Ranks of Bronze э-1

by David Weber

  The tribune was shaking with reaction, but the injuries and malaise he had brought from the battlefield were gone. He had thought slaughter was the only thing that could take him wholly out of himself, but he had been wrong. He stepped down.

  "What do you want us to do, sir?" demanded Rusticanus in a husky voice while Niger, wrapping the tribune again in an arm, babbled excitedly, "What're you going to do, Gaius?"

  Vibulenus looked from one man to the other, taking in the way other soldiers were pressing toward him from all sides with hopes, advice, and congratulations on their lips.

  Clodius Afer grinned sardonically, but it was his back and spread arms which provided the tribune with breathing space.

  "Out," Vibulenus said, nodding toward the nearest doorway because he knew his voice might not be audible in the commotion.

  "And then," he added for himself alone, "we plan how we're going to go home."

  The soldier ahead of Vibulenus cycled sideways. "I still think-" the tribune heard Clodius Afer grumble as they stepped together into the paired cubicles.

  "Quartilla," said Vibulenus, and he walked into the woman's room through the dissolving wall. "I need to talk to you."

  Clodius had insisted the tribune should go to the head of the line on the basis of planning needs if he were unwilling to pull rank-and he had the rank, had earned it, so there was no reason not to claim its perquisites.

  Vibulenus had refused on the grounds that they were all in this together, however you defined "this"… and that there was no real haste, that he'd processed through the Sick Bay, eaten, and drunk already.

  And all that was true, to the seasoned veteran Gaius Vibulenus Caper at any rate. He smiled at how the boy-soldier Vibulenus Caper would have reacted to the notion of eschewing the honors due his rankthe boy who had not yet fought beside his men in a hundred fields, fought and died. But the real reason he had not cut in at the head of the line to the women was cowardice. There was solace in the thought, a psychic mudwal-lowing in the fact that he was afraid and that he was giving in to that fear-somewhat.

  He was here in the room lighted by a bead in the back corner, and Quartilla was facing him.

  Vibulenus hadn't been a gallant-Carrhae and capture had come too soon for the boy to have developed polish even if the inclination were there. There had been a woman during the season he spent in Athens attending lectures by the philosopher Aristaneus. An Argive of good family, she claimed… a Carian from some nameless crossroads, Vibulenus had suspected even then. Everything about her was as false as the red of her hair, and Vibulenus' passion had been false as well-a boy's nonsense modelled on the poetry of Catullus and Theognis, and it hadn't prepared him to really care.

  "I would have discussed it with you first," the Roman said softly, "but the offer was spur of the moment and there wouldn't be… time."

  He was standing with his back straight and his hands gripped firmly so that they would not wash themselves in his nervousness. He was not skirting the discussion of his plans to take the ship home to Campania: he did not even remember those plans in the crash of personal emotions which, as always in a human, managed to claim precedence.

  "You…" Quartilla said. She patted the couch beside her. She wore wristlets and anklets strung with tiny bells which sang at every movement. "Come, sit down, of course. You-must have been very brave for the guild to allow you…"

  The tribune sat very carefully and faced the woman, because he forced himself to do so. "Brave's easy," he said, meaning physical courage. He was blackly amused at how much easier it was to face spears than it was to face the fact that he had blithely destroyed a relationship that just might mean more to him than life did.

  "Everybody was brave," he went on, able to make his tongue function even though it was dry and his mouth was so dry he thought it would crack. "Either they were pleased because I was smart enough to pull the pan out of the fire when they fucked around-"

  Vibulenus took a deep breath. "Or else," he went on, letting the words tumble out in their own time, "they liked the way I tried to save the Commander's life. Which was a stupid mistake, and the more so if it earned me the chance to make a worse stupid mistake. All I can say about either choice was that I did what I did; and I-wish I hadn't."

  "I'm a slave," said Quartilla.

  "We all are," Vibulenus broke in savagely. "We're less than that."

