by David Weber
But interspersed with that orderly threat were the men who had turned the front rank into a killing machine during the initial engagement. Clodius Afer's crest had been sheared to half its length by a slashing blow, and several other soldiers, like Vibulenus at the post of honor, were helmetless. Their shields were hacked, spangled with ripped facings and the dangling weapons they had blocked. Bosses and reinforced shield rims were rippled with the dents and stains of the crushing blows they had delivered.
And everywhere was blood; on the swords and the equipment, and in the eyes of the veterans who grinned at another chance to kill.
A few warriors broke and ran, panicked by a sight more terrible than the carnivores and toad-faced monsters they had just cut down.
The Commander stood up suddenly, his garb a synthetic blue cynosure among the shaded variance of animal dyes. He took two steps toward the cohort, bleating a cry for help more universal than Latin.
A warrior on the verge of flight turned and offhandedly slashed the blue figure across the front of both thighs. Either the blade was sharper than iron had a right to stay during a long cut, or the muscles in the blue suit were soft as milk curd. Great wounds gaped like mouths opening to the bone before they vomited blood over the Commander's knees. He fell backward, still screaming, because the muscles that should have kept him upright had been severed.
The native who had chopped the Commander down leaped over the sprawling body, making his escape into the mass of his fellows. One blade of his spear trailed droplets of blood dark as garnets.
Another warrior eyed the twenty foot distance between him and the Tenth Cohort, then raised his own weapon to stab straight down into the Commander's wailing mouth.
Vibulemis flung his Spanish sword overhead.
The weapon was still blade-heavy after-who knew how many?-sharpenings, and the tribune had never been trained to throw even a knife balanced for the purpose. It flew straight, but the fat part of the blade instead of the point spun into the native's forehead.
That was good enough. The warrior's hands shot up. His shield flew in one direction, his spear in another, as if they were pins struck down by the sword which caromed away from the impact in a splatter of blood.
Clodius Afer, straining a half-step ahead of the legionaries to either side, decapitated the native with a sweep of his own blade. The man was an artist, thought Gaius Vibulenus as he sprawled face down on the gravel, played out from exertions rather than the score of wounds which for now he had forgotten.
For a moment the tribune could not move. His torso crackled with dry yellow fire, and he could not tell whether or not he was breathing.
The patter of stones and startled oaths brought Vibulenus around to present awareness. He remembered where he was a moment before his shield slapped him, lifted by a foot that trampled its inner rim. Men were striding past, on their way to finish a battle and another native enemy. The tribune was debris in their way, to be avoided if possible because he had been a comrade-but an obstacle nonetheless to men who would prefer to save their remaining energies for the foe.
"Sir, y'all right?" demanded a soldier who took Vibulenus' feeble attempts to shrug off his shield as a request to be lifted. Because the man-he was Titius Hostilianus; the whole cohort must have shifted to its new front after all-had only one free hand and that after dropping his sword, he jerked the tribune brutally into a sitting posture. "You all right?" he repeated anxiously.
Vibulenus let his shield slide off his left arm and quiver against the soil on its concave face. "I'm- Pollux…" He had a bruise beneath his ribs where his diaphragm had thrust against his bronze armor in desperate attempts to draw air into his lungs.
"I'm fine," he said, straightening to keep the cuirass from pressing flesh already abused. "Gimme… you know, help me up."
Suddenly the two men were in the wake of the battle again. They were alone on trampled gravel with discarded equipment, bodies crumpled like waste rags, and a few legionaries hobbling but determined to catch up with the action despite their wounds.
It felt amazingly good to stand up again. He could breathe without his equipment pressing in ways that made his lungs scream… but without the legionary's steadying arm, Vibulenus could not have stayed upright.
The sky was thunderous with the trading vessel's descending bulk, and the body-recovering tortoise already loomed over a shingle ridge in the direction of the legion's own ship.
Vibulenus nodded his companion forward; it would be pointless to try to talk until the trading vessel was grounded and silent. Did their own ship sound like that when it landed and took off…?
