some minutes before. As the gallery poised, the remainder of the man-made rockslide worried it like a shark with a gobbet of flesh too large to bolt entire.
Had the gallery been in vertical line with the collapsing wall, the sturdy shelter would have been ground to splinters indistinguishable from the remains of anyone who had chanced to be inside it. Because the thrust of the hollow log kept the wall from tilting outward, the stone fabric crumpled from the bottom when it lost integrity and only then sprang out to cover the ground.
The upper reaches of the wall slipped downward smoothly, even fluidly, while the layers at their base exploded into a fury like that of a waterfall but fed with the inertia of stone. The mobile gallery rushed backwards on the wave front, disintegrating as if its beams were not of four-inch hardwood.
The roof of mud and wicker slid into the siege ramp, compressed the fascines momentarily, then flexed a few feet up the face of the stabilized earthwork. The stones driving the gallery thundered above and across it. A few of them jounced over the lip of the Roman works and careened angrily down the corduroy surface, spreading panic among noncombatants and those legionaries who thought they had gained a place of safety.
Though the stone was dark, the dust into which the great blocks ground themselves rose in a pall as white as wheat flour. It drifted instead of rising on a column of heated air the way the smoke had done as flame gutted the tower.
Beneath that choking, settling shroud of rock died Gaius Vibulenus Caper, military tribune and one-time Roman citizen.
The first thing he remembered was fire.
Not the tower, destroyed by its own defenses-though after a moment he recalled that too, standing like a bloody sacrifice against the pale blue sky.
But all his mind had room for at first was the way his body burned as it was squeezed and rubbed to bits. There had been no sound-or rather, the cosmos had been entirely of sound and the false lights flashing in his brain but not his eyes, so that he could not hear his bones breaking in sequence. He had felt the fractures, though, the momentary slippages and loosenings as one part after another gave up the struggle with inexorable forces.
There had been no pain, then: only fire in every cell.
His name was Vibulenus. He was a soldier, and he was dead.
Everything was muted gray, an ambiance rather than a light. It could have been part of the dream Vibulenus was having since there were no lines or junctions, but he could see his own limbs. Half afraid of even the attempt, he decided to wiggle his toes-and those appendages, deep scarlet like every part of his body that he could see, moved normally.
The motion did not even make the pain worse, but the pain was already fiercer than the tribune could have imagined at any time before this awakening.
There was something beneath him, a bench or a floor, but he could not tell where it joined the walls that must surround him. He tried to roll to his feet, screaming and scratching at himself in a fury of frustrated disbelief. He had been somewhere just before he became here, and he could remember nothing of that other place except that he wished he were back in it.
Heat spread over the surface of Vibulenus' body and, like a blanket on a fire, suffocated the pain. His skin rippled as tremors pulsed through the muscles beneath, but that feeling-though disconcerting-was in no way kin to the agony of moments before.
The tribune did not even realize that he had flopped back on the floor-there was no furniture in what must be the room-until he started to get up again. The tension that his muscles had released by trembling left them feeling normal, though extremely weak. The sensation of heat vanished as suddenly as it had come on, and the pain did not return. He stood cautiously.
Instead of a door opening, the wall in front of Vibulenus dissolved completely. The room had shape and dimensions; it was a paraboloid little more than the man's height and twice that on the longer horizontal axis. One end was now open, like an egg topped by a knife, and a man-well, a figure in a blue skinsuit who was not the Commander or the Medic-lounged there with an expression of mild interest.
"C'mon, walk," the figure said, making walking motions with two of the three fingers of either hand. "Do they work or don't they? Let's see 'em move, cargo."
"Where am I?" Vibulenus demanded, walking toward his questioner. He had heard the question clearly-the words were in the flawless Latin spoken by everyone on the vessel except the legionaries themselves. Many of the line soldiers were of Oscan or Marsian origin and had learned Latin as a second language. The tribune's nurse had been a Marsian, and he still framed some thoughts in that ancient Italian language himself…
He was alive, and he was the man he had always been. All he needed to know now was where, in the name of all the gods, Gaius Vibulenus was standing at the moment.