  She waved him silent in a silvery murmur from her wrist. Apart from the bells, she wore nothing on her body-though her hair was piled around crystalline combs which refracted the dim red light.

  "I'm a slave," she repeated, "but I can forget that, usually, with the part of me that lives." Her hand gripped the tribune's, and her eyes demanded that he meet hers. "Do you understand?"

  He gave an upward nod of assent, afraid to speak but filled with sudden hope that it wasn't over, that there was something between them still to salvage.

  "I'm good at what I do," Quartilla said with fierce emotion that was neither anger nor very far apart from it. "I have my pride, and maybe that's because of what they did to my mind after they bought me, the guild, but it's all I have. You had the right to make me your personal slave, Gaius Caper, you earned that and I'm very pleased for you.

  "But why in the name of the god you worship did you decide to exercise that right? Why did you rob me of all the little fantasies that left me free in my own mind?"

  "I thought…" the tribune said. He turned suddenly away and slammed the wall with his fist in a blaze of self-revulsion.

  He hadn't thought. He had wished and acted on the wish, unwilling to consider anything but the way he wanted his world to be structured and arrogantly certain that his power to choose also gave him authority over the outcome of his choice.

  He didn't want to die now. He wanted to have died that morning, before he had time to speak to the Commander and claim the reward which destroyed more of his life than remained.

  There was a whisper of bells. Quartilla set her hands on his shoulder blades. Vibulenus let his shoulders loosen, but he would not, could not, turn around. He hid his face in the crook of his right elbow and squeezed back his tears of frustration with the muscles that enabled his sword to shear through simpler problems.

  "Gaius," said the woman gently, "you could have asked that you never have to fight again. Yourself. They would have granted that, you know. There are twenty of us, the females, but they have only one of you among so many swords."

  "Quartilla," the tribune said as he turned with his eyes still closed, "I will not-fail to think again." He did not offer to undo what he had done, because he could not change the past, change his words. He would ask the ship, the Commander, that the woman be returned to her regular duties; but that would not change the fact that he had made her a slave, of his whim or anyone's whim.

  "Truth," he said in a flat voice, "isn't as important as perception." He wasn't even close to considering whether he could live with the situation he now perceived. For now it would be enough that he be permitted to try- that she permit him to try.

  Quartilla smiled as he met her eyes, but it wasn't a particularly happy smile.

  He didn't, now that he was aware of externals again, remember when he had stood up. His knees were quivering and he wanted very badly to sit down again, but "We'll either get through this," said Quartilla gently, "or we won't. And 'won't' could be a very long time for both of us, the way things are."

  She took one plump hand from Vibulenus' shoulder and gestured toward the couch. The tribune read the gesture in his peripheral vision, still afraid to break the eye contact he had regained. He sat or collapsed, and Quartilla curved gracefully down beside him, her breast wobbling momentarily against his elbow.

  "I want to change the way things are, Quartilla," Vibulenus said. "I want to take my men home, and I need your help."

  "Gaius," said the woman with new concern in her eyes. "You can't go home."

  "And just now," the tribune continued, without recognition that he knew s
omething had been said in the interval, "I want most of all to think that you'll forgive me for what I did."

  Quartilla slid her left hand from Vibulenus' shoulder to the back of his neck. Her fingertips toyed with his scalp while her free hand plucked open the knotted sash of his tunic. She smiled again.

  Vibulenus knew that he was not being given an answer, however much his body was willing to believe otherwise.

  But he knew also that the woman was willing to try to work through it; and that was perhaps as much undeserved mercy as he could have accepted anyway.

  The sweat of Tenth Cohort in sword drill overloaded the Exercise Hall's ventilation system with an effluvium made bitter by fatigue poisons. Men grunted, and the clack of practice weapons was supplemented frequently by the duller sound of a riposte getting through to human flesh.

  "Up, Decimus, up," snarled Clodius Afer as his swagger stick-which looked like, but probably was not, vine wood-prodded the legionary who had just been knocked down by a head blow. "You're favoring your right hip, and that's why he's coming over your guard." Decimus' duelling partner, a gray, featureless automaton like the hundreds of others in the Exercise Hall, waited with its sword crossed over the face of its shield- both pieces of equipment equally-gray extrusions from its body.

