by Peake, R. W.
Squeezing his nephew's knee, Pullus said, "I just want you to know how proud I am of the man you've become, and what a fine Centurion you are, Gaius."
Porcinus couldn't trust himself to respond, his head bowing again, as the tears started anew.
Turning to Scribonius, Pullus whispered, "Sextus, no man could have had a better or more loyal friend. It's been my honor to know you, and I'll pray that the gods watch over you."
Now it was Scribonius' turn to break down, the raw emotion of the moment penetrating even the hard shell of the medicus, who had witnessed so many scenes similar to this, on this day alone, that he should have been inured to them by now. But he was as moved as the other two men, and it was only with a great effort of will that he kept his tone level.
"Yes, well. All right then," he mumbled as he arranged the items he had gathered just so. "Best get on with it. Centurion," the medicus turned to Scribonius, "if you could hold his legs please. No, like that. Yes, like that. Thank you;" he motioned next to Porcinus as Scribonius tightened his grip on his friend's legs, straddling them with his own and grasping Pullus' calf with both hands. "If you would get behind him. Yes, like that. Now, hold both of his shoulders. Tightly."
Every man has his limits, and even Pullus had reached his, groaning when his nephew tightened his grip on his shoulders. Porcinus had shut his eyes, trying to focus completely on his task as the medicus explained to Pullus what he was going to do.
"You've undoubtedly seen this done before, Primus Pilus," he told Pullus. "So you know that I'm going to do my best to pull the blade straight out at the exact angle, as it went in. That minimizes the damage and......"
"Would you shut the fuck up and just do it, already?" Pullus muttered through clenched teeth.
The medicus blinked a couple of times, then nodded his head. With a hand that was shaking only slightly—which Pullus noted and thought was a good sign—he grasped the hilt of the sword. But before he made any move, he bent down so that his eye was level with the hilt and squinted down the length of the blade, trying to determine the angle. Finally satisfied, he took a deep breath, looked down at Pullus, who gave a brief nod, his jaw muscles so tightly bunched that it looked as if the Roman had been in a brawl and had a swollen face. Then, with one smooth motion that spoke to the number of times he had performed this act before, the medicus withdrew the sword. It happened so quickly that Scribonius, the only one of the two holding onto Pullus who was actually looking, wasn't sure that he had seen it. Just one moment the sword was there, sticking out of his friend's body, then it wasn't. As soon as the blade was removed, a gout of blood gushed from both front and back, but the medicus made no immediate move to staunch the flow, prompting a sharp question from Porcinus as to why he wasn't doing so.
The noncombatant shook his head in answer, but then seeing that a non-verbal response wouldn't appease either of the Centurions, he explained, "He's had that sword in him so long that the blood has pooled inside his body. If we don't let it drain out, for some reason it will turn corrupt and will end up poisoning him."
Scribonius was about to argue, but thought better of it, mainly because even as the man was talking, Scribonius could see that the flow was slowing drastically. After just a few heartbeats, it had stopped for the most part, and only then did the medicus move to place the bandages on either side of Pullus' chest, soaking up some of the blood. Pullus was quiet, because he had fainted when the blade was withdrawn, but when Scribonius went to revive him, he was stopped by a gentle, but firm hand.
"Let him stay out for now, Centurion," the medicus told him. "He's going to want to be this way for what we have to do next."
What came next was pulling off Pullus' armor, a feat made even more difficult than it normally was from an unconscious man who was nothing but dead weight, when that weight was as much as Pullus'. Even in his unconscious state, a groan escaped from the Primus Pilus' lips, when Porcinus and the medicus, as gently as they could, lifted his arms above his head. This also prompted a fresh rush of blood, but the medicus insisted that this wasn't a bad or dangerous thing. Recognizing they had no other choice but to trust the man, both Scribonius and Porcinus followed his instructions exactly. As slowly as they could, they pulled the heavy mail shirt off of Pullus, tossing it aside once they did. This forced yet another groan from the large man, and his eyes fluttered open for a bare moment before they rolled back into his head, and he lapsed back into unconsciousness. With the armor off, the padded undershirt was next, but before they removed it, the medicus inspected it closely.
When asked why he was doing this, he replied, "I'm trying to see if that sword made a clean cut and sliced through the mail, this undershirt, and his tunic, or if it was dull and pushed some fragments into the wound."
Neither man needed to be told what that meant: even if Pullus survived the next watch, he would be facing a long, lingering, and extremely agonizing death as his wound putrefied from the foreign material left to fester in his body. It was true that one of the more experienced physicians might be able to fish the debris out, but the wound was so close to vital organs, such as the lungs and heart, that this would only be a last resort, because in all likelihood the operation would kill him. Both Centurions had been in the army long enough to know of men who had suffered this fate, and it was something neither of them would wish on anyone, particularly someone they cared about. Finally satisfied, the medicus gently pulled off the undershirt, leaving just the tunic, where the process was repeated. It was only after that and after they removed the tunic that the orderly showed any sign that could be called relief, no matter how faint.
"It looks like that bastard had a very sharp sword, because, as far as I can tell, that's about the cleanest cut I've ever seen."
