The Centurions

by The Centurions (retail) (epub)

  A group of officers from the Vindonissa legion were lounging on the counter, extolling the superior quality of their men over the Eighth Augusta’s. Silvanus eyed them thoughtfully. “How ’bout them?”

  “…back my men against these summer soldiers any day in the week,” a Vindonissa centurion was saying.

  Correus stood up. “Right.” His ear didn’t ache anymore, and there was a curious sensation in his limbs. He felt invincible. “That’s why they had to call in the Eighth to finish their road for them,” he said loudly to Silvanus.

  “Certainly,” Silvanus agreed. Their helmets were on the table between him and the Vindonissa centurions, and he put them on the floor. “They got lost in the big woods and their mamas were looking for them.”

  “The Eighth Augusta couldn’t find its own ass with a German guide to help look,” the Vindonissa centurion said. His three companions moved up beside him and glared, weaving slightly. They were very nearly as drunk as Correus and Silvanus.

  Anset the Egyptian put the stoppers in the wine jars and started to yell “Outside!” again, but it was too late. Silvanus dove over the table and caught the Vindonissa legion’s spokesman around his boots, and he fell with a crash into the next table.

  The dice players, who were Vindonissa men, erupted from their corner and jumped on Silvanus, and Correus threw himself happily on top of them. By the next moment, practically every man in the room had joined in the fray. Mostly it was one legion against the other, but two Augusta centurions who had been arguing tactics over a makeshift landscape of pebbles and a wine cup suddenly stood up and punched each other. The Egyptian stood in front of his wine jars and laid about him with a piece of flat board anytime the fray came too close. He knew better than to knife an army officer, but he would have liked to. Only the unknown Chloe’s bereft lover seemed oblivious. He sat on the dirt floor in the corner and began to sing again, hiccuping between verses and holding his wine cup carefully over his head as the booted feet rushed past.

  Correus and Silvanus stood back to back, grinning and slugging any Vindonissa officer who came within reach.

  Probably it would have gone on until they all fell down insensible or the Egyptian lost his temper and stabbed someone, but as a Vindonissa centurion took a flying leap over a table, he slammed into one of the posts which supported the precarious roof of The Emperor’s Own and it came down with a crash, bringing half the wine stall with it. An oil lamp that had hung from a crossbeam smashed on the floor and caught the collection of straw and canvas serving that corner as a roof, and the next minute half the shop was in flames.

  “Mithras, god – fire!” Silvanus yelled. “Come on!” They dove through the now gaping wall with three of the Vindonissa men behind them, and sprinted for the water channel that ran to the baths. There were buckets beside it – fire was always a danger in a timber fort – and they grabbed them, breaking the film of ice in the channel to fill them.

  More men poured coughing from the wreckage, with the Egyptian behind them dancing up and down in a fury. They doused the nearest flames with water and ran back for more. Someone was drunkenly organizing a bucket line and they fell in at the head of it as the sentries came running up to help. The Egyptian, abandoning the rest of his establishment to the flames, was dousing the straw-filled storage bins where his wine was laid.

  By the time the fire was out, The Emperor’s Own was a wet, smoking shambles, smelling of burnt hides and sodden ash, but the wine bins were intact, and even the charred remains of the counter were still standing, their amphorae smoke-blackened but unbroken. The proprietor stood behind them, cursing in Egyptian. He glared at Correus and Silvanus as they stood among the wreckage, their faces black and their cloaks and leggings charred. Correus pulled his helmet from beneath a half-burnt table and then dropped it again, shaking his hand. It was still hot and the crest was singed off so that only a few charred twigs stuck up from the top like grass.

  “I thought you two had worked it off already,” the Egyptian said in disgust.

  Correus and Silvanus looked at each other. They stumbled out again and sat down in a snowbank. The Vindonissa centurion came and stood over them, thinking. “He was overcharging anyway,” he said finally. He adjusted his helmet and staggered off.

  * * *

  The next morning, stiff, aching, and horribly hung over, they plodded along the timber catwalk that skirted the rampart. It was snowing.

