by R. W. Peake
“Crastinus is a good man,” he said as he stared thoughtfully into his cup of wine, “you can learn a lot from him.”
“I already have,” I replied, “but I sometimes have trouble deciding whether I hate him or love him.” Cyclops smiled. “That means he’s a great leader, because you respect him out of equal parts love and fear. And in a place like the army, you have to have both.”
I could see the sense in this, and I said so. We spent the rest of the night drinking and trying to keep our voices down as we talked, with less and less success, until Livia threatened us with imminent bodily harm if we did not go to sleep.
Waking the next morning with a pounding head, despite the pain, I had to smile. It was good to spend time with Cyclops, this time as a man who finally understood all the things that he had been telling us. I have come to the conclusion that trying to describe battle to someone is much like trying to describe the act of sexual congress; no matter how imaginative one might be, the description pales in comparison to the actual event.
As I bade them farewell, now headed to see Valeria and her husband Porcinus, I thanked Cyclops for all that he had shown me. “It’s because of you that not only have I survived, but I’ve done well,” I spoke honestly. I could tell this pleased him, and he surprised me with a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I'm proud of you Titus. I think you have a great destiny in the Legions.”
To say I was pleased would be an understatement. Kissing Livia, I waved goodbye as I started down the road, wondering if I could make it to Valeria’s farm before dark. It had taken more than a day to escort her to Porcinus’ farm on the day I delivered her to her new married life; this time, I wasn’t in a wagon with my sister, so I was confident I could make it, and I did, actually arriving well before sundown. For the third time, I went through the ritual of hugs, kisses and concern over my scar, yet I must say that this time was the most enjoyable. Valeria looked radiant, which I heard is how pregnant women were supposed to look, but I was scared to hug her for fear of hurting the baby.
“Titus, you’re not going to break me,” she laughed, though I was still not convinced.
And for the third time, I was stuffed with food; I ate more in the last two days than I had the previous week, but it was still good to have so much food before me. Porcinus never served in the army, and although I liked him well enough, there was not a lot to talk about with him since I held no interest in farming, but it was the thing in which he was most involved, so not much was said between us after the initial pleasantries. Besides, I was more concerned with talking to Valeria, yet I found for some reason that my reluctance to share details with the other people in my life about all that I had seen fell away with Valeria. I had always been completely honest with her about everything, and this time was no exception. To her everlasting credit, she did not flinch when I told her the things I had done, things like with the woman at the first town we assaulted; she just listened. Once I was done, it was well into the night, and when I bedded down in the main room, she came to kiss me on the forehead, just as she did when I was a boy. I remembered how the last year or two, I had done whatever I could to avoid it. This time I did not mind so much.
The day before we were to return to camp, I went back to Astigi to spend time with Vibius and Juno. It was clear that their feelings for each other were not changed, and in fact, had grown stronger. It was painful for me to watch, but it was also nice to see how happy Vibius and Juno were in each other. Watching them part was more upsetting than I imagined it would be, partly because I wished it were me that Juno was so distraught to see go, but also because I could only hope that one day someone would feel the same way about me. It also made me even more conscious of my obligation to Vibius to keep him alive so that he could return to his true love. I was also envious of the obvious pride that Vibius’ father had in his exploits, boasting to his friends about his son the Legionary and his great bravery, yet in this I was happier for Vibius than I was sorry for myself. Saying farewell, we made promises to write that we knew we probably would not keep, although I will say that Vibius certainly made a better attempt than I did. In those days, I had little interest in writing, or reading for that matter, although that would change, partly because once I rose through the ranks it would be required of me. However, another reason for my increased interest, especially in reading, had to do with what we were about to face now that the campaign was over, an enemy that would prove to be one of the most formidable that any soldier faces, no matter how many battles and campaign seasons they face.
When we made it back to camp, we found that the orders to break it down and begin the march to the northeast to our new home had been issued, so there was a swarm of activity. Vibius and I had agreed to say nothing of the trouble we experienced in Astigi, trusting in the Fates that word would not reach the ears of the Pilus Prior or any other officer, and it never did. The chatter of the men catching up on their various adventures during their respective leaves helped make the tasks of breaking the camp down less onerous and within two days we were ready to march, the only difference being that instead of burning down the camp like we normally did when we marched this camp was left intact, manned by a small guard left behind, along with a portion of the medici who tended to the sick and the men whose wounds were not yet healed to the point where they could travel. To my mind, and to those of my comrades, the fate of these poor souls was worse than death itself, for they existed between the two worlds. They had survived the initial threat of death but were now lingering on, not getting better or worse as the days crept by. Some of them finally showed up at Narbo, but even fully recovered they were never the same, and I think the idea of suffering this kind of fate scared me more than actually dying did. The march itself took three weeks, with the weather becoming bitter as we moved north along the coast, rapidly growing colder than anything most of us had experienced. This was far different in climate than the Hispania of our birth, despite the fact that we were still in the province for the most part. Neither Vibius nor I had ever been this far north, so we spent every night wrapped in our cloaks and wearing our extra tunics, but still our teeth chattered most of the night. Being as close to the coast as we marched did not make it any warmer because an icy wind blew off the water to further our misery.