The tribune's spur-of-the-moment response to the encircling native army had been successful beyond his conception. All Vibulenus had intended to do was to block the enemy's flanking motion and take the pressure off the portion of the legion which already had screaming warriors on three sides.
But the soldiers in the rear ranks, though leaderless, were no cowards. They had turned defensively to meet a threat from what should have been the direction of safety. When the cohort swept past them in formation, they fell in behind the attack and multiplied its weight. Warriors, checked by the resistance of the command group, fled the rush to heavy infantry as abruptly as they had attacked. Most threw away their meager equipment. Those who did not were hacked down atop it as legionaries caught any who were in the least burdened.
And all the time, the legion's original front continued to butcher the natives before it, though swords grew dull and arms ached with the motions of slaughter.
Falco lay on his back, but his head was turned to the side by the weight of the javelin's shaft. His remaining eye had rolled up in the socket as blank and white as that of an unpainted statue, and his face was frozen into an expression of terrified disbelief.
"Wonder if he saw it coming," said the surviving tribune in a normal voice that not even he could hear over the roar of the descending trader.
Probably Falco hadn't. You don't really see anything in a panic like that, only the image of fear your mind creates for you. The image could have been anything, a warrior or the gravel as his mount fell or even the enveloping fury of a laser putting paid to a deserter's account.
Death was a point of blue steel, its edges polished smooth by a Roman hand that morning.
Rest, Publius Rectinus Falco, in whatever torments the gods adjudge you to deserve.
Several of the carnivores were still twitching in their iron blankets, dead to all but reflex that made their jaws clop and clawed feet slash at emptiness.
Their riders were utterly stilL Vibulenus had wondered if the bodyguards had the tenacity of life that marked real toads, the ability to thrash for hours after being mangled. Not these. Their bodies were feathered with scores of native spears, thrust into the joints between the hoops of their armor.
The Commander was still alive.
At one time, he must have attempted to clamp shut the gouges in his legs, because both his gloved hands were slimy with his thick, dark blood. Now he only babbled sounds jmintelligible even in the hush that followed the trading vessel's landing.
Vibulenus knelt-caught himself with his hands so that he did not topple flat himself. Moving was tricky; every time he did something different, he chanced total collapse.
The Commander's lips began to move slowly, as if he were still speaking, but no sounds came out. His eyes pleaded beneath a surface glitter that no longer seemed protective. Now it aped the glaze of death.
Which would shortly follow from shock and the blood loss that were natural results of the guild employee's wounds. The extensor muscles of both thighs had been slashed across, disabling him as effectively as hamstringing and with a far greater mess. The blood vessels that fed the powerful muscles were severed also, leaking out the Commander's life.
The tribune started to unknot the sash at his waist. His fingers did not work properly, and there was neither time or need to be delicate. The fallen weapon he picked up to cut the silk in
to a pair of tourniquets was his own sword.
"Just hold on." Vibuleenus said to the man-putatively-he was working to save. "You'll be fine. Death just gives you a different outlook on life."
"The turtle's coming, sir," said Titius. "S'pose they can load him in like they does us?"
"Why not?" said the tribune offhandedly as he tied off the right thigh. The Commander went limp, his head rolling back on the gravel from which he must have been lifting it so long as consciousness allowed. "It all comes down to the same thing, doesn't it? Whether we wear blue suits or bronze armor."
It did not occur to him to phrase the last sentence as a question.
"Lookit this sucker," Clodius Afer bragged. "Tell me you ever saw somethin' this ugly!"
"It'll do," Vibulenus said, more or less in agreement, as he surveyed the bull-roarer that the pilus prior had captured.
The sounding piece was about the size of a man's forearm and carved intricately from a single bone. Each of the holes through which air swirled to make the sound was fashioned into the likeness of a fanciful mouth.
The disquieting thing was that the result looked somehow as if it might be a miniature of a living creature… and that thought was unpleasant even to men who had become used to the toad-faced bodyguards.
