The Sea of Grass

by Gilbert M. Stack

  “The men succeeded in escaping, but it appears now that letting them go was part of the savages’ plan. They have a new leader and he’s a wily devil. He let the fort send out reinforcements then revealed he had about a thousand more savages in his army. Even then, the phalanx could have handled the situation without too much trouble, but this Teetonka is also a powerful shaman and he broke our ranks with lightning—opening the way for his savages to swarm the legion.”

  He let that comment sit with them a moment before continuing. “It got bad then, but they still couldn’t break us. We killed three or maybe four savages for every legionnaire they pulled down and in the end we routed them. The savages fled completely broken.”

  Evorik grunted in approval and slammed the table with his open palm.

  “The threat is completely ended?” Marcus prompted.

  “The remnants have gone back to their more typical raiding,” Lucanus hedged. “In the aftermath of the battle, the Great Tribune ordered the other cohort stationed at Fort Prime to reinforce the legion at Fort Segundus until more permanent reinforcements arrive. These greens traveling with you are a good chunk of the new men. So we advise caravans to be cautious on the trail, but no, the major threat is definitely ended.”

  “That is good!” Evorik proclaimed with another open-palmed smack of the table. “I have always said that your legionnaires are tough men for infantry—not as dangerous as proper Gota cavalry, but tough men just the same.”

  Lucanus nodded politely while Marcus decided not to counter the man’s argument with cold hard legion logic. Instead he kept the conversation on the topic that really mattered. “And the caravans are totally back to normal?”

  The Tribune shrugged. “As normal as they get. The ones from the south are longer than we usually get while the ones from the north have become more erratic.”

  “What precisely does that mean?” Marcus asked.

  “It’s the difference between the way things are done in the provinces of Aquila and the way they are done in the rest of the world,” Lucanus explained. “Caravans leave Aquilan territory quite regularly, but in the north the Gente don’t think that way. So sometimes you get two or three coming south in a week, and sometimes you go two or three weeks without seeing any.”

  Marcus did not like the sound of this. “And it’s been two or three weeks since anyone has come south?”

  Lucanus nodded.

  “You should not look so worried,” Evorik told Marcus. “The Tribune, here, is quite correct. The Gente—they are shit! All that they worry about is the last time they bathed and which perfume shall they lather themselves in today.”

  Now that Marcus thought about it, Alberto and the other Gente men did smell quite a bit like expensive whores.

  “I would feel better,” Marcus admitted, “if we had fresh news of the trail ahead of us. It never hurts to know what your enemies have been up to. When was the last time you had a report from Fort Segundus?”

  “The reports come with each caravan,” Lucanus explained. “I will send one with Master Burkhard when you leave in the morning. Again it is nothing to be concerned about.”

  Marcus forced himself to sit back in his chair and relax. No matter how little he liked what he was hearing, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it—at least not until he could talk to young Seneca.

  Day Five

  An Issue of Purity

  “Did you enjoy your evening last night, Magus?” Marcus asked, promoting the young wizard with friendly politeness.

  “What?” the young wizard asked, spinning around in surprise. “Oh, it’s you, Tribune.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “I don’t know how you keep catching me by surprise. It’s not supposed to be so easy to sneak up on a magus—even a magus-in-training such as myself.”

  Marcus couldn’t help smiling. “My apologies, Magus, I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just curious if you’d enjoyed the dinner party last night.”

  They’d gotten their earliest start yet this morning, rolling out of Fort Prime just as the sun had begun to peak over the horizon. Marcus gave the credit to Lucanus’ legionnaires rather than to Caravan Master Burkhard. The legionnaires had made certain that everyone was up and ready an hour before dawn and had not accepted any excuses. As a result, everyone was tired. The stopover in Fort Prime had been a welcome break from the monotony of the trail but it had not been much of a rest.

  Exhaustion, however, didn’t stop Seneca from bubbling with enthusiasm at the mention of the dinner party. “I did, indeed! Magus Jocasta is an impressive—not to mention beautiful—woman.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Marcus agreed. He wondered if the young man’s little bout of puppy love had been as obvious to the seasoned Magus as it was to everyone else. He’d followed the woman around all evening and seemed surprised when it had been pointed out to him that it was time to get some sleep as the caravan would be leaving at dawn. All the way back to the wagons the young man had waxed eloquently about the older woman’s abilities and accomplishments, with frequent reminders of her physical beauty thrown in between the other compliments.

  Marcus decided to come to the point of his visit. “I wish to plunder your magical knowledge, if you can spare me a little of your time this evening.”

  Seneca brightened with excitement. “Of course, Tribune, how may the Collegium Magicae be of service to you?”

  “I’m concerned about the trail ahead,” Marcus explained. “I don’t know how much you heard about this in Fort Prime, but there has been rather a lot of trouble with the savages in recent months and—”

  “Oh, yes, Magus Jocasta told me all about it,” Seneca gushed. “The legion at Fort Segundus really kicked their scrawny posteriors. Despite being greatly outnumbered, they broke the backs of the attacking raiders and sent them scurrying back across the plains.”