Arriving in Narbo at the beginning of Januarius, it was very late under normal conditions, but there were no plans for us in the immediate future, which of course we had no way of knowing. The beginnings of what would start out as a camp had been begun by the advance party and over the next weeks it was transformed into a small city, our tents replaced by wooden huts, still organized around our tent sections, except with wooden floors and a solid roof. The walls were made of planks that we whitewashed then filled in the cracks, making solid little structures that helped keep out the cold. The outer walls of the camp were initially also made of wood, but gradually they were replaced by walls of stone, although that was yet to come. Once the camp was finished and deemed to be suitable to be a permanent base, the lustration ceremonies were held, along with the renewal of our oath of loyalty to Rome. We were led to the camp by one of the Tribunes who would serve with us for this year as the senior Tribune, while a new batch of more boy wonders arrived from Rome. Thankfully the senior Tribune was not Doughboy, who had returned back to Rome to follow the cursus honorum; he must have stumbled along the way because we never heard of him again. The Tribune that remained behind to serve as the Senior Tribune was the one that I took notice of earlier who had seemed to have his wits about him, and in the intervening time I learned his name, Gaius Trebonius. Now, it is a name I curse and hope that Cerberus is cracking his bones as he shrieks in agony and torment, because he was one of the slayers of the great man. However, I was happily ignorant then and was content enough to have one of the boy wonders who seemed to know what he was doing lead us, or more importantly accepted what he did not know and allowed the men who did to do what was necessary.
That was when the secre
t enemy first showed up, an enemy that we had been warned about by the veterans, except until we faced it we did not know exactly how vile a foe it is. In reality it is a combination of two different enemies, working together. They are the twins of despair known as boredom and illness. Once the camp is finished for winter and all the resulting tasks are complete, there is not a whole lot for an army to do, despite the Centurions doing their best to find things to keep us busy. Unfortunately, a substantial number of duties that are considered punishment duties, such as the cleaning of latrines, are reserved for Legionaries who fall afoul of the many rules and regulations needed to ensure the smooth running of the Legions. For those of us who stayed out of trouble, as hard is it might have been to do, that did not give us a lot to occupy our time. A good number of us, by virtue of skills we acquired before joining the Legion, had been given the status of immunes; Vibius, for example, worked in the leather factory, making and repairing all the various bits of leather gear, like our harnesses and the tack for the livestock. I had the status of being the weapons instructor after the death of Vinicius, yet there is only so much training one can do in a given day. Therefore, a good number of the men filled their spare time with the pursuit of wine, women and gambling, each man putting the three vices in their own order. Fairly quickly I observed that those pastimes carried their own sets of risks, and more often than not, when a Legionary fell afoul of the regulations, it was a direct result of one or a combination of those three. In our tent section, there were two men who seemed to find themselves on the wrong side of the Pilus Prior’s vitus, or even worse punishment, on a regular basis. One received more official punishment, while the other’s tended to be more unofficial in nature, and more likely than not was at the hands not of the officers, but from his fellow soldiers.
Atilius was a type of soldier that I came to know well during my time in the Legions, and is a fairly common sort in the army, having an extreme fondness for wine and by extension, the joys of revelry and debauchery that tend to come with it. He possessed a talent for finding drink under the most unlikely circumstances and was quick to take advantage of his finds, although I never once saw him drunk when his lack of sobriety meant that it endangered himself, or more importantly one of his tentmates or the Century. However, once the rigors and dangers of a campaign were left behind, Atilius was one of the first over the wall in search of Bacchus. Compounding the problem for Atilius was that he possessed no skill, other than fighting, so he did not have the status of immunes, which would have occupied more of his time. He was the type to start out as a happy drunk, but as the night progressed some evil numen would inhabit his soul, and anyone participating in revels with him was guaranteed to find themselves in some sort of melee, particularly when there were men from another Legion around, or even worse, civilians. For reasons I never discovered, Atilius hated civilians, which was not a real problem when we were tramping about the countryside. But Narbo, for example, was a well-established town by this point, replete with all the hangers-on that can be found in every town in the Empire that has a Legion present. Pimps were a special problem for Atilius, although in the interest of accuracy, it would be more precise to say that Atilius posed a real problem for pimps. Early on during our time in Narbo I made the mistake of accompanying Atilius, Romulus, Remus and Vellusius on a night on the town. I will not go into detail other than to say I found myself shivering in a ditch that I later found out was used exclusively for the drainage of waste, as I attempted to avoid attentions of the provosts and a party of particularly angry associates of a man that Atilius had thrown headfirst through a wall. Now, I liked a good brawl as much, if not more than any man, particularly because I tended to win. However, I could see fairly quickly that my goal of raising myself up from my current status, both in the sense of promotion in the Legion and the even larger one of improving the lot of myself and my descendants, might be permanently damaged if I continued to attend Atilius’ romps. No more than a month had passed at Narbo before Atilius found himself confined to the camp, with a portion of his pay taken, not to mention the thrashing he was given by the Pilus Prior that left him with an especially prominent black eye. However, if any of us hoped that this would serve to warn him off the path he was taking, they were in vain. His second offense happened no more than a week later, when he was caught trying to sneak back into the camp shortly before dawn. Because this was his second offense, the punishment was more severe, and he was given ten lashes, fortunately not with the scourge but the regular lash, and put on latrine detail for a month. This did serve to curtail his activities for a couple of months, and when he finally regained the chance to go back out in town, he was more circumspect, for a while anyway. Regardless, Atilius was destined to never reach above the rank of Gregarius and was not even considered for duty as immunes because of his problems with wine and debauchery.
