Foreign Legions

by David Drake

  The rock opened into a tunnel ten feet in diameter; the walls were of glowing blue ice. A Commander waited behind a waist-high screen of the same translucent blue, guarded by a pair of armored apes wearing metal gloves with knives welded onto the knuckles. Those were good weapons for the tunnel's close quarters.

  Three-Spire stood at the Commander's side. The bastard sure did get around.

  The barbs from the village walked into the tunnel. There was another click, click, click-clickclick, and the opening fused to solid rock again.

  Glabrio turned to his centurion, his face white. The dagger trembled in his hand. He wasn't worried by flying chariots or the way the metal ships climbed through the air, but this was new.

  It was new to Froggie too, but he was a centurion. He couldn't let anything show on his face, or his boys might go off in a panic that got some of them killed.

  He motioned to Glabrio and backed out of sight of the outcrop before turning to start down the trail again. He heard the muted tunk of the dagger going home in its sheath; then Glabrio whispered, "Aren't we gonna follow 'em when they leave, Top?"

  "Hercules, we know where they're going back to, don't we?" Froggie said. "And if they didn't, that'd be two fewer to take care of when the time comes. Not that I'd mind the extra work in this case."

  The blue glow hadn't been real bright, but it was enough to leave Froggie just better than stone blind on the starlit trail. He'd like to have hurried, though he didn't suppose it mattered. However long the barbs stayed inside the tunnel, they weren't going to see well enough to run up the Romans' back when they got out.

  "The thing I don't figure . . . " Glabrio said—and if there was only one thing, he was doing better than Froggie— " . . . is what the Commander's doing there? Does he have some kinda plan?"

  "Your people were farmers, weren't they, Glabrio?" Froggie said. As his sight came back, he was stepping up the pace. His left foot flicked a spark off into the night.

  "Huh?" Glabrio said. "Yeah, wheat and a garden, the usual. So what?"

  "We were shepherds," Froggie said. "Now, if you're not used to them, all sheep look alike—but they don't all act the same way. You learn to tell them apart by the way they stand, by the way one's left ear curls back—that sort of thing."

  "Yeah?" said Glabrio.

  "So the guy in a blue suit we just saw was standing straight, not hip-shot, and when he called the barbs inside he tapped his left fingertips into the other palm," Froggie said. "He was a Commander, son, but he wasn't the guy who's supposed to be in command of us."

  * * *

  The sun had just come over the horizon, and the birds that roosted in treetops at night were lifting into the sky. They flew on sheets of skin rippling along either side of their snake-slim bodies, more like flounders swimming through the air than the birds Froggie'd grown up with.

  These would fly to the sea three days march to westward. They'd gorge on the jellyfish swarming in sheltered waters between the mainland and the chain of offshore islands, then fly back. The birds were free to go anywhere they pleased—and it pleased them to go the same place every day.

  Glabrio was sleeping but Froggie stood at the fort's west gate, facing Kascanschi. He thought about the birds and all the similar birds he'd seen in scores of places, and he tried to imagine his life if he'd never been sold to the Guild. Maybe for him there wouldn't have been any difference between being a freeborn Roman citizen and a Guild slave . . . but he knew he hated his Commanders as he'd never hated a Roman general, not even that idiot Crassus who put him here.

  The city gates creaked open. Local women shoved the sagging panels outward, supervised by one of the squad of axemen who'd spent the night in the gatehouse.

  The guard noticed Froggie. He balanced his long-hafted axe on the fingers of one hand, then did a complicated series of sweeps that involved him stepping forward and back through the spinning weapon. His eyes remained locked with the centurion's.

  One of the girls chirruped in fear as steel flicked toward and past her. Given the blade's weight and edge, the axe would've taken her arm off if she'd lurched in the wrong direction as she stepped back from the gate. Froggie was willing to bet that the axeman wouldn't have let that prevent him from finishing with the flourish that brought his weapon to rest precisely as it had been at the start.

  The village women were lined up to go to the fields now that the gate was open, but today Slats and his guards were ahead of them. The administrator chirped an order through his lavaliere. His four bearers left the group of girls at the fort and lifted him in his palanquin. Slats sat bolt upright with both sets of arms crossed behind his back, wearing what Froggie was coming to recognize as a sour expression on his pointed face.

  Froggie nodded. He didn't especially want to talk to Slats, but he wasn't surprised when the palanquin came to a stop beside him.

  "No more warehouse inventory to take, Slats?" Froggie asked. "Can we head home now?"

  "Of course not, Centurion Froggie," Slats said severely. "I am to remain here in charge of the district even after the planet is classed as pacified and you warriors are dispatched to another location."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," Froggie said. He'd miss the bug now that he'd gotten to know him on this detached duty; but what Froggie really regretted was that he and the boys wouldn't be leaving here until the place was officially pacified.