  For brawling, they had drawn a chewing-out and a week’s extra sentry duty from their cohort commanders, but somehow it still seemed worth it. Correus raised a hand in salute to Silvanus as they passed each other on the windy catwalk, and Silvanus grinned back at him. His eye was black and green and nearly swollen shut, and there was a purple bruise on his jaw. Correus’s own face was blotched with bruises and his left hand had been scraped raw along the knuckles by someone’s teeth.

  “You look like a pair of fresh corpses,” Labienus had said the night before when they reeled into the surgery office, soaking wet and still drunk. He had dressed Correus’s hand and rubbed some salve into Silvanus’s lip, then sent an orderly with them, “to make sure the damn fools can find their own tents.”

  In the end they had found Silvanus’s, and that had seemed to them sufficient, so they sent the orderly back to Labienus and Correus had spent the night rolled in his cloak on the floor.

  In the morning, as they stumbled out into the gray light to make their penance with their commanders, they had run smack into Flavius.

  They stood, still weaving slightly, arms about each other’s shoulders, and he stalked past them white-faced, the healing scar on his cheek flaring red. Correus felt a writhing knot in his stomach that was not entirely due to overindulgence, but he pulled Silvanus back when he seemed inclined to pursue the matter.

  “Let it go. He’s miserable enough.”

  “He and me.” Silvanus groaned. “Oh Mithras, I think I’m still drunk.”

  Correus had the same feeling, but by the time he had presented a somewhat halting explanation of his night’s activities to Cominius and weathered the aftermath, he was feeling remarkably sober. When Correus was out of earshot, Cominius laid his head down on his desk and howled with laughter.

  The Egyptian, cursing nonstop, renewed his scavenging, and by noon the motley conglomeration that was The Emperor’s Own was standing again. Correus and Silvanus, he let it be known, were henceforth barred, but the edict was rescinded when the culprits agreed to pay for the damage.

  “He’s got a nerve,” Silvanus said indignantly. “That dump is made out of the legion’s castoffs, or anything else he can steal. He didn’t lose a penny.”

  “Well, pay him anyway,” Correus said practically, “if you want to drink Falernian.”

  “I suppose so. It’s the last we’ll see for a while.” They had finished their punishment duty and their regular duties, and were engaged in straightening out the mess they had made of Silvanus’s tent. Someone – they both glared at each other accusingly – had thrown up on the floor, and since neither of them could remember who had done it, they had decided to clean it up together.

  “I can’t have my slave do it,” Silvanus said. “That really would be too much to ask.” They fetched a mop and bucket from the supply shed, ignoring the snickered comments that followed, and set about scrubbing down the plank floor.

  * * *

  It was an odd start to a friendship, but over the winter months Correus and Silvanus grew steadily closer together. In the evenings they diced for wild, imaginary stakes, or let Paulinus beat them at latrunculi. They patronized The Emperor’s Own with exaggerated decorum and prowled the hodgepodge stalls of the peddlers to buy food or rubbing oils or one of the heavy native rugs to take the winter chill out of a tent floor.

  Winter came down like a thick hand about the camp, and rumors as to Nyall’s intent flew wildly with the snow. He would attack Vindonissa first. He would strike at the eastern road. He would wait for the legion to move first.

/>   Every soldier and camp follower had a theory, and they changed with each new rumor. Something was coming, but not yet, not until the thaw, and in the meantime the camp grew edgy with the waiting, and the officers devised endless drills and weapons practice to keep their restless soldiers busy. Catapults were taken out, restrung, and tested; the armorer’s shed rang with the sound of hammers, the forge fires sending up black clouds into the air. In the forest the howling of wolves had the thin edge of hunger in it, and every native hut sent someone to keep guard around the lambing pens. In the Roman camp, rations grew withered and tasteless and the men were almost unrecognizable as legionaries now: they were bundled in trousers and cross-gartered leggings, their uniform tunics hidden by two and sometimes three cloaks, and their faces were muffled to the eyes against the northern winter.

  Correus saw little of Flavius, and his brother’s silence nagged at the back of his mind. Flavius was ashamed of himself, he thought, and furious at Correus because of it. When the holy birthday of Mithras, in whose eyes all men were brothers, came at the winter solstice, Correus decided that it was as good a time as any to shake the barrier down. He found Flavius in his tent, sitting alone and brooding.