"You oughta pick things up yourself, sir," said Pompilius Niger with what the tribune supposed was meant for a cheerful intonation. The junior centurion's lips were so badly swollen around the cut that the words he lisped would have been indistinguishable from moaning by anyone less familiar with Niger than his companions were. "Adds a little, you know, interest to things."
"Found my sword," Vibulenus said, drawing the weapon an inch or two from the sheath to indicate it. He had cleaned the blade as soon as he had leisure and the opportunity… using Falco's sash as a wiping rag. He did not have a stone to resharpen the steel. That would be done within the ship-by the ship, perhaps- after the tribune stacked the weapon with the rest of his equipment in the hall to the Sick Bay. "What have you got? Teeth for a necklace?"
Some of the men had been doing that lately. The ship stayed ripe with the miasma of putrefying alien flesh for a week or two after each of the past several battles.
"Better, sir," said Niger with a grin. He patted his bulging leather knapsack. "I found honey. Near enough!"
A bright yellow car howled past a hundred feet in the air. Crackling discharges played in its wake. Vibulenus' mouth opened and his body trembled between the choice of fight or flight… but the sizzling corona was not a weapon, only a sign of someone from the trading vessel headed in a great hurry toward the soldiers' destination-their ship.
The legion's transport always looked mountainously huge when the Romans straggled back to it; but even after so many battles, Vibulenus had no clear picture of what the vessel looked like when they disembarked. It was usually dark then, near dawn; and the ship was behind them-but it would require only a glimpse over a shoulder as he marched out…
Battle was still a matter of anticipation. Every time, even though there had been so many, even though the fantasy fights in the Recreation Room had multiplied reality by a score of visions that seemed real while they were being dreamed. Neither battle nor sex brooked any rival when they had engaged a man's emotional attention.
"Now where in this place d'ye figure to find honey?" Clodius Afer was asking with a sweep of his arm. "I've seen drill fields as looked like a garden compared to this."
"Found," said the other centurion. He paused beside the barrel stem of a plant whose spreading leaves had been trampled to rags by hundreds of sets of hobnails. Kneeling instead of bending, so that the buckled lid of his knapsack remained level-it was not fluid tight-he stabbed the stem with his dagger and made a quick circular motion as if he were boning a ham.
The blade withdrew along with a plug of the stem. Behind it oozed a thick green fluid in such quantity that it must have come from a reservoir instead of being intracellular sap.
"See?" said Niger with muzzy brightness. He wiped his blade with an index finger and stuck his tongue between blackened, swollen lips to lick the green sap. "Just like honey."
"I'll take-" said Vibulenus, planning to continue, "-your word for it." But why not?
"I'll take a taste," the tribune said, dipping his own fingertip into the cavity rather than licking the digit which Niger offered him. The sap tasted sweet… and perhaps it even tasted like honey. The last time Vibulenus had tasted honey was too distant in time and incident for him to remember.
The sticky fluid had a smell like old bones, however, which he doubted had been true of honey.
"Well," said Vibulenus. He avoided the grimace which would have been insulting, but he wiped his finger carefully on the pebbles to cleanse it of the vile goop. "I wish you luck with your mead. It'll be… interesting, you bet."
"Wonder if that was the Commander bein' brought back?" suggested Clodius Afer as he shifted his loot. "Wasn't the tortoise picked him up, I hear, it was some liltle yellow bug from the trader. Like that one went past."
The expression on the pilus prior's face hinted that he wished he'd taken something less bulky, perhaps the spinner alone without the heavy shaft and line of the bull-roarer. It had been an exhausting battle for all of them; and under the guild, the legionaries did not have the lines of slaves that would have carried the loot they did not comprise.
Vibulenus looked at his friend, trying to remember how he had thought of Clodius when he first knew him. The pilus prior looked to be the same veteran at the height of his powers as was the file-closer who had cowed and angered a boyish tribune named Vibulenus. Clodius was that man physically… and perhaps in mind as well, more or less.
