by Cass Morris
He had not expected Aventan-style bathhouses here, but the reminder of the lack of civilization rankled him nonetheless. But he attempted to be gracious. “After ten days at sea, I shall simply be grateful to feel clean.”
“Yes, yes, I know the feeling!” Fimbrianus laughed. “The domus the city provides us is a treat, though, even if it does lack some amenities. Take it from me, though, you’ll want to invest in some property on the mainland for a respite. All the wealthy folk have estates over there, where there’s more room to spread out. Though perhaps—” Fimbrianus’s already-wrinkled brow creased further as he seemed to remember the reason for Rabirus’s arrival. “Perhaps best to make that investment once you’ve sorted out the trouble with the locals. Just in case.”
Rabirus wanted to ask Fimbrianus’s opinion of those locals, but they had arrived at the domus, and he found himself swiftly bundled off to clean up before dinner.
An hour later, Rabirus joined Fimbrianus in the dining rooms. Even the furniture was odd in this foreign place, a mongrel configuration of Aventan, Tyrian, and what Rabirus assumed were Iberian practices. The arrangement of the tables was familiar enough—three set in the shape of a horseshoe, with the greatest men seated at the top of the room. The tables were unnaturally high, though, and after further scrutiny, Rabirus saw why: there were no couches set around them, but a series of high-backed benches. ‘At least they have cushions . . .’ The native Iberians, no doubt, would be happy to sit on bare wood, as though they were no better than beasts of the wild.
The company was likewise as mismatched an assortment as Rabirus would have expected to find in a Popularist household back in Aven, with men of all sorts mingling freely. Rabirus could not keep his eyes from drifting over toward one stranger in particular. His clothing was of neither Aventan nor Tyrian design, nor did he have an Iberian look to him. His tunic was striped blue and brown, and secured with strangely knotted cords that formed an X over his chest. Rabirus had never seen the like.
“Ah!” Fimbrianus said, seeing Rabirus glance at the odd dinner guest and mistaking the look for one of interest. “You’ve noticed my Asherite friend. There’s a small population of them in the city. Mostly keep to themselves, you know, or else they deal with the Tyrian traders. Well, they came over with the Tyrians, generations ago. Some of them live up near the Ligustine Lake now. Good textile workers!” He flapped a hand, as though waving away the stray thoughts that buzzed through his conversation like so many flies.
An Asherite! A thing almost anathema to the Aventan way of life, utterly inexplicable, lounging in an Aventan triclinium! Rabirus could hardly countenance it and was unable to contain his shock from distorting his expression. The Asherites were considered strange even in their native lands, a people who eschewed all gods but one—and that one, from what Rabirus had heard, seemed a harsh and thankless taskmaster. Even the Parthians and Abydosians were wary of the Asherites.
“You know,” Fimbrianus said, lowering his voice and leaning toward Rabirus. His tone became almost conspiratorial. “If I might offer a suggestion, friend Rabirus.” Rabirus bit back an insult, challenging Fimbrianus to prove that they had ever been friends. “You would do well to make sure the people of Gades see you take the Tyrians and Iberians, and even yon Asherite, into your council. They will like you for it, and, if you do not . . .” He lolled back into his chair, eyebrows arcing as his eyes went exaggeratedly wide. “Well . . .” Fimbrianus spread his hands.
Rabirus had no patience for this. “If I do not, what?” he demanded.
Fimbrianus gave no visible response to his sharp tone. “They will think you . . .” After a moment of searching for the right word, he laughed. “Well! As we would call it, provincial.”
Recoiling, Rabirus glanced around the room. These men? This ragged collection of eastern hedonists and western barbarians, they would dare to deem him provincial, when he hailed from the finest city in the world? The center of all morality, the republic which had stood for hundreds of years?
Fimbrianus noticed his shock. “I know, I know. When you’ve hardly been out of Aven, it seems impossible.” The man’s reasonable tone irritated Rabirus all the more. “But a few years of living here taught me how much more there is to the world. Well! It’s on our own doorstep, if we could see it!” Now he looked amused, laughter playing at his lips. Rabirus suppressed an urge to punch him in the nose. “Hard to tell, from the Palatine or Caelian, but Aven is very like Gades, in some ways.”
