A columned temple stood in the courtyard of the Principia, and in it the cohort and century standards were ranged, with the bright silk of the cavalry pennants snapping in the stiff autumn wind. At the center of the standards stood the great gilded Eagle of the legion, perched on crossed thunderbolts with its silvered wings swept back as if to lift in flight. Its staff was thick with honors and bore a plaque where Correus read its name and number: LEGIO VIII AUGUSTA[.]{.smallcaps} There was a newly added honorific from the Emperor Vespasian: PIA FIDELIS. With a catch in his throat, Correus saluted the outspread wings. This was his legion, his Eagle, the start of a service for which he had truthfully told his mother he would have sold his soul.
In the Principia a bored optio informed them that the legate of the Eighth was up at the Emperor’s front line with the bulk of the legion, and he passed them on to the camp prefect, remarking that he’d be glad enough to see new centurions.
“They’ve been losing junior officers faster’n they can train ’em up there.”
“How delightful,” Flavius murmured, and Correus laughed. Very junior centurions like them were almost beneath the notice of a headquarters optio.
The camp prefect, a middle-aged centurion with close-cut but thick graying hair and the no-nonsense expression of a career officer, welcomed them somewhat more gently.
“I’m Centurion Probus,” he said. “And you’ll be…”
He matched their orders against a roster from among the clutter on his desk. “Ah, yes, Julianus and Julianus. Well, Mithras knows we can use you. I’ll have the optio show you to your quarters, and you might as well relax and enjoy them because you’ll be going out with the patrol in the morning to catch up to your troops.” He consulted the roster again. “Eighth and Ninth Cohorts. Good. That puts us damn near up to strength in those two at least. I don’t suppose any more were posted out with you?”
“No, sir,” Correus said. “Two of our class were posted to the Tenth Gemina and the Sixth Victrix, and a dozen more to the Twenty-second and the Fifth.”
“Frankly, Centurion,” Probus said with a faint grim smile, “I am not at the moment interested in any legion but the Eighth. Although the gods know those last two could use officers, too,” he added. He studied the roster again and then shoved it under a stack of requisition slips. “Damn! Well, the legate’s going to have to promote from the ranks whether he likes it or not. We can’t go on this short of officers.” He looked up to find them still standing at attention, faces correctly expressionless, but curiosity fairly radiating from them.
“Sorry,” he said brusquely. “Dismissed.”
“Well!” Correus said. They had stowed away Flavius’s kit in the officer’s quarters at the end of the Ninth Cohort’s sixth-century barracks, and were sorting through his own in the Eighth Cohort building. “It looks like we’ve walked right into it.”
“We asked for it, if you’ll recall,” Flavius said, stretching out on the bed while Correus shed his lorica and harness tunic and hung them on a T-shaped stand in the corner. “Damn it, Correus, what possessed you to ask for the same legion?”
“I didn’t,” Correus lied, folding his spare tunics into the clothes chest, his back to his brother. He had known this was coming. “I just asked for the Rhenus, same as you did. I suppose they thought we’d like it.” He closed the lid gently and turned to Flavius with a slightly fixed smile. “Frankly, I do like it. It’s less lonesome this way.”
Flavius sat up and gripped Correus by the forearm as he knelt to stow his shield under the bed. “I like it, too,” he said, catching Correus’s eyes with his own. “It isn’t that—”
He means it, Correus thought. Or at least he wants to. “It’s just that you don’t like being thought of as half of a pair, like matched ponies,” he said lightly. “No more do I, but that’ll wear off when we’ve been here awhile. Come on, let’s go and have a soak in the baths while we still can.”
* * *
They took their dinner in the officers’ mess – standard army fare of the sort best eaten quickly and not thought of – with Centurion Probus and such of the other legionary officers and auxiliary commanders as remained with the skeleton garrison at Argentoratum. They made up no more than one long table – Correus, Flavius, the commander of the Third Cohort (the garrison cohort) and his five junior centurions, a junior surgeon with the staff of Aesculapius on his belt buckle, a scattering of cavalry decurions, and another junior centurion, named Silvanus, of the Ninth Cohort, newly released from the hospital and heading back to the front lines in the morning.