  Froggie suspected pacification was a long way off. He just hoped the Third of the Fourth wouldn't be massacred to prove he was right.

  "I am going into the fields to watch the work," Slats said. "The crops being harvested are less by one half than they should be."

  The palanquin lurched as the bearers set it down without orders. They'd apparently decided that if their cargo was going to stay in one place and talk, they didn't need to hold his weight on their shoulders. Froggie braced Slats with a hand to keep him from tumbling out on his face.

  "They're eating meat, remember?" Froggie said. "It makes them perkier."

  The women from the town were trudging out to the fields, moving in pairs and small groups the way it always happens, even in a flock of sheep. Queenie, striding with the assured direction of a thrown javelin, entered a clot of a dozen local girls and brought them to a halt. She didn't look around as she talked, but her listeners turned and stared straight at Froggie. It was like walking by a fishmonger's stall, all eyes and gaping mouths. He hoped the barb axemen weren't watching.

  "Anyway," he continued to Slats, "two days isn't much time to decide what's a normal amount of work."

  "Do I tell you how to use your sword, warrior?" Slats said, his tone the first hint Froggie'd gotten that the bug was capable of an emotion other than fear. "Do not tell me how to assess labor against output; this is what I do. I tell you the crops entering Kascanschi these past two days are only half what they should be, based on the surplus earmarked for transport to the royal capital immediately before the battle."

  "That's 'cause half the women have been put to slicing the tops of kiro trees out in the forest, buddy," Laena said. Slats chirped and jumped against the back of his palanquin in surprise at being addressed by a man he'd thought of as furniture.

  Froggie was surprised too. Laena was part of the administrator's guard section today, but while Slats talked he'd been taking it easy with "Glycera" same as the other troopers and girls were. The last thing you'd expect from Laena was for him to volunteer a comment about farm output.

  "Yeah," Laena continued. He didn't notice or didn't care that he'd scared Slats into an early molt. "My girl Glycera says that since this new lot come in, they've put half the workers to cutting the tops, that's where they fruit, of the kiro trees. The sap bleeds out and hardens, and the seeds don't ripen the way they ought to."

  "Dis!" Froggie said. "What's good does that do?"

  "Not a bit, the girls say," said Laena. "The guys with axes tell them they'll carry the heads away in a couple weeks, but none of the girls can see why. It just makes a black gun
k."

  Slats patted his middle arms together. "I will examine the kiro trees," he said, his eyes focused on a point in space. "Perhaps they provide a valuable product which the survey informing my briefing cube failed to note. But if they do not—"

  The administrator clasped his hands, upper left with middle right and vice versa, in a gesture of emphasis.

  "—then I will put a stop to this diversion of effort. I am the Guild administrator for this district!"

  "Our friends with the axes might have something to say about that," Froggie said quietly.

  "Then you and your warriors will remove them, Centurion Froggie!" Slats said. "It is your duty!"

  "Yeah," said Froggie. "Though in this case, it'd probably be a pleasure as well."

  * * *

  The native women had been drifting back from the fields for some while before Froggie saw Slats and his troopers returning. The administrator took his job seriously, which Froggie generally would've been glad of.

  The fort was small—as it had to be for a single century to defend it—but it was a clean, professional piece of work. There were gates in all four walls and fighting towers kitty-corner on the northwest and southeast angles. The walls were eight feet high, and the earth-filled hurdles were actually more difficult to bore through than stone because gravity would fill the holes between pick-strokes.

  "We don't have a proper ditch around it, Top," said Glabrio, beside Froggie and leaning against the baffle protecting the north gate.

  "It'd get in the way," Froggie said. "Besides, with maybe three thousand barbs in the town, how long d'ye think a ditch would slow them down? Dis, they could take the thatching off a few houses and fill any ditch sixty men could dig."

  Glabrio frowned, but he didn't argue the point. He was tense because he knew things were about to happen and he couldn't tell for sure how it was going to turn out.

  Froggie sighed. He couldn't tell either.

  The bearers carried Slats to where Froggie was waiting. Slats grabbed the sides of the palanquin and chirped an order so that he could seem to be telling the girls what to do this time. They set him down.

  As the administrator got out, one of the girls stroked his shoulder the way you'd polish a nice piece of pottery. He hopped away sideways; all the bearers giggled.

  "Come on inside here, Slats," Froggie said. "I'll show you the way we've been carrying out the Commander's orders to keep busy."

  Slats looked at his palanquin. He could walk fine, so it was just a status thing that he wanted to be carried.