“You sound,” Rabirus said, ice in every syllable, “like a Popularist.”
That proclamation made Fimbrianus chortle without restraint. “Oh, friend Rabirus, I’ve been away from Aven too long to consider myself aligned to any particular faction. Popularist, Optimate, I’ve had no need to care about it, out here. But I think, perhaps, I’ve become a bit more cosmopolitan.” He winked—actually had the audacity to wink—at Rabirus. “I hope it does you as much good as it did me.”
“If it’s advice you wish to dispense,” Rabirus said, “then bring me up-to-date on the barbarian uprising.”
Fimbrianus’s merry features melted into a scowl as he plucked apart a partridge wing. “I told that boy messing about in Toletum to leave well enough alone,” he said. “He stirred up trouble, if you ask me. Those Lusetani would have gone back to their villages once the winter set in and raiding lost its appeal. Now they feel they’ve something to prove, so they’ve dug in all up and down the Tagus River.” He waved a grease-covered hand dismissively before reaching for his napkin. “I sent a cohort that needed blooding, but I haven’t seen any need to move anyone else out of the city. We’re best off protecting Aventan interests here.”
As inclined as Rabirus was to agree, there was one hole in Fimbrianus’s reasoning. “But what became of that cohort?” he asked.
This time, Fimbrianus hesitated before replying. “They’re still in Toletum. Stayed there through the winter.”
Rabirus stared at him a long moment. Fimbrianus’s shoulders had drawn together, and his eyes were fixed determinedly on his plate now, not expansively enjoying the room, as he had been. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“It’s rumors, that’s all!” Fimbrianus huffed. “Mad rumors, you know how it is. Young men listen to too many stories and start thinking they see specters out there in the wilderness.” Rabirus continued to stare at him, and under the scrutiny, Fimbrianus sighed and continued, less dismissively. “The last I heard from the centurion posted there, he claimed the Lusetani had summoned lemures against them.”
“Lemures?”
“Or something like them. Iberian spirits. I’ll—I’ll show you the letter, you’ll see what nonsense he talks. He called them ‘soul-drainers,’ said they make a man feel like he lacks the strength to stand . . .” Fimbrianus sucked his lower lip up under his teeth for a moment, making Rabirus suspect he credited these tales more than he let on. Denial had become a convenient excuse for not placing himself in jeopardy—all the more convenient when he also had the excuse of waiting for Rabirus to arrive and take over command. “More likely some horrible fog crept in around them and they all started hallucinating out of boredom! The Counei—they’re the local Iberians, along the coast from here to Olissippo—they told me they’d heard nothing of the sort. That it was quite impossible, in fact! It’s nonsense, I tell you, plain nonsense.” But his voice trailed off into uncertainty.
Rabirus had intended to do as Fimbrianus had done: hole up in Gades, refuse supplies to Sempronius’s efforts, starve the war effort as passively as he could manage. The new praetor of Maritima was a friend of his and had agreed to do what he could to slow Sempronius’s supply lines. Waiting games—that was how Rabirus liked to achieve his ends.
This, though—these rumors caught his attention. These lemures, or soul-drainers, or whatever they were, they sounded like something Pinarius Scaeva had spoken of. ‘They might be worth seeing.’
Swift and sudden, that thought grew into a compulsion. Rabirus went from feeling as though he might like to witness this to feeling that he must. Even if it took him into the wilderness, he had to see this foreign work—whether it was magic or trickery. Perhaps it would prove something he could turn against his opponents while keeping his own hands clean, as he had so nearly managed to do with Pinarius. A way to counter Sempronius, or to deal with the troublemaking tribune up in Toletum—who was, after all, brother to the meddlesome woman who had spoiled his efforts back in Aven. Or perhaps it would be nothing at all, as Fimbrianus said, and Rabirus could cut through the rumors and thus undermine the casus belli for the entire Iberian endeavor.