The other miscreant in our group did not run afoul of the Centurions, his crime being the type that goes unreported and never appears in his permanent record. By this time, gentle reader, it should not surprise you when I reveal the identity of this individual, and I recognize that at this point you may have suspicions that I am being somewhat unfair to the man. I assure you that if anything, I am being kind. Didius loved to gamble, but more than he loved to gamble, he loved to win, and was not one to scruple much over how he did it. His favorite game was dice, and his gravest crime was that he was too stupid and greedy to know that it did not take long for others to suspect that his winning streak might not be attributed to the many sacrifices he supposedly made to Fortuna as he claimed. Yet he did have a certain amount of skill, because for the greater part the most that he aroused was suspicion since nobody could quite catch him in the act of cheating, as it were. Until one day in early spring, when his run of “luck” expired, courtesy of an “accidental” jostling of his person just as he was making a throw, a bumping that caused the extra pair of dice he was hiding in his other hand to fall to the ground, followed down immediately by Didius himself. It was only because Romulus and Remus were there to intercede that he was not beaten to death; there are few crimes considered more heinous to Legionaries than cheating a fellow soldier, in any fashion, at just about anything. The only exception to that are attempts made to get out of any kind of extra duties of some sort; the ability to do so is universally admired by every soldier I have met, until you gain the vitus of course. Even then, I found I held a grudging admiration for the ingenuity that some of the men under my command displayed in their attempts to avoid shoveling manure or some such. And it was due to the fact that, as much as we may have despised Didius ourselves, he was one of our tent section that required Romulus and Remus to come to his rescue. Now one might think that, under the circumstances, a man who found himself rescued under such dire straits would express gratitude to his rescuers, and view himself as forever in their debt. Perhaps the fact that Didius expressed no such gratitude will be an indicator that when I speak of him, I am not judging him too harshly. Not only was Didius ungrateful, to hear him tell it the brothers had stopped Didius from exacting revenge for the unfair accusations made against him by thrashing the half-dozen or so men who had set upon him. The fact that his face was massively swollen, his nose now going in a different direction, with the rest of his body covered in greenish-purple bruises, was a contradiction if one were to listen to his words. Apparently, however, he was simply lulling his antagonists into a false sense of security by allowing them to appear to beat him senseless, and was just about to unleash his master stroke counter-attack when the brothers so rudely interrupted. It took the intercession of Calienus to keep the brothers from finishing the job that the other men had started, with both of them making a solemn oath, swearing on Jupiter’s stone that they would never come to his rescue again, no matter what the circumstances. For my part, I must admit that I took some vindictive pleasure in paying particular attention to some of his sorer spots during our weapons drill, in which he had to participate because of an awkward situation
, at least for him. Didius could not exactly present himself for the sick and injured list, since the circumstances of his condition would prompt a series of questions that he really had no wish to answer. Despite his protestations of innocence in the matter, Didius was at least smart enough to know that on the face of it the evidence was not in his favor, so there was a relatively good chance that there would be some official punishment. Because the penalty for cheating a fellow Legionary at anything is extremely severe; it is not uncommon for men to be sentenced to death for particularly egregious offenses, Didius’ reticence was understandable. Much later in my career there was a case of a Tesseraurius who stole the money of the men he had been charged with banking and the punishment for him was the same as when a unit is decimated, except that nobody had mixed feelings about beating him to death. Therefore, Didius was forced to perform his normal duties, including giving me a chance to beat him senseless with a wooden sword, something I enjoyed immensely.
Every morning, either in winter quarters or in garrison, starts with a formation, where the orders of the day are announced before everyone goes about their business. The winter had passed, the spring had come and gone, and we still performed our normal duties, with no prospects of action. In short, the situation was disgustingly peaceful. We still did our forced marches twice a month so we maintained a certain level of fitness, but to keep Legions honed to a sharp edge for long periods of time is practically impossible. No matter how hard the Centurions tried, those of us stationed at Narbo lost all of the edge that we gained during the campaign in Lusitania. However, one man was prospering; we followed the rise of Caesar’s career with great interest, jumping onto every scrap of news about his fortunes. Other officers came and went but the army, particularly the 10th, thought of themselves as Caesar’s men, even in those days of inaction. Rarely a day went by where his name was not mentioned, a fact that I imagine the other nobles who were assigned to command us at that time did not particularly care to hear.