  It was that term raider that was causing Marcus his concern. Everything he’d been able to learn about the savages suggested that fighting a set piece battle against the legion was out of character for them. They were, apparently, masters of the hit and run attack—darting in on their fast little horses, firing off a flight of arrows, and racing away again before coming back from another direction to start their attack anew. Charging in to fight hand to hand was something they did after a foe had been fatally weakened. So Marcus wondered, had the legion really broken them, or had their leader, Teetonka, been smart enough to realize that he had erred in his judgment and called off the attack before he lost more men. Lucanus was certainly convinced that the legion had crushed all opposition, but it troubled Marcus tremendously that no caravan had come south in the past three weeks. That strongly suggested that a significant force of savages was still in the area.

  “I’m wondering if you have advanced sufficiently in your training to have been taught the fine art of farseeing?” Marcus asked him.

  “Oh, yes!” Seneca assured him. “I’m actually quite adept at the procedures. It’s an important skill and one of the basic competencies required to graduate from the collegium.”

  “Excellent! I want you to take a look at the trail between here and Fort Segundus to see if you can find any caravans traveling toward us.” He would also like the young man to look for savages, but they would presumably be harder to find so he started with the more straightforward task.

  Seneca’s enthusiasm drained away. “All the way to Fort Segundus?”

  “Is that too far?”

  “Maybe, I’ve never tried something far away, but well, I could try. When did you want me to do this?”

  “Now.”

  “Right now?”

  “It needs to be done before nightfall, doesn’t it?” Marcus asked.

  “Well, yes, but—I don’t have the usual tools to help me with such a spell. I know it looks simple to outsiders, but it really is a complex working of energies.”

  Marcus didn’t have any idea how farseeing worked, but it was a truism among officers of the legion that magi always made thei
r spells sound much more difficult to cast than they really were. “I’ve seen a magus cast a farseeing in a cup of canteen water,” he lied. “Can you really not pull something together to give us a look down the trail?”

  Seneca thought for a moment. “I guess I can try. I need a bowl of pure metal. We used gold in the collegium, but silver or even copper are supposed to work nearly as well.”

  Marcus had anticipated this need and pulled out a silver cup his first sweetheart had given him when he left to join the legion. Her parents had married her to a Senator more than twice her age the next year, but he’d kept the cup as a memento of that first great love. He offered it to Seneca for the spell. “Will this do?”

  Seneca examined the cup carefully, glancing up at Marcus when he found the initials M and V beneath the cup. He probably thought they stood for Marcus Venandus, but they were really for Marcus and Vesta. She’d been just careful enough not to want to create any incriminating evidence of their love in case their plans to marry each other didn’t work out.

  “How pure is the silver?” the young would-be magus asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus conceded, “but I think it’s pretty pure.”

  Seneca shrugged. “Let’s give it a try. I’ll also need a handful of salt and a few drops of oil.”

  “I can get them,” Marcus told him, but the younger man had already risen.

  “No need, I have a few supplies in my baggage.”

  He went to the wagon carrying his goods and climbed inside, appearing a few minutes later with a flask and a pouch. “So to be clear, you want me to summon a spirit to show me the trail ahead.”

  “A bird’s eye view, if you can,” Marcus told him. “Fly the bird forward and look for anything that isn’t long blades of grass.”

  “That sounds simple enough,” Seneca agreed. He sat down cross-legged and placed the cup in front of him, then looked up in alarm. “I forgot the water.”

  Marcus chuckled and pulled a water bag off the side of the wagon. “Will this do?”

  “We should probably boil the water first to purify it, but we’re running out of daylight so I guess it will have to do.”

  The student’s comments reinforced Marcus’ opinion that much of what wizards insisted upon was purely for show. He watched Seneca pull a handful of salt out of the pouch and then fling it into the air while he mumbled a few archaic-sounding words.

  “What did you do that for?” Marcus asked.

  The young man glanced reproachfully at him. “You do know that I am not permitted to reveal secrets of magery to the uninitiated, don’t you?”

  “That’s not a secret of magery,” Marcus countered. “You just threw salt in the air.”

  “It is so a secret,” the student magus protested.

  Marcus laughed. “What you really mean is that no one has told you why you throw the salt. You just know it’s part of the ceremony.”

  Seneca squared his shoulders. “For your information, salt is a purifying agent. When I scatter it about me, the salt draws remnant magic out of the air, making it easier to cast my spell without the possibility of contamination.”

  “Interesting,” Marcus mused. “Could you use it to disrupt a spell? Throw salt at a caster to suck his magic away?”

  “No, salt is not that strong. It’s just—wait a minute! I told you I can’t talk about this.”

  Marcus suppressed a smile. “My lips are sealed.”

  Seneca pointed a finger at him. “No more questions! Agreed?”

  “No more questions about the process at least.”

  “Good! Now be quiet so I can concentrate.”

  The young would-be magus bent over the cup and said a few words. It almost looked like he was praying. Then he filled the cup from the water bag, picked up his flask of oil and dripped a single drop onto the surface of the water.

  “Now all I have to do is infuse my power in the drop of oil and…”

  Marcus leaned closer, wondering if he would be able to see anything in the water.