But of all that, Fimbrianus needed to know nothing, and so Rabirus turned his attention back to his meal.
* * *
Ebrus River, Central Iberia
By the Ides of Maius, Sempronius’s legions were well into the Iberian interior. Sempronius left a single tribune in Tarraco as an anchor, to pass messages to and from Aven, and went himself upriver toward Salduba.
The legions cutting their way through the provinces made for a considerable sight: fields of crimson fabric and shining iron armor, a river of men, flowing for miles at a time. As they marched, their standards bobbed encouragingly above them: For the Tenth, a horse rearing on its hind legs, looking as though he had fire in his mane and at his hooves, homage to their long-ago origin as a mounted auxiliary unit. For the Eighth, marching to rejoin their beleaguered vexillation in Toletum, the barking dog, testament to their history of serving as Aven’s protective guards. The Fourteenth’s standard displayed an upraised fist. Along the poles of each were hung the awards won in battle by generations past. And with them all, the eagles, the standard of all Aventan legions.
More than a standard, the eagles were a talisman of luck and glory. The men looked to them and took heart. To lose them was an almost-unsurvivable shame. Legions who lost their eagles could be disbanded—if any had survived the battle to begin with. The eagles stood for the legions’ honor, their fortitude, their devotion, and their piety, all wrapped together. The eagles marching with Sempronius’s legions were polished until they gleamed in the sunlight and had been blessed by Nedhena’s foremost Spirit mage before the legions had started south.
The plateaus of central Iberia were not without challenges, dotted with forests and cut with ravines. The legions had to adopt a new marching formation. Their lines were stretched out across miles, in places no more than four or six men across. A vulnerable way to march, and one which agitated Sempronius. The thinness of the lines kept him up at night and had him watching like a hawk during the day.
He strove to keep his anxiety from showing, but Felix picked up on it anyway, demonstrating the clever intuition that so easily disappeared beneath his irreverent demeanor. “You’re worried,” he said in a low voice, pulling his black horse up alongside of Sempronius’s dapple-gray stallion. He had sense enough not to bellow loud enough that the troops would hear.
“I am,” Sempronius admitted, in the same subdued tone. “Perhaps without reason. But this formation is a weak one.”
“How else would you have us march?”
The question was sincere, not flippant, and so it bothered Sempronius all the more that he had no ready answer. “There is no alternative, truly,” he said, with a shrug more casual than he felt. “The terrain dictates us at times. If we had a good Aventan road through this territory . . . but it may be many years before the region is secure enough for us to see that project through.” He gestured at the men just ahead of them, marching only four abreast. “When the lines are this thin, they are easier to break, easier to scatter. We have not drilled enough for these conditions. Worse, the tribunes and centurions are too far apart to give orders effectively. If anyone attacks, cohesion could break down. We’ll be little better than the brawlers we face.”
Felix’s face was set seriously. “So what do we do?”
“Wait,” Sempronius said. He did not say hope, for with each passing day, he was becoming more convinced that an attack would find them, sooner rather than later. If the rebels had any scouts in this territory, they would be fools if they missed the significance of how the Aventans were being forced to march. All it would take was one intrepid tribesman to repeat the information back to his chieftain, and the Aventans would be in for sport.
* * *
When it came, not long after the legions passed the outpost of Salduba, it hit hard and fast, and from both directions at once. The legions marched through a thick patch of evergreens, and though they took advantage of every spare foot, so that the prickling needles brushed against the armor of the men marching on the outsides of the column, they could still not march more than six abreast.
The tribesmen struck from left and right simultaneously. A hail of arrows and slung stones rained on the legionaries like a sudden rainstorm, and several men went down before anyone had realized what was happening to them. “Testudo!” Sempronius shouted, and to his gratification, the men immediately raised their shields, moving into the tortoise formation—so named because they used their shields to create a shell-like barrier around the entire legion. Sempronius swung down out of his saddle and under the shields of his lictors, the small contingent of personal guards he had by virtue of his praetorial office.