Neither man had realized they were holding their breath until they both suddenly expelled it in harsh bursts, causing them to chuckle a bit. Now that Pullus was stripped, the orderly gently swabbed the wound with a rag, now completely filthy and black from performing this chore for the better part of a day on other wounds. Once he was satisfied, he took the two bandages, put them back in place, then, linking the two baltea together, had Porcinus and Scribonius heave Pullus' bulk into an upright sitting position. The way Pullus' head lolled back as they did this reminded Porcinus of the newly dead, who possess a limp shapelessness that a soldier knew all too well, but he did his best to ignore that, taking comfort in the sound of his uncle's breathing, as shallow and raspy as it was. Using the two baltea, the medicus pulled the bandages tightly against Pullus' body, forcing one last groan from the unconscious man.
"We're done now," the orderly said, more to soothe the other two men than anything else.
Laying Pullus back gently, Porcinus asked, "Now what?"
"Now," the orderly said grimly, "we wait. It's in the hands of the gods now. But," he shook his head, "I will say this; I've never seen anyone wounded that badly who's survived this long."
"So there's hope," Scribonius interjected, to which the orderly could only shrug.
"Where there's life, there's hope. How much?" he asked, not finishing the sentence, instead giving a slight shrug. He didn't have to say anything more.
Entering Caesar's camp, Asinius Pollio's mouth hung open as he gazed about. Only when he looked to the right side of the forum did he see anything resembling a Roman camp. Except that the usually neatly ordered streets were now crammed full of men lying in row upon row, as other men, both uniformed and noncombatant, moved about, in one spot crouching next to a man to offer a drink of water, ladling it out of a bucket, while in other places a pair of men would be grabbing the legs and trunk of a Legionary who had succumbed to his wounds. Treating the now-dead man with a care that Pollio had seen so many times before, the bearers nevertheless moved swiftly, carefully stepping over the other wounded as they took the body away to... where, Pollio wondered? Even as he watched, this scene played out on every single Legion street, sometimes simultaneously. As quickly as the corpse was removed, two m
ore orderlies would come hurrying up, using the plank stretcher to bring another wounded man from one of the areas Caesar had designated for his physicians and the medici, where they assessed the casualty brought before them. Although this scene wasn't all that unusual—Caesar had long since perfected the art of rapid restoration of order and treatment of casualties after battle—Pollio had never seen anything on this scale before.
That was because, he realized, nothing like this had ever happened to Caesar's army before. Pollio had since dismounted, leaving his horse behind to walk on foot, mainly because he had reached the part of the camp where everything was in such a shambles that it was impossible even to see where the Via Principalis or Via Praetoria was, let alone follow it. But the real reason he had chosen to walk—the two Tribunes he had brought with him trailing behind him, their mental state much the same as his—was that he needed time to absorb what he was seeing. Also, he had been prepared to tell Caesar in expansive terms about the hard-fought battle they had endured to hold the southernmost camp, but all the flowery phrases that he had come up with in his mind were wilting as rapidly as if they were real blooms, suddenly exposed to a desert sun. Pollio realized now that nothing he and the men of the southern camp had faced was anything close to what had evidently happened in Caesar's.
Reaching the far edge of the forum, Pollio's walk slowed even more, then came to a stop, as he stood, open-mouthed and looking in the direction of the western wall. Normally, his eye would be met with row upon row of ordered tent lines, blocks of them neatly arranged by the Cohort and Legion they belonged to, the streets between the blocks as neatly delineated as the tents. It was a sight that was always pleasing to a Roman eye, so even more than the sight of the blackened ruins of entire blocks of tents—most of them still smoking—was the lack of order that impacted Pollio most profoundly. He would never have thought that he put so much importance on seeing what were nothing more than clumps of peaked leather arranged in regular patterns, but in that moment Pollio realized just how Roman he was. Now, standing there, his eye traveled from the southern wall to the northern wall, stopping only when he spotted something out of place in what he recognized as a scene of total destruction. Usually it was the sight of a group of Legionaries, bending over one of the many heaps of bodies, where at some point part of the fight had coalesced. From his experience in reading battlefields, Pollio knew that this sudden preponderance of corpses usually signaled some event that merited an increase in the fury of the fighting, at least to the men in that area. Usually, Pollio knew, it involved something like a signifer of a Cohort, or even an aquilifer carrying the Legion eagle, either choosing or being forced to make a stand, which naturally drew the attention and effort of the enemy to take the prized symbol. Or, it could revolve around an individual who attracted the same kind of attention, usually a Centurion, Tribune, or even Legate.
Whatever the cause, while the piled bodies weren't a new sight to Pollio, the sheer number of such heaps was, and momentarily forgetting what it was he had come to do, Pollio stood in place as he surveyed the scene. The ability to read a battlefield came only with experience, but what Pollio was trying to interpret was on a scale unlike anything he had seen, hence it took him longer to make sense of it. He noted a number of spots on the western wall where the palisade stakes were missing, telling him where the barbarians had come pouring over the wall. Turning to examine the southwest corner, he understood that this was where the biggest and probably fatal breach had occurred, as not only the wooden stakes but also a great section of the turf wall had been pulled down.