  "Yessir," the legionary muttered, though his eyes were crossed, and the only movement of which he seemed capable was to clench and unclench his hand on the hilt of his practice sword, formed from the same material as the automaton. It was heavier than a real sword, and-though its edges were rounded and slightly resilient-a blow from it could send a man to the Sick Bay easily enough.

  "Let's get him checked over, pilus prior," said Gaius Vibullenus, threading his way a step behind Clodius through the ranks of duelling pairs.

  His own temple throbbed in sympathy with the blow Decimus had taken. The Medic had assured him that there was no organic injury-the booths would have seen to that. But something in the tribune, his mind if not his body, remembered the blow it had taken in the ancient distance.

  "Cohort," roared Clodius Afer, "at ease!" He would not have had to raise his voice, because in this room a unit leader spoke directly to all his men as if he were the Commander. Battle practice for a pilus prior, however, was not limited to exercise in swinging personal weapons.

  At the Roman's order, all the automatons froze into their upright position, waiting for another command to reactivate them. Soldiers who had kept moving on adrenalin knelt, wheezing and supporting themselves on the shields which, like all their practice gear, were overweight. Drill had to be harsher than the real thing, because real battle could not be halted save by victory- the victory of either side.

  "Good drill, boys," the pilus prior said mildly, this time letting the vessel's communications system do the work. "File-closers and watch clerks're responsible for getting whoever needs it to the Sick Bay. Rest of you, stack arms and dismissed."

  "Yessir," repeated Decimus in the hubbub. He was still playing with his sword hilt on the floor. The file-closer from that century clumped over, swearing softly.

  "Not bad," Clodius Afer said to the tribune as men streamed past them. "They're good. Pollux, they're the best."

  "Stacking arms" meant carrying all the practice equipment to the wall at the distant end of the Exercise Hall where the smooth gray surface would reabsorb the helmets and body armor, swords and shields. With dismissal as a spur, the men moved as fast as their exhaustion would permit them-and that prevented their muscles from cramping as they would if allowed to cool suddenly and completely after that level of exercise.

  "They'd better be good," Vibulenus answered grimly. "We've got to make our play soon, before the ship goes into Transit. And if we try and it doesn't work… they won't let things be. The Commander won't."

  "Nobody in the whole fuckin' legion won't be willing to try, sir," said Clodius Afer, flexing his swagger stick gloweringly to the curve just short of breaking. "Nobody said there wasn't a risk when they swore us in, did they?"

  "In Capua," the tribune said, with a bitter smile because he remembered little of the city save its name. Would he recognize his father's face?

  "In fuckin' Capua, and that's where we're goin' back," said the centurion in what was more a soldier's prayer than agreement.

  "Let's go take a look," Vibulenus said, shrugging. Today neither he nor the pilus prior had donned equipment themselves, but he thought he might return later for some individual exercise. His mind alone could not burn off the nervous energy with which his plans filled him. "Quartilla'll join us there."

  "I swear those dummies, they hit harder every time," said Pompilius Niger, jogging drunkenly from the wall where he had dumped his gear. He was not gasping, but he drew in full breaths through his mouth in between phrases. "You guys willing't' head for the baths with a fella been doin' some work?"

  Vibulenus briefly surveyed their surroundings. None of the hurrying legionaries showed any particular interest in the three of them. "We're going to the Main Gallery, going to take a look. Wouldn't mind another set of eyes if you're up to it."

  "Sure, why not?" agreed the junior centurion. He put a hand on the shoulder of each of his companions and sagged there momentarily, miming total exhaustion. "Sure. You know," Niger continued, setting the trio a brisk pace through the door, "if enough of us stare at it, maybe its teeth all fall out, hey?"

  "That still leaves the claws, don't it?" Clodius noted dourly.

