“I want ephedron powder and a verdigris dressing,” Labienus said to the orderly. “And a half-dose of opium. I’m going to have to stitch this.”
Correus roused himself at that. “He hit his head,” he said, his own head propped wearily against the wall. “He was out off and on most of the way back.”
The surgeon ran his hand through Flavius’s hair and found the bruised spot at the back. He pulled Flavius’s eyelids up and looked closely. “Damnation. No opium then. I’m afraid you’ll just have to grit your teeth, son.”
Two oil lamps hung from iron arms that swiveled about a central pole, and Labienus fiddled with them for a moment and then sent the orderly for more light. “I can manage well enough here,” he said to the junior sturgeon as the orderly set up another lamp stand. “Go and see why the centurion over there is bleeding on my floor.”
“How is he?” Correus whispered as the junior surgeon, whose name was Lucanus, tugged his boot off gently and began to slit his trousers up the inner seam. At his feet, blood was soaking into the wood of the floor.
“He’ll do all right,” Lucanus said, “but it’s a good thing you got him in as quick as you did. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
Correus sighed with relief, thinking of the diverging trails in the snow, and then winced as Lucanus pulled the trouser leg back from the inner thigh. The boar’s tusk had slashed along the fleshy part, leaving a four-inch cut, and strands of wool were stuck to the edges.
“You’ll do all right, too,” Lucanus said, inspecting it. “Messy but not serious. Another four inches, though, and you’d never be anyone’s dad.”
“Comforting,” Correus said. “Odd, I didn’t know I’d been gored.”
“Wounds are like that sometimes,” Lucanus said. “They don’t start to hurt till the shock wears off. Up with you on the other table and I’ll take care of it.”
Correus pulled himself off the bench and, lifting himself with his arms, sat on the table edge. He lay back, feeling as if a hot iron had been laid along his thigh. “I’m noticing it,” he said with gritted teeth as Lucanus began to swab it out.
“Here, hold this.” The surgeon pressed a bandage over the wound and put Correus’s hand over it. He trotted off down a corridor and reappeared with a pottery cup of some dark liquid. “Drink this.”
Correus sniffed it. “No, I don’t need—”
“Don’t be an ass!” Lucanus said with an authority far beyond his years. “No man in this hospital stays in pain for no reason. That’s a direct quote from Labienus,” he added with a smile.
Correus sat up and drank the liquid while Lucanus held the cup for him. Somehow it didn’t seem fair while Flavius was having a much worse wound stitched undrugged. The drink left a strong, dark taste in his mouth, and after a moment the thought slid away from him and the room became very strange and unreal, like a reflection in a pool. Lucanus dressed the wound and began to stitch it, and it hurt, but in an odd way, as if it were someone else’s leg. He was tired, he thought, tired to the bone, and almost as soon as the stitching was finished he slipped into a gray sleep across which odd little dreams flickered. At one point he was looking into a mirror, in full uniform, the rim of his helmet shadowing his face. It was hot and he took his helmet off, and as the figure in the mirror did the same, he saw that the hair was dark and it wasn’t himself at all, but Flavius.
“He’s all right,” a voice beside him said, and he came groggily up out of the dream to find Paulinus sitting beside him in his own tent. Everything was slightly fuzzy and his eyes were thick with sleep. He closed them, then opened them again, and things began to sort themselves out.
“He’ll be laid up for quite a while,” Paulinus was saying. “I am in great disfavor with his commander, but he’s going to be fine. There’s no sign of infection.”
“Infection?” Correus asked. “How can you tell so soon?”
Paulinus looked amused. “Soon? You’ve been asleep for two days,” he said. “You had a bit of a fever, but Labienus said it was exhaustion and doped you up again. Here.” He handed a cup of water to Correus, who drank thirstily. “You lost damn near as much blood as Flavius. How in Hades you held on to him and that horse all the way back I’ll never know.”
“Pigheaded,” Correus said. There was a vile taste in his mouth and he reached for the water again.
“I had no idea you were hurt,” Paulinus said, and his face was contrite. “I should have taken Flavius myself.”
“You couldn’t have held on to him.”
“Or Tullius could have. I’m sorry.”
Correus leaned back against the pillow. “No matter. Where is Flavius?”
“In the hospital. Labienus wanted to keep an eye on him to make sure the wound didn’t open up again, but he said you’d do all right in your own tent and I thought you’d rather be here.”
“Thank you. I would.”
“Messala Cominius says to stay off that leg for a few days and then get your ass back to your century,” Paulinus said with a chuckle. “And the legate says that the next officer who gets wounded by anything but a German can recuperate in the guardhouse. I am in no one’s good graces at the moment.”
“Mine,” Correus said. “You’re in mine and Flavius’s, Lucius. I don’t think we’d have made it without you and Tullius.” He was tired and his eyes had begun to close again. Paulinus drew the blankets up under his chin and slipped out, and Correus drifted into sleep again, oblivious to the dull ache in his thigh.
* * *
When he awoke again it was full daylight and he dragged himself out of bed and dressed, limping first to the latrine and then to the bathhouse. He wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to get the wound wet, but he felt as if he hadn’t washed in a year. He would bathe first and then ask.