As he gradually made sense of the scene, he could see that Caesar had staged a fighting withdrawal, stopping his backward movement every couple of dozen paces, where the barbarians would renew their assault on what was essentially a mobile wall composed of wood, flesh, and iron. Satisfied that he had a sense of the flow of the battle, Pollio turned and continued heading toward the forum, reaching the jumbled mass of equipment, crates, tables, and carts that had formed the makeshift barricade. He was pleased to see that Caesar had at least organized work parties to clear a path to the barricade, so that Pollio and the Tribunes didn't have to step on the bodies that literally covered the ground entirely, to the extent that the only visible dirt was this path—cordoned off by a grisly pile of dead barbarians who, Pollio noted dismally, were already beginning to stink and draw flies. It always struck him how quickly the human body started to decay after a man's death; he had heard men claim that they could smell the stench of death, even as a man's body hit the ground. While Pollio doubted this, he did know that it took less than a watch before the first scent of that sickly sweet smell reached his nostrils.
Following the gory path, he nevertheless had to clamber over the barricade, thankful that there was a ladder in place to help him. He was no longer a young man, and he was afraid that he would break something if he had been forced to climb over the barricade by hand. But it wasn't lost on him that Caesar hadn't ordered the barricade to be taken down, and he wondered if that was because Caesar had specific information, or because he was just being cautious. If it was the latter, Pollio thought, that would be a sign Caesar had been shaken much more badly than he would want to admit, and he carried this thought with him as he gazed about at the knots of men, trying to find the general. Pollio wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but he realized he shouldn't have been surprised that the space inside the barricade had been cleaned up, as much as the time allowed. There were no bodies or much debris in the form of pierced or shattered helmets, damaged shields, or spent javelins. But what there was—in abundance—were dark stains, splotches of dirt that told Pollio of fallen men, fighting to keep the barbarians out. There were many of them that it was impossible for him to make even an estimate of the casualties suffered in this last phase of the fighting. The packed dirt area of the forum, where the wounded had been dragged during the fight, was completely darkened with the blood of the fallen, to the point where the ground was uniform in color. From above it looked as though a roughly square shape of a different type of dirt had been laid over the lighter colored soil that was a feature of this ridge.
Finally, Pollio saw one of the groups of men suddenly disperse, revealing the sight of his general, who was still seated on the stool that had been brought to him some time before. Pollio made his way in that direction, noticing that the men who had been gathered with Caesar and were now heading in different directions all wore the distinctive transverse crest of the Centurion. Surely, Pollio thought with dismay, there's more than two dozen Centurions left out of the 120 that had started the day! Caesar hadn't seen Pollio yet, concentrating instead on another tablet, inscribing something in the wax with his stylus, and it was this sight, more than anything else, that brought home to Pollio exactly how costly this battle had been. As Pollio thought about it, just as he was reaching Caesar's side, he couldn't remember the last time he had seen Caesar, out in public at least, writing his own messages. In private, certainly; Pollio knew that Caesar had been keeping a journal of this entire campaign, much in the same way as he had in Gaul, but it wasn't seemly for the general commanding the army to be forced to write his own dispatches. Caesar, head bent down and concentrating on the tablet, became aware of Pollio only when the standing man's presence blocked out the last of the daylight. Obviously irritated, Caesar looked up with a frown, squinting up at whoever it was that had dared to throw a shadow over his work. At first, he didn't seem to recognize Pollio, and in the short silence Pollio had the chance to examine this man he had been following for so much of his life. Just like Carbo, what Pollio saw was a man who seemed to have aged overnight, but in Pollio's case, this was almost literally true, since it had been just the night before that Pollio had attended the last briefing Caesar had held. How much had changed in that time, Pollio thought, only partly thinking of the battle. He was about to open his mouth, when Caesar's expression changed to one of recognition, and the general waved the tablet wearily at his lieutenant.
"I was about to send you another dispatch," he said tiredly. "I hadn't heard from you and I need to know if you have any medici you can spare. Mine are almost exhausted; I expect them to drop any moment. Frankly, I don't know what keeps them going," he muttered.
"Because they're needed," Pollio told Caesar quietly.
This prompted a mirthless laugh.
"That they are," Caesar agreed. Then, he turned his mind to other matters, asking Pollio, "What's your status? I assume, since you're here, that your camp held?"
"Yes, it did," Pollio replied. Not knowing why exactly, he was nonetheless compelled to be frank as he told Caesar, "I was going to tell you how hard a fight it was, and how the men fought like Trojans. But now that I've seen all this," he waved a hand around him, "I realize we had it easy."
Instead of answering immediately, Caesar looked outward in the direction Pollio had indicated, but his true gaze was inward. Watching him sit there, Pollio had a thought very similar to Carbo's earlier, thinking that Caesar looked... lost. That was it, Pollio realized, for the first time, if not in this campaign but his entire life, Caesar doesn't know what to do next. And that thought scared Pollio more than anything he had seen this day.