by Peake, R. W.
"All right you cunni," compared to the normal bellow that Titus Pullus could produce, this was as close to a whisper as he ever got, but the hush that had fallen over the assembled men as they strained to hear what he had to say was total. "Caesar tells me that you don't want to finish the job we started when we set foot on this fucking island. Is that true?"
Scribonius hadn't thought it possible, but it became even quieter, to the point that he heard the buzzing of the flies that were still feasting on the scraps of men that had escaped being disposed of, in either the mass graves dug for the enemy or in whatever manner the fallen Legionary's will decreed. Men who had been looking directly at Pullus now dropped their heads, unwilling to meet his eyes, and gave him the answer he was looking for.
"So it is true," Pullus said, softly enough that only Caesar and Scribonius heard him.
Scribonius felt his friend take a huge, deep breath.
"This isn't the 10th Legion I know!"
It wasn't a blast that Pullus would normally consider one of his best, but it was close. His tone alone cracked like a whip above the men, who began looking even more ashamed.
"This isn't the army that I know! We fought these bastards to a standstill, despite being outnumbered! And now you want to turn tail and run? NOW?"
By the time he was through, Pullus was panting as if he had run the entire length of the ridge the camp was built on, and his sweat dripped onto Scribonius. The Pilus Prior was sure that Pullus would pass out at any moment, but somehow he managed to stay upright. When it was clear that Pullus was done, at least for the moment, only then did the silence break, a low buzz as men mumbled to the comrade next to them. Still, no man was willing to look at Pullus, and he knew that before the army would move, he would have to win the 10th.
Somehow, he gathered the strength to continue, "We have never, ever run from an enemy. And I for one have no intention of starting now! If we don't finish this, even if you live for another 40 or 50 years, you will never be able to look at yourself or your comrades again!"
At the end of his strength, Titus Pullus turned, with Scribonius' help, to face his general.
"Caesar, even if it's on this litter, I'll follow you to the capital of these bastards and make them pay for all the blood of this army they've shed."
And with that, Titus Pullus was spent, his head dropping to his chest and with Scribonius' help he went back to his litter. As Scribonius laid him down, the buzzing sound grew into yet one more roar, and as near death as Pullus looked, there was the ghost of a smile on his face.
Compared to almost any other time, Caesar's army moved with nowhere near the speed to which all of the men were accustomed. This was due to one simple reason; whereas before, if it was tactically feasible, Caesar left the baggage train behind, this time he would only move as slowly as the surviving mules and wagons could move. In all truth, the pace was due to just one wagon, and one wagon only. Now that Caesar had gotten the army marching he wasn't about to turn his back on the reason and the man who was responsible for their change of heart. In a wagon that had been made as comfortable as possible, in a hammock slung between two poles built in each end of the wagon, lay Titus Pullus. Riding in the wagon with him were the Han physician and Diocles, supplied with everything that the physician had deemed might be needed to keep Pullus as comfortable as it was possible to make him. For Caesar, knowing how superstitious the men of his army were, understood what a powerful symbol the Primus Pilus was not to just the men of the 10th Legion, but to the entire army. In the immediate aftermath of Pullus' performance, the 10th had sworn their loyalty to Caesar, renewing a vow the Legion had once made before, long ago, when facing the German Ariovistus. The rest of Caesar's army at the time had been thoroughly intimidated by the reputation of the German chieftain, with the 10th Legion being the lone exception, sending a delegation of Centurions to Caesar to swear an oath that the Legion would follow him against Ariovistus, even if the rest of the army refused to leave their winter camp. Although it was true that there were very, very few men left who were part of Caesar's army on that day in Gaul, deeds such as the 10th's are part of the history and legend of the Legion that had been Caesar's favorite for many, many years and those deeds never die. They are passed along, from the hoary veteran to the new tirone, and not just with members of the 10th itself. While few in numbers, the men of the other Legions who had been present, a very few of them actually having been in the 10th before being transferred to another Legion when they were promoted, composed the senior leadership of the army. And they would be damned if the 10th grabbed the glory again! So it was only a matter of perhaps a watch after Pullus' performance, which had cost the Primus Pilus dearly as far as his recovery was concerned, the other Primi Pili came to Caesar, informing him that, after a discussion among themselves, they would be marching with the 10th, as well. Whereas it might have been understandable for Caesar to gloat a bit at outmaneuvering his Centurions, he was neither interested in doing so nor did he feel secure enough in his hold on the army to do as much. For their part, the Primi Pili were chagrined enough that they didn't need Caesar to remind them of his victory, and if the truth were known, the object of their ire was the man riding in the wagon. As respected as Pullus was, he was also envied by the other Primi Pili, to one degree or another, and more than one of them had grown tired of living in the giant Roman's shadow. Being outmaneuvered as they had been by a man who was half-dead, and by virtue of a performance worthy of being penned by any of those infernal Greeks that Caesar and his lot enjoyed so much, just made the draught that much more bitter. Such was Pullus' reputation, however, that not one of the Primi Pili would have been willing to utter such thoughts aloud in front of their men, or each other, for that matter. So they kept their grumbling to themselves, for the most part, although not