Certainly more nearly the same man than the tribune was; but the tribune hadn't been a man, only a boy, and he had aged a very long time since he first fought in the line at Clodius Afer's side.
Gains Vibulenus, eighteen years old, drew his sword and almost lost it as he jumped down. A warrior thrust at him, and only Clodius' quick sideways chop kept the spear from taking Vibulenus through the chest…
It was also hard to remember that men who had been side by side so many times, and through so much of the battle just completed, had not been together in the immediate aftermath. The pilus prior had led the sweep mopping up the right flank, while Vibulenus had knelt at the Commander's side when "Yes, it was a flying wagon from the trading ship that picked the Commander up," said the tribune as the three of them resumed their ambling pace toward their own vessel. The great doors already swarmed like the entrance of an anthill, shimmering with the forms of legionaries happy in their victory. "The tortoise came by, but it ignored him. They-I guess they don't expect commanders't' be hurt."
Killed, Vibulenus guessed with a great deal of experience on the subject, by the time the vehicle with six panicky figures in yellow suits had arrived. The tourniquets could not prevent shock, and blood loss from the wounds had probably proceeded beyond hope of recovery by the time the tribune had bound the limbs off.
"You know," said Niger, who had been sucking at his finger off and on with a contemplative expression, "they didn't pick up the bodyguards a'tall. I'd have thought they might be alive, some of'em. Fixable, anyway," he added with a nod toward the tribune.
The three of them did not discuss the aftermath of the tower's collapse, so many… battles; what was a year?-battles ago. They had all received wounds since then, but none so serious that they could not stagger to the Sick Bay with the aid of friends.
"They can replace people to stand around and look ugly," Clodius said. "Wouldn't be surprised they could replace people to wear blue suits and stick their thumbs up their ass… though I dunno, prob'ly they've got a different kinda medic on the big ship, a veterinarian I shouldn't wonder.
"But anyhow, they can't replace us. Because nobody's ever been as good as we are."
Instead of clapping the senior centurion on the shoulder with a boastful echo of his own, Niger smiled oddly-the disto
rtion was not solely a result of swollen tissues- and said, "Falco was there too. I guess they don't pick up the ones they can't, you know, help."
His voice paused for a moment. The scrunch of the trio's boots, in unison by habit, was the only sound the men made for several seconds. Then Niger resumed, "Mostly it'd bother me, you know, anybody I'd been together with so long. Even ones I don't rightly know. It'd be like it was-"
"Could've been you or me," said Clodius Afer, who kept his eyes straight ahead.
"Like that, yeah," the junior centurion agreed. "Only it isn't, you know? Nothing about that bastard has anything to do with me or anybody I care about. Alive or dead. The vultures around here-" there had been nothing in the local skies save the wagons after the traders landed "-can have what they want of him."
Vibulenus laughed harsly and said, "As much epitaph as he deserves." But in his heart he knew that he and Rectinus Falco had been shoots from the same vine, and the way they had twisted was the choice of the gods alone.
From habit, the soldiers began to strip away their gear as soon as they reentered the vessel. The hatch was the same one by which they had disembarked, but now the hall to the Sick Bay lay beyond it instead of the Main Gallery. Like the fact that the sun rose and set-used to rise and set-the internal workings of the ship had ceased to be matters for comment. None of the soldiers- none of the surviving soldiers-had enough philosophical bent to waste energy trying to explain the inexplicable.
The line was moving faster than Vibulenus expected. The aisle was scarcely half full even though the trio of friends had been among the last Romans to drift back to the vessel. Men were piling up their equipment for the ship to process at leisure, then walking on without the usual delay.
The Medic's voice could be heard. Though his words were unclear, they did not appear to be his usual singsong about clearing and entering the cubicles. Over that and the shuffling murmur of men moving came repeated clangs from the device that warned someone was trying to carry metal into the vessel proper.