  “This does us no good,” Correus said softly, putting his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  Flavius’s eyes were dark and brittle-looking, like mica. “I hadn’t thought you’d be wanting my company.” He knelt to lace his boots, his face hidden.

  “You’re my brother,” Correus said stubbornly.

  “The more pity for both of us,” Flavius said.

  “We’re stuck with it,” Correus said. He wished he could punch him in the nose, like Silvanus, and get it over with. “We must learn to make the best of it, or we’ll pull each other apart.”

  Flavius stood up and managed a half-smile. “All right. Perhaps we can learn not to tread each other’s toes so hard. I admit I’ve been… lonely.” That was true. Flavius had never faced anything that frightened him without Correus there, too, forcing him in some indefinable way to go on, to go through with it. He knew that, and the knowledge was a black taste in his mouth. But there was war coming, and the desire to let Correus set his mark for him, to show him what it was he must do, was too strong to override.

  He held out a hand, slowly, as if it hurt, and just as slowly Correus put his own in it. Together they went out into the gray dawn to make their prayers to the god of soldiers, who was also the Lord of Light, the Unconquered Sun, born on this day when the year turned round and the days began to lengthen once again.

  The Eighth Legion’s followers of Mithras had raised their altar in a rocky cave in the wall of a hill beyond the cleared land, and the two brothers entered silently, ducking beneath the stone lintel. They had become initiates independently of one another, each seeking, and finding, something different in the face of the god. For Flavius, it was the strength he feared he didn’t have; for Correus, it was the duty and the brotherhood that lay at the center of the worship.

  They spoke the invocation as the cloaked and hooded figure of the Sun-runner made the sacrifice – a hare, newly caught. Beyond the altars, flanked by the twin torchbearers of light and darkness, a figure was carved into the gray stone of the wall. He sat astride a bull and the animal’s head was bent back before his knife – Mithras, the Guide and Mediator, whose word was Light.

  “Unconquered Sun, Redeemer, grant us thy aid and intercession, and take our pleas before the Lord of Boundless Time. As you slew the Bull for our sakes, take now our sacrifice, freely given, and grant us strength.”

  The worshippers went in twos to the altars to dip their forefingers in the blood. “As brother guards his brother, thus is the faith of soldiers. Mithras, Lord of Armies, grant us victory and grant us peace.”

  Correus, kneeling before the god with Flavius beside him, added his own whispered prayer: “And peace among ourselves.”

  X The Horse Mask

  The chief’s hall at Arngunnshold was crowded, more crowded than it should be for comfort, and the two parties were growing twitchy with their enforced closeness. On a platform at the far end sat Arngunn of the Nicretes. Above him on the reed-and-clay wall hung his weapons. A design of multicolored clay made an outflung sun spiral behind them. Arngunn’s graying blond hair hung over his shoulders in braids, and he was muffled in a thick tunic and trousers and a cloak held with an amber pin. A fire blazed in a stone hearth at the center of the room and he held his hands toward it. They were cold, the hands of a man past his prime.

  Two women sat beside him: one, the elder, in a low chair at his side; the other, a girl with a cloak of pale hair like a waterfall, was curled catwise on the platform’s edge, leaning forward, chin on hand. She watched the shifting crowd of warriors – her father’s and the imperious interlopers of the Semnones with their hair pinned up in outlandish knots at the sides of their heads. The Semnones moved among the Nicretes lordlywise, with arrogance in every stride, and the men of the Nicretes glared back at them and snarled like foxes.

  To Arngunn’s other side, Nyall sat with the long fingers of his right hand curled loosely around a beer horn and the other hand drumming lightly on the oaken arm of the chair. His wolfskin cloak was thrown back, and he wore a long shirt of deep green sewn with gold sun’s-eyes at the hem. The gold collar at his throat caught the firelight and glowed with it, but the gold-tipped pins that held the braided knot on his head almost disappeared into the flaming hair. The gray eyes were watchful and intent, the girl thought, but his body was relaxed almost to the point of insolence. His feet were clothed in light indoor shoes of soft green leather, and he leaned back in his chair, legs crossed, one ankle resting lightly on the hard muscles of his thigh.