  "Guide to the Main Gallery," said Vibulenus to the ceiling, and a red dot appeared.

  "Thing is," Niger went on, his breathing under control and a serious frown on his face, "we do need to…" He touched his friends' shoulders again, though without looking up from the floor. "Look, guys, if we don't do something, there's going to be trouble. Maybe not just now. But sure as shit, when we wake up after Transit and they issue real weapons-somebody's going to put a javelin through the Commander."

  "Gonna try, anyway," the pilus prior agreed.

  "And then," Niger concluded morosely, "I guess we can all figure out what's going to happen. Might be wrong on details… but it won't be a detail sort of job the guild does on us."

  "We're going to do something," Caius Vibulenus said flatly. He spoke with the absolute certainty he felt, although he could not have explained why he was so certain. Not quite.

  "You know," said Clodius Afer, after a few moments of tramping forward during which all three men remembered laser blasts, "I didn't know the girls were still loose on the ship. I mean-" Suddenly it didn't seem to be a safe topic of conversation after all. "-you mentioned Quartilla, you know."

  "Ah, that's right," said the tribune. He corrected his mumble after he got out the first few syllables, but he fixed his eyes on the guide bead. "Ah, Quartilla's status, that changed. And I was going to change it back, you understand, but she thought it was good just now that she could come and go…"

  "Sure, I understand," said Clodius Afer. What the pilus prior did understand from the emotional loading in his friend's voice was that they'd better talk about something else.

  "Wonder if they close this place and steam it down like the little rooms," said Pompilius Niger, turning into the Main Gallery and supplying the perfect change of subject. Vibulenus had continued to walk past the bead at which he had appeared to be staring.

  "The way they move it around," the tribune said in a subdued but reasonably normal voice, "they may be able to turn it inside out and shake it clean."

  The echoless nature of the Main Gallery expanded its great real size into the ambiance of a twilit plain. The floor was level, and for a moment nothing at all moved within the black volume.

  The beast rose, haunches first, and stretched in silhouette against the forward bulkhead which was the only source of light.

  "Good, I was feeling lonely," said Clodius, but there was a grim tone overlaying the joke.

  They walked in unconscious unison toward the waiting beast. The forward bulkhead quivered with a red glow so dee
p that it felt brighter than human eyes could perceive. The creature began to growl. Though the room's noise-deadening acoustics must have absorbed the physical volume of the sound, the hatred behind it was projected like a volley of missiles.

  "Got slack in his chain, the bastard does," observed Niger. They were walking gingerly now, as if they stood on glass or eggshells. "Hopes we'll come maybe a step too close to look at him, he does."

  The side entrance opened and closed soundlessly, but the motion took the men's attention as well as that of the giant hyena. The beast turned only its head and, after a moment of observing Quartilla's quick-footed figure in silence, began to growl again.

  "Milady," muttered both the centurions, glancing away in at least the semblance of being embarrassed as Vibulenus and the women kissed demurely.

  Quartilla wore sandals, a tunic, and over that a dark blue woolen stola. The garments were chaste and had as much the appearance of being Roman as she herself had of being human.

  "That's gonna be a bitch't' deal with," said Clodius with his eyes on the pacing, growling carnivore only twenty feet in front of them now. "And I just don't see any choice."

  "Unless you could, ah, lady," said Niger as his tongue and words wrapped a sudden idea clumsily. "I mean, maybe it'd let you get past it't' the door since you're not-I mean, maybe you're like the Commander or the guards to it and it'd let you be?"

  "I'm not," said Quartilla with a smile that replaced a blank expression as soon as Vibulenus' hand reached over to squeeze hers. "It wouldn't swallow down pieces of either one of us, Publius, but it wouldn't hesitate to bite those pieces out."

  "Wouldn't help anyhow," muttered the pilus prior. The older veteran scowled as he watched Vibulenus step cautiously nearer to the tethered carnivore. "Only use to getting the door open's so the rest of us can get through. Which we sure don't do while that's still standing there, grinnin'."