The tribesmen must have been waiting for quite some time. They had set themselves up in the higher elevations before the army had even begun to pass through this part of the forest, and they had waited patiently until they could strike at the middle of the seemingly endless line. ‘How did our scouts not realize—’
The tribesmen on the left flank were less organized than those on the right; he could see that in an instant. On the right, they advanced in a wedge formation—more sophisticated than Aventans generally expected out of supposed barbarians. On the left, they continued to fire arrows intermittently, but more were throwing stones from slings. A primitive weapon, perhaps, but a formidable one; a hard enough strike could dash a man’s brains out or break his arm. ‘Thank Mars and Bellona we march in full armor.’
The tortoise was an excellent defensive formation, but poor for fighting, and it would not hold forever. Sempronius stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled a short code. Several of the centurions picked up his signal and repeated it down the lines, and in response, the men adjusted their formation, splitting down the middle so that half faced out to the left, half out to the right. The men on the outer edges held their shields before them, while those in the middle stayed above. “Hold the lines!” Sempronius bellowed. “Hold!”
His men were well-disciplined. Even with the Iberians howling for their blood, rushing down from the hillsides, they held their lines, unshaking. When the first of the Iberians slammed into those outward shields, many of the leather-covered wooden barriers shuddered, but did not give way. The centurions knew their business; without any direction from Sempronius or the other commanders, their whistles called for methodical stabs of hundreds of short swords, perfectly in synchronization, up and down their lines. Iberian chaos crashed against stalwart Aventan discipline. Sempronius believed, with everything in his soul, that discipline would triumph—if it could last long enough to do so.
“Second line!” Sempronius yelled, “shields down!” The tribesmen were using fewer projectiles now, with their own men engaged in the action; hopefully the shields of those innermost would provide enough cover to protect them all. The second line needed to be ready to move forward. After a moment, he gave another short whistle, which the centurions dutifully echoed. At that signal, the first line of fighters on each side slid expertly back to the center, with the second line moving up to take their place.
This was ugly formation, and Sempronius knew it; they would tire quickly, rotating through the lines so fast. Legions typically deployed much deeper, so that a man might only fight for a few minutes out of an hour before cycl
ing back through the ranks. With their forces only three lines deep, they would scarce have chance to catch their breath. Worse, there might be places where weaker men were grouped together without stronger fighters to support them.
Still, the legions had a plethora of built-in advantages, and what tribesmen had dared to rush them were swiftly falling to the Aventan blades. Their curved weapons looked to be made of bronze, no match for Aventan shields or the sturdy iron short sword that every legionary could use as efficiently as his own arm. Nor did the tribesmen have much armor to stand up to a legionary’s scale-like plate and chains. But what the Iberians lacked in military technology, they made up for in numbers, falling upon the narrow strand of legionaries like massive waves upon a spit of sand.
At a shout and noise of clashing armor, Sempronius looked to his left, seeing with horror that part of the line was collapsing. Too many legionaries had taken wounding blows, or perhaps the sodden ground had given way beneath them, making them lose their so-crucial footing. “Lictors, part!” Sempronius shouted, hauling himself back up into the saddle. “Auxilia! On me!” The cavalry, a mix of those brought along from Truscum and local Lacetani picked up in the foothills, moved into formation behind him as he charged along the right side of the column, where part of the line had given way. “Ride them down!” he bellowed, and the cavalry eagerly complied. Sempronius’s horse plunged through the swarm of hollering tribesmen, kicking and crushing men beneath its hooves, and Sempronius lashed out with his sword. He felt a hot spurt of blood on his arm and knew he had made contact with someone, but there was no time to see what damage he had wreaked. He pivoted his steed back around, trampling another tribesman, and made another pass.
In this way, the cavalry cleared the assault on the weak point long enough for the foot soldiers to recover themselves and reform their lines. Sempronius could take no time to breathe before giving another call to the rest of the cavalry. As the centurions mustered the infantry back into a solid position, Sempronius wanted to make sure there were no other weak points along the lines. “On me!” he cried again, raising his sword so that it caught the sunlight through the trees, and the riders bellowed their understanding.