  A cloud of steam erupted from the silver cup, hitting both Seneca and Marcus in the face and blowing them over backward as if they’d been hit by a very strong wind.

  A flash of pain flared momentarily on Marcus’ face leaving behind only an annoying tingling feeling when it was gone.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Seneca rolled onto his hands and knees, his face looking sunburnt after the explosion of steam. “I don’t know. I thought I did everything right. I-I don’t know why things keep going wrong. Maybe the cup wasn’t pure enough or—I just don’t know.”

  Marcus placed his hands firmly on the young man’s shoulders. “Seneca, it’s all right. No one was harmed. You tried to help me and it didn’t work out. That’s all that happened.”

  “I just don’t understand why I can’t get it right!”

  Tears started to well in the young man’s eyes and Marcus did not want to deal with a crying young magus. “Just wait a minute!” he said. “Think it through with me. You were trying to do a spell in the field without your proper equipment. This was not a classroom exercise. Of course it was more difficult. But we can learn from our mistakes, can’t we? It’s not all bad if we learn something, right?”

  Seneca began to calm down. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Of course, it does,” Marcus told him. “Now think about what you did tonight and see if you can figure out anything we could do better if we decide to repeat this experiment tomorrow night.”

  “Repeat it tomorrow?” Seneca asked as if he couldn’t believe Marcus had said the words. “You’d trust me to try this again?”

  “Of course, I would—as long as you think you know how to make it work next time.”

  Marcus bent down and recovered the cup. He turned it over in his hands, examining it for damage. “Good, I was worried that little explosion might have broken it.”

  Seneca’s eyes grew wide. “That’s not just a cup is it? I thought you had it engraved with your initials in case someone tried to steal it from you, but that’s not how you got it, is it?”

  “No, it was a gift,” Marcus told him.

  “From someone who thinks you’re very special, right?”

  Marcus nodded. “Yes, that’s right.” There was no way he was going to tell this boy it came from his first love.

  Seneca’s shoulders drooped. “That’s what went wrong.”

  “I don’t understand,” Marcus admitted.

  “I thought it was just a cup, but whoever gave you that must have truly loved you. Was it your mother? Love is a form of magic all its own and it can interfere with a spell—especially if you’re not prepared for it.”

  “Yes, this was a gift of love,” Marcus confirmed. He was irrationally annoyed with himself for not having known this cup would disrupt the farseeing.

  “That’s what went wrong,” Seneca said again.

  Marcus forced himself to put on a pleased expression. “You see, already we’re making progress. You didn’t do things wrong you just didn’t have all the necessary facts. Now eat something and get some sleep. Dawn comes early on the Sea of Grass.”

  Day Six

  Armor Up

  The wind began to pick up from the typical arid breeze that chaffed the skin but caused few other problems, to a gusty, dust kicking, annoyance which stung the eyes and set Marcus’ teeth on edge. The direction of the wind had changed as well, no longer blowing primarily from the north but steadily from the northeast, precisely the direction that the caravan was traveling.

  The Gente merchants in their caravan wrapped brightly colored silk kerchiefs around their faces to protect their noses and mouths from the assault of grit. Lord Evorik, his wives and his twenty Gota horsemen wrapped long silk scarves around their faces—although why they were wearing scarves in this weather Marcus could not understand. Whatever the reason, the scarves provided better protection than the kerchiefs and Marcus devoutly wished that he owned one. Lacking an article of cloth des
igned for the purpose, he took out his oldest tunic and cut four strips of protection from it, handing the extras to Severus, Calidus and the driver, Kuno.

  The cloth helped, but it didn’t calm the sense of uneasiness growing inside Marcus. He found himself straying far off to the side of the caravan where he could look forward and backward along its length, except the wind had picked up so much dust that he could only see maybe twenty or twenty-five wagons ahead and behind—the worst such visibility they had endured since they had begun this journey.

  When he returned to his own wagon he found Severus and Calidus both waiting for him. “Well?” the Black Vigil asked.

  “Well what?”

  “You’re acting like you think we’re in danger,” Severus told him.

  “I am, aren’t I?” Marcus told him. He looked up and down the line again. He was a man who trusted his intuition, but he had never had the second sight. What was it about this storm that was making him so uncomfortable and why had his skin started to prickle the moment the wind had shifted direction?

  “You’re thinking about the fact that we’ve all three been told by our different sources that the savages like to attack out of the dust,” Severus told him.

  Marcus nodded. “That and the fact that their shamans are adept at minor weather magic—mostly building winds to cover their movements.”

  “So why are you hesitating?” Severus asked. “Are you afraid of looking foolish if you’re wrong?”

  Marcus shrugged. The idea sounded preposterous to him. “Armor up—I’d always rather look foolish than be dead.”

  Calidus smiled. “You can always call it a drill, Tribune.” He climbed into the wagon and started handing down pieces of armor: breastplates, grieves, and helmets. With the ease of long practice, each man slipped into his gear without falling behind the slowly moving wagon. When they were armored, Calidus handed down their swords and pilum before finally giving them the massive shields. Then he hopped down beside them ready for action.