In the wooden bathhouse he stripped and pulled the bandage off. The wound was healing already, but the stitches itched maddeningly. He resisted the temptation to scratch them and slid gingerly over the rough-cut rock ledge into the warm pool. The water stung, but after a moment the itching began to go away. He dived under the surface, scrubbing his hair with his fingers, and came up again as a group of young officers came in to wash off the day’s work.
“Well, the walking wounded,” one of them said. He came and knelt by the pool, and Correus recognized him as an officer of the Fourth Cohort who had previously been reluctant to acknowledge his existence. “Seriously, old fellow, that was a damn fine thing you did, getting your brother back like that. Uh… we’re proud of you.” He rejoined his mates as they stripped and plunged bravely into the cold pool in the next room, and Correus thought the man had been a little embarrassed.
He lay soaking as other officers crowded in to bathe (the bathhouse was small and they went in shifts, officers first), and then he reluctantly dressed and limped up to the hospital. There he was chewed out by Labienus, who rebandaged his wound.
Flavius lay alone in one of the small four-bed cubicles that lined the outer walls of the hospital, separated from the central surgery room and a dispensary by a roofed corridor. He was awake and looked well enough, although the cut on his cheek was going to leave a scar. Correus drew up a stool by the bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fair enough,” Flavius said. “They doped me up some after Labienus decided I wasn’t going to pass out on my own from that knock on the head. I’ve been sleeping mostly.”
“Me, too. I still feel groggy. The bastard got me in the leg.”
“They told me,” Flavius said. “On my account. You could have been killed yourself.” There were sharp lines about his mouth and he looked unhappy.
“Flavius, don’t—”
“I told everyone what you did,” he said.
“You didn’t have to.”
“Yes I did. I’d have been dead if it weren’t for you.” His head felt hot and he rubbed his hand across it restlessly. “I’m grateful,” he said. He wondered miserably if he really was. If Paulinus had not been there a
lso, would he have made such a point of singing his brother’s praises? It was not something Correus would have boasted about himself, after all.
“I’m your brother,” Correus said. “Forget it.” There was an odd look on Flavius’s face and Correus wished he had kept away. He had a feeling that Flavius didn’t much care for owing him his life. He rose to go. “Get some sleep now. Life will look much better when that wound has healed.”
Flavius lay awake after Correus had left, his unwilling gratitude hanging about him, like a suffocating cloud. If it hadn’t been for that dark cloud, Flavius would never have painted the picture he did when Silvanus, a smuggled flask of wine under his cloak, came to see him.
VIII The Mirrors of Memory
Flavius knew the next morning that he shouldn’t have done it. Knew and would have retracted every word if he could somehow take them back. Remembering Silvanus’s shocked, indignant face, he knew that the wine had gone straight to his head and mixed there with the bitterness of owing Correus his life. And so he had painted for Silvanus a black picture, wholly untrue though built of true things twisted. Flavius turned over and buried his face in the pillow. It was too late now.
Correus, for his part, found to his disgust that his command had taken advantage of his enforced absence to make Messala Cominius’s life difficult. The cohort commander greeted him with a certain grim pleasure four days later, when Labienus had pronounced him fit for duty.
“Let me make one thing clear, Julianus. I’ve had those slovenly soldiers in my hair for four days now, and I haven’t had time to cope with ’em properly. So I don’t want to see ’em again until they’re as prim as Vestal Virgins and dressed like lawyers. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Correus said. “Uh, four days, sir? You mean they came unstuck in just four days?”
“The legionary is a beast of short memory,” Cominius said with a sigh.
Correus sighed in return and gave a little chuckle. “I hate to think what my brother’s going to find when he gets out of the hospital,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” Cominius said. “But I don’t think he’ll have much trouble. He’s had ’em a few months. By the way, when you’ve knocked yours straight again, come see me and I’ll tell you a pet theory. And in any case, your brother’s men aren’t in my cohort, so unless they actually start a riot, I don’t care if they go on parade in their grannies’ nightgowns.” He gave Correus a level gaze. “My cohort, you understand, is another matter.”
Correus saluted, Cominius saluted, and Correus went away to see that his men started saluting.
* * *
Purely wonderful, he thought at parade that morning. Only gone four days and they’re falling all over their pilums again. They trooped past him like a drunken centipede and Correus looked wistfully at the well-oiled precision of the sixth century nearby, so recently his own. The fourth century was assigned to work on the log road for the rest of the day, and at the end of it they drew an extra parade.
“All right!” His voice snapped like lightning, three levels louder than they were used to, and they eyed him warily.
“You will proceed with the usual drill, and we are not leaving this field until I see a performance that could not be achieved by a drunken bath attendant and his eighty-year-old mother. Now march!”
It took a week to straighten them out, and at the end of it Correus remembered Messala Cominius’s mention of a “pet theory” and asked him about it.