Silvanus had a healing scar on his shield arm, thick hair the pale color of ripe barley, and light brown eyes flecked with amber. His skin, tanned bronze by a hotter sun than Germany’s, was startling against his hair, which was cut somewhat longer than the army training barracks at Rome had allowed. Correus, looking at him, decided with relief that apparently he was not expected to spend his entire career with his head mowed like a temple lawn.
Next to Silvanus sat a thin, sandy-haired youth in a civilian tunic, perhaps a year or two older than Correus, but still very young. His homely freckled face was eager and alert as he talked with Centurion Silvanus of the current campaign. Centurion Probus gave him a look of disgust as he took his own seat at the head of the table.
“Damn it, Paulinus, you’re not even supposed to be inside the camp, much less sponging at my officers’ mess.” A legionary with a wine flask moved down the table and the sandy-haired boy held his cup out. “Why, Prefect,” he said innocently, “you invited me to dine yourself, if you remember.”
“I invited you to dine in my quarters next week, not to come gathering secret information from my officers for that seditious journal you keep.”
“I think ‘seditious’ is a bit strong.” Paulinus appeared undeterred and applied himself to a plate of fish and cured olives. “I’m a historian. I deal in facts. And unlike my predecessors’ tomes, my History of Modern Rome will be written by a man who saw it, not by some self-serving retired magistrate with time on his hands and a pack of inaccurate old scrolls to steal from. I want to give my readers a true picture of our frontiers.” He picked up an olive, mottled black and brown, and regarded it dubiously. “And if I’m willing to poison myself at your appalling table to get it, you ought to be grateful.”
“Well, I’m not,” Probus said shortly. “Most generals don’t want your ‘facts’ going crosswise to their own reports, much less getting into the Germans’ hands. After that last ambush, the legate’s looking over his shoulder for spies and wood-elves every three paces as it is.”
“I keep my notes in Greek,” Paulinus said mildly. “I doubt that Nyall and his Germans would find much use for them.”
“I don’t care if they’re in Egyptian hieroglyphics, you’re not going to run tame in my camp.” Probus cracked open an egg and glared at his uninvited guest. “You may finish your dinner and then I want you out of here. Understood?”
Paulinus sighed reluctantly. “Very well. Would it make you any happier if I told you I was leaving Argentoratum in the morning?”
“Infinitely,” Centurion Probus said. “Go and annoy the garrison at Moguntiacum if you must.” He turned to Silvanus. “And as for you, Centurion Silvanus, you had no business letting him in here in the first place.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” Silvanus looked as repentant as possible. Unless it occurred to the prefect to forbid it directly, in the morning Silvanus was going to take Paulinus into the Agri Decumates. He turned to Flavius on his other side, and learning that he was posted to his own cohort, struck up a conversation with him. Meanwhile, Paulinus, whose curiosity appeared to be boundless, drew the young surgeon into a discussion of the best treatment for infected wounds.
“Rumor has it that the Germans poison their spears,” Paulinus said, sliding the topic carefully back to the current campaign. “Have you seen any evidence of it?”
“Nothing to which a good copper verdigris dressing doesn’t prove
an antidote,” the junior surgeon said with a trace of sarcasm. “If you want my opinion, that’s a tale in the wind – probably spread by a surgeon who didn’t like admitting he’d lost a patient.”
Paulinus chuckled and resumed his meal. Correus sat quietly, occasionally joining in Flavius’s conversation with Centurion Silvanus but mostly just watching, taking stock of his companions and his new legion, pondering the service that would be home to him for the better part of his life. If the “spies and wood-elves” didn’t get him, of course. That was always a possibility, but tonight, in the still heady excitement of his new commission, it seemed remote.
Most of the junior officers were young, of mixed races and accents; soldiers’ sons, most of them, many from the provinces, where their fathers had settled and married. They were all tall – the Centuriate had a height standard – but for the rest, they were blond and dark, Roman, Gaulish, and Egyptian, and they made their prayers as frequently to Mithras or Isis as to Jupiter Thunderer or Phoebus Apollo. But they had one thing in common that was a closer tie than blood: the look that marked them for soldiers – the look that was born in the training camps of the Centuriate. It was a look Correus had seen often enough in his father, and on the faces of Pertinax Aquila and Centurion Probus. He hadn’t before realized that by now it must mark him as well.