  "Come on, Slats," Froggie repeated gently. "There's not room enough to turn that travelling couch between the gate baffle and the main wall anyway."

  He reached out his hand, but Slats was already scuttling down the open-topped passage. The gate looked crude, but the leaf pivoted on a bearing of hollowed stone. Everywhere workmanship would affect function, the job had been accomplished to the highest standards.

  "I am very angry, Centurion Froggie," Slats said. "What Warrior Laena said was true: half of the labor force is wasting its efforts on mutilating kiro trees. This sabotage of Kascanschi's output is as pointless as it is deliberate."

  "Step over here by the wall, Slats," Froggie said. Somebody—meaning somebody with an axe—on the city gates could see down into some of the fort's interior; that was the disadvantage of having had to build so near to the city. Froggie could've taken the administrator into the timber-roofed barracks, but the light was better if they stood close to the wall nearest the town.

  Froggie brought an oval tube the length of a man's middle finger out of his wallet. There were indentations at several places on the surface, perhaps intended for finger pressure.

  "What?" said Slats in amazement. He snatched the gadget. Froggie had to tug him back or he'd have stepped into plain view with it. "Where did you find this?"

  "The head of the guys with axes had it," Froggie explained. "The feathers're dyed, by the way. His girlfriend slipped it to Queenie. Only girlfriend isn't exactly the right word, because I guess she'd rather he was dead and a long time dying."

  "This is the key to a dimensional portal!" Slats said. "There's nothing on this planet that would justify the cost of constructing a portal! Even ordinary stardrive is a marginal proposition for the products available here."

  "If it turns solid rock into a hole with blue ice around it," Froggie said, "then somebody disagrees with you about it being worthwhile to put one here."

  He reached for the key. The administrator kept hold of it and said, "This is incredible! I must take this—"

  "Nowhere," Froggie said, closing his fist around the little tube despite Slats' attempt to retain it. "The girl has got to get it back before her master finds it's missing. Whatever else happened, she'd be chopped for sure. You coming back late pushed the time more than I'd have chosen to do."

  "This is more important than one—" Slats said.

  Froggie tapped the bug's mouth, not the lavaliere, with his index finger. "No," he said, "it isn't. I've got nothing against killing barbs, but I'm not going to have somebody else kill 'em because I didn't do what I promised. Understood?"

  "Understood, Centurion Froggie," Slats said in a tiny voice. "I must go to my room, now. This is very important."

  "Yeah," said Froggie, "I thought it might be."

  Queenie waited nearby, tense and silent. When Froggie nodded to her, she snatched the key and slipped it beneath her kilt before scurrying out of the fort. Froggie smiled faintly.

  "Do you have any idea what this is all about, Slats?" he asked as he followed the administrator out of the fort. Slats didn't bother with status and the palanquin in his haste to get back to his room in the temple.

  "I do not!" he said. "It is inconceivable, Centurion Froggie!"

  Froggie sighed again. "I kinda thought that too," he said.

  * * *

  During previous nights a fire on the central slate hearth illuminated the temple's interior adequately. Tonight the space was full of troopers: sharpening weapons, polishing armor, and talking in hushed voices about the future. Because so many bodies blocked the light, Froggie'd had a fatigue detail string the nut-oil lanterns they'd found in a storage room on the sixth level. The shades were rinds of something like a beet, pierced with fanciful shapes.

  The lamplight was creamy, but it waked sword-edges into sparkles like fangs winking in the night.

  Slats came down the stairs, eyeing the assembled troopers warily. Froggie broke off his conversation with Verruca about the guard roster and went to meet the administrator.

  "Are you expecting trouble, Centurion Froggie?" Slats whispered, twitching one of his middle limbs to indicate the soldiers. The courtyard would've held at least five hundred worshippers, but men in armor filled the space in a way that civilians could not have done.

  "Not anything special, Slats," Froggie said. "The men're getting a break tonight except for the guards. A lot of them thought it'd be a good time to put their equipment in order."

  Slats moved his head in tiny jerks, looking across the array of bronze and iron. "You had them busy on other duties before?" he asked.

  "Yeah," said Froggie. "I did."

  "I have been talking to the Commander," Slats said. He held up the little wand that he'd said could summon help. "Trying to talk with him, that is."

  "You have?" Froggie said. "Dis, if whoever's behind Three-Spire gets wind of what we've found here, they'll come for us sure. And I sure don't believe the Commander's going to keep anything private. We're going to have to head back to Harbor at first light!"

  "We can't do that," the administrator said. "Our orders are to remain here until recalled. In any case, I doubt that the Commander will even remember that we talked. He seemed disconnected. By the end of the conversation he was almost comatose."