Cominius startled him by smiling and offering him a cup of wine – very good wine, acquired through channels of his own. “You’ve grasped the short-memory principle,” the cohort commander said, and Correus nodded. “Well then, you know why your men fell apart and your brother’s didn’t. Now apply that further. They don’t teach this to Centuriate candidates because it makes them dangerous,” Cominius said, “but it’s a lesson we pick up on our own one way or another.” His parade harness, thick with medals, lay jumbled on the desk beside him, and he fiddled with it thoughtfully as he spoke. He had the hands of a man who uses them, Correus thought, the callused palms at odds with the carefully trimmed nails.
“A legionary signs on for twenty-five years,” Cominius said, “same as you and me, but he spends it all in the same legion, and mostly in the same province, and he can’t resign if he’s a mind to. The only things that shape that soldier’s life are the immediate ones: drill or no drill, holidays or the ‘on report’ list, a dock in his pay or a bonus from the Emperor. If his centurion is tough, he’ll shape up and work because the alternative is unpleasant. If the centurion’s lax, he takes advantage while he can. If the centurion’s dishonest enough to take bribes, he’ll pay them for the same reason – a softer berth now. If the centurion’s brutal, the officer may even get knifed. You’ll get an occasional bad lot of men, but mostly it’s all in the officer, because the legionary only thinks in terms of now.”
And that made it no hard thing for a strong commander to turn his troops to his own uses, Correus thought. Cominius had practically given him a handbook for civil rebellion.
Cominius saw the way his thoughts lay and nodded. “It is perilously easy. Promise them a bonus, and if you have the power to give it to them, they will rise up and call you emperor. Centurions are the army, and its stability rises and falls with them.”
“That seems… shortsighted, sir.”
“It is, and we’ve paid for it before now. It’s what makes Vespasian dubious about giving us more men – I’m afraid we may be going into this war undermanned, but he still shies at the thought of too much legion power in Germany. But that power’s the price of holding the Empire. In the old days, the armies were disbanded when peace came. Now, the only way to hold the land we’ve conquered is with a standing army, and that makes the army a power in its own right.”
Correus found that frightening and said so.
“It’ll scare you worse yet, the higher you rise,” his commander said. “In just over a hundred years a whole class has come up for whom the army is an inherited service. You were born to it, and so was I. The days when a general left his plow to lead an army and then went back to his turnip patch are gone for good. The army becomes our life now. You, Julianus – even now, would you be happy if you left it?”
“My circumstances are somewhat different, sir,” Correus said.
“I don’t think so,” Cominius replied. “You’re here because it was bred into you. If all you wanted was a chance to shake off a slave birth, there are plenty of other ways to do it.”
“I suppose there are.” But he had never really thought about them.
“You take my point,” Cominius said. “Take off your helmet and relax. I’m not advocating your leading a rebellion, you know. But you should be aware that you may someday have the power to do so, and make up your mind and principles accordingly, so that you don’t fall victim to ‘here-and-now’ thinking yourself when the time comes.”
Correus took off his helmet and drank a sip of wine, watching his commander with interest. Cominius fascinated him. Appius had never been so ruthlessly honest. “What about yourself, sir?” he asked. If anyone stood the chance of having to make that decision one day, Cominius was a more likely prospect than most.
“I should do what we did three years ago,” Cominius said. “Go with the strongest man who showed the best chance of keeping the Empire – and the army – in line afterward. It wasn’t my decision then, but it’s the one I would have made. I don’t have much desire to be emperor and spend my time looking for a dagger in the back.”
“And if the strongest man were you?”
“Mithras forbid!” Cominius said fervently. “But then… then I’m rather afraid I would make the same decision. It’s what Vespasian did, I’ve always thought. He was happy enough in Judaea until Otho and Vitellius began squabbling over the purple and tearing the Empire apart in the process.”
This was a thought that had never occurred to Correus before, and he let it sink in. “That is not a decision
I ever want to make,” he said at last.
“Nor I,” Cominius said frankly, “but it arises from the same problems you are dealing with now in your men. Your influence over them will be in direct proportion to how well you handle them, and how long you have exerted that influence. When good behavior becomes a habit, they will still think in terms of now, but in ways other than disobeying you. The army as a whole reacts to the Emperor in the same way. The populace may not care much who wears the purple as long as he keeps them amused, but to us it’s vital.”
And to the eighty men under him, the centurion might as well be emperor, Correus thought, for the way he shaped every hour of the legionary’s life. Unnerving. “I remember our drillmaster,” he said. “Mucius. The only thing that kept me from strangling him with my bare hands a couple of times was the thought that I only had to stand it for six months.”
“Precisely,” Cominius said. “It is harder to look ahead when the term is twenty-five years.” He stood up. “Keep that in mind, Julianus, and if you’re unlucky enough, you may rise to be emperor. And now I’ve got to go and quarrel with the quartermaster about supplies.” He settled his helmet on his head and departed, brisk and purposeful.
* * *
Correus thought a good deal about the army and Centurion Cominius over the next few days, while he wrestled the demons of the fourth century into line. He imparted Cominius’s views to Paulinus and found the historian in agreement.
“All the best leaders since Julius Caesar have learned that,” Paulinus said. “If he doesn’t get killed, Cominius is going to go somewhere.”
The Centurions Page 15