When they had eaten, Correus and Flavius strolled with Centurion Silvanus to escort Paulinus to the landward gate. The ground was wreathed in mist and the air was wet.
“There’s good hunting in these parts,” Silvanus said, “when we aren’t out hunting Germans instead. Did you bring your own mounts with you? If you didn’t, I warn you that what you’ll get assigned is what the cavalry doesn’t want, and they’re mostly enough to make you think someone had lopped the ears off a mule and tried to make him do.”
“My body servant is bringing them,” Flavius said easily, “at a somewhat slower pace than the army wanted from us. I’ve no desire to ruin my Nestor before I get him here, and he doesn’t think much of riverboats. We tried.”
Silvanus laughed. “Yes, my mount had to come by land also. They ship the cavalry horses by river in transports, but even in ships that are built special for ’em, it’s a nightmare. Is your body servant coming along also?” he inquired of Correus. “You’ll be glad of your own. There’s precious little that’s of much use in the slave markets out here.”
“Horse, yes; servant, no,” Correus said. “I find that I’m happier doing for myself,” he added, feeling it unnecessary to explain that he had flatly refused to buy a body servant. He had found the slave market a somewhat too pointed reminder of other days.
“My brother has a few egalitarian thoughts on the subject of slavery,” Flavius said, and Silvanus looked amused, remarking that for himself, he disliked polishing armor. Paulinus gave Correus an interested look, but he made no comment.
Feeling irritable at this talk, Correus parted from them at the gate while they were still making plans for the morning. He knew that Flavius was unable to resist the temptation to dig at him in that fashion and that he did not consciously mean him any harm, but it set his teeth on edge all the same. He decided to walk off his temper and turned down past the barracks rows toward the southern wall. It was full dark and the ramparts were illuminated at intervals by torchlight; he could just catch the red crests of the sentries as they passed from one circle of light to the next. A knife-sharp wind came up, bringing with it a cold, dank smell from the river. Correus wished he had brought his cloak and decided that he was too pigheaded to go to his quarters and get it.
He stalked on, past more barracks rows, parade ground and drill shed, armorer’s shop and the pottery works, where a stack of roof tiles lay on a wheeled wooden pallet. Farther still was an open-air marketplace, its stalls shrouded for the night; here, such vendors as the prefect approved were permitted to offer their wares to the garrison. It had a swept and regimented air to it and would probably prove far less interesting than the jumbled market square of the nearby civil colony.
Argentoratum felt empty. There was something odd about it that nagged at the back of Correus’s mind, but he could not pin it down. He turned into the broad cleared stretch along the river wall where the squat bulk of the granaries rose on his left, well out of firing range from enemy ships. An owl floated by on silent wings, intent on mice. Then it came to him. The Eagle. If the Eighth Legion was in the field, why was its Eagle standard still standing in the Temple of the Standards before the Principia? The Eagle – heart and soul of a legion – went with it always.
* * *
He was still wondering about that when they rode out the next morning to the Argentoratum Bridge. Their horses had not arrived, and he and Flavius had been given a pair of mounts from the cavalry barracks that bore out Silvanus’s prophecy all too well. Silvanus rode his own horse, a white gelding with a strain of Arab blood that showed in the bright, intelligent eyes and small, pricked-up ears. Correus, applying his heel to a dun nag whose father had apparently had his way with a cart horse, wished fervently for Antaeus, while Flavius was astride a hammerheaded hack with a mouth like an iron bar.
The sandy-haired historian, Lucius Paulinus, rode beside them, along with a man who was apparently his body servant. They were muffled in gray, army-issue cloaks, and Silvanus had provided them legionary helmets apparently acquired in some devious fashion.
“Here, put these on,” he said, laughing. “I’ve squared it with the sentries on the bridge, but you never know when Probus’ll take it in his mind to trot by. He’ll have my head if he finds out I have anything to do with you.”