  Beside him, two of his Companions, his household warriors, sat cross-legged on the platform, their dagger hilts winking in the firelight. The girl recognized them: Geir the envoy, with more scars than his missing eye to show for his years on the war trail; and the younger man, Lyting, younger even than Nyall himself, who was also of the Kindred, the royal clan of the Semnones. Like all the people of the Suevi – the loose confederation of tribes of which the Semnones were the greatest – they looked as if they were accustomed to being given what they wanted. At the moment it appeared that Lyting had his eye on her waiting woman, Saeunn, and she saw that the girl kept her hand on her knife as she bent to pour from a pottery pitcher into Lyting’s beer horn. It was a pity that Arngunn hadn’t been as cautious, but it was too late now. Arngunn had swung in the wind between Nyall and the Roman-kind across the river for too long, and now they were both threats.

  The trestle tables where they had made their meal had been cleared by Arngunn’s thralls and the High Table was removed; now the dogs were quarreling over bones in the straw on the floor. The warriors who had risen to stretch their legs returned to their benches, Arngunn’s men on one side of the long hall and Nyall’s Companions on the other. A thrall kicked the dogs away from the hearth and swept the bones and debris to one side, clearing a space on the hearthstone for any man who might choose to stand and speak his mind.

  Nyall passed his beer horn down to Lyting and stretched his arms, cracking his knuckles backward with a little snapping sound that made Arngunn jump. “A fine feast,” Nyall said pleasantly. “My thanks to you and to your house.” He smiled at Gudrun, Arngunn’s wife, and she nodded. She was a tall, raw-boned woman with a shrewd face. The fine red stuff of her gown hung on her like a silk blanket on a mare, but there was intelligence in those sharp eyes.

  “You are welcome at our hearth,” she said. “But if the time has come for the Council, best to make it now before your hounds and ours begin to quarrel.”

  The beer had gone around again and the men of the two tribes were eyeing each other restively. It was an uneasy alliance at best.

  “Indeed, lady, you show wisdom,” Nyall said, and Arngunn nodded and raised his hand. The thing could not be put off.

  An old man in a white robe with a small twist of grain stuck
through his belt came forward and tapped with his staff on the hearthstone. “We make a Council of the Free People,” he said “as it has been done since the old days.” The priest rested his hands below the golden sun disk on the top of his staff and looked first to the Companions and then to Arngunn’s men for their silence. “Speak, Nyall of the Semnones.”

  Nyall stood up. He was an imposing figure, decked in a chieftain’s gold. He had eyes the color of a storm. “You have heard the terms the Roman-kind would make. Is there any man here who has a wish to wear their thrall ring?”

  There was muttering on both sides, and Lyting stepped down from the platform and stood on the hearth by the priest.

  “I have seen the lands-across-the-river,” he said. “They become a tribe of farmers and watch their cabbages grow. Is that work for a warrior of the Free People?”

  A man of the Nicretes rose and the priest nodded at him. “Speak, Ranvig.”

  The man came forward and stood, hands on hips, to face his own tribe. “We must go with the Roman-kind, or make alliance with the Semnones,” he said. “I am no tiller of cabbage patches and I vote for alliance.”

  “If the Semnones had not come into our hunting runs and urged the tribes to fire the Romans’ frontier, a year ago, there would be no need for a choice!” another man shouted.

  “Then why did you ride with them, Ingald?” Ranvig snapped.

  “Silence!” the old priest said. “We are in Council. Brawl with each other and I will put you in the byre with the cows.” The two subsided and Ranvig returned to his place. A man of the Semnones stood up. “Speak.” The priest nodded at him.

  “I am Kari, old father,” the man said. He had brown hair and a somewhat darker complexion than his companions. “My father rode with Armin of the Cherusci when he took three of the Romans’ eagle-gods in battle, and my mother was a woman that he took from them. I know something of the Roman-kind. They are small men, not fearsome, but once they have set their fortresses in a land, their towns will follow and then it is like trying to hold back the sea. We must burn them out now, or go the way of the lands-across-the-river.”