Paulinus, who practically disappeared into his helmet, could not have been mistaken for a soldier at a distance of less than a hundred paces, but his servant, settling the helmet on his head and twisting his cloak into a military fold, had the look of the legions about him. The set of his shoulders fairly screamed of the drill field.
They trotted across the wooden planks of Argentoratum Bridge, which seemed to float in midair above the mist-shrouded river, and Correus saw Silvanus slip something into the hand of the sentry as they passed by onto the log road on the other side. “Keep tucked in yet awhile,” he said to Paulinus, a look of mischief on his tanned face. “Once we’re clear of the first patrol, you can take that thing off. You look like a kid with a pot on his head.”
“I couldn’t say,” Paulinus replied austerely. “I have never put a pot on my head.”
“What, never as a youngster, to play soldier?”
“I am a writer,” Paulinus said, and Correus saw that his mouth was twitching with amusement under the out-sized helmet. “Primarily a historian, and an occasional poet. When I’m feeling nasty I write a satire. If I want someone hacked to pieces with a sword, I ask Tullius to do it.”
His attendant, a barrel-chested man with arms like an ape, nodded solemnly as an expression of pure devotion played across his broad features.
“He sounds a most useful sort of slave to possess,” Flavius said.
Paulinus chuckled. “Tullius is no slave. He followed the Eagles himself once and took up with me quite voluntarily. But as to his usefulness, I grant you I have little fear of robbers in the streets at night.”
The ground was rocky now, dotted with tree stumps, and the log road was too narrow to ride all abreast. Flavius and Silvanus trotted on ahead, with Correus and Lucius Paulinus behind, leaving Tullius to bring up the rear with Centurion Silvanus’s servant. The road was of oak planking laid over brushwood and pegged to the ground; a steep drainage ditch to either side kept it reasonably dry.
“Half this accursed country is mountains and the other half’s bog,” Silvanus grumbled. “The legate’s staff is crawling with engineers. He consults ’em like oracles before we move a foot. I’ve dug enough drainage ditch since I’ve been out here to circle the Capitoline.”
“That reminds me,” Correus said to Paulinus. “Why are the Eagle and the cohort standards in Argentoratum if the legion’s in
the field?”
“Noticed that, did you? Well, you see we’re not at war out here, not officially. The legate’s playing at cat-and-mouse with Nyall, who’s the king or lord high what-have-you of the strongest German tribe in these parts. The legate doesn’t want it to come to a pitched battle if he can help it, not while he’s still undermanned. What he wants is for Nyall to have a nice long think and come to terms. So he leaves the Eagle at home and sets out as if he’s engineering; but he takes every man he’s got available. Nyall knows what an Eagle is, all right – the northern tribes have still got the three they took from Varus in Augustus’s reign. And Calpurnius Rufinus – that’s our legate – figures that if Nyall doesn’t see the Eagle he’ll figure this isn’t the whole army marching about and be so impressed that he’ll come bounding in hung all about with green branches and surrender to us.”
There was a note of blatant skepticism in Paulinus’s voice. “I take it you don’t think he’ll surrender,” Correus said.
“I am not, praise Athena, a general. But no, I don’t think so. I think Rufinus is underestimating Nyall. I’m not so sure who’s the cat and who’s the mouse.”
“What’s he like? Nyall, I mean.”
“I’ve never met him face to face, and I’d give quite a lot to. He’s from the Semnones, one of the tribes of the Suevi, whose lands are just outside the Agri Decumates. He doesn’t fancy having Rome’s soldiers on his border, so he’s worked up the local tribes to resist, and he’s put more sense of unity in them than anyone else ever has. The German’s a funny beast. They live to fight, and they don’t seem to care much who they fight. When they’re at peace with us, they fight each other, just for something to do, apparently. This Nyall seems to have got them into a fairly cohesive unit, and they have the advantage of knowing the land. They practically rise up out of the bog under your feet – that’s what Probus meant by wood-elves. We may not be at war, but we’re mounting double patrols, and often enough the Germans manage to pick off a man or two, anyway.”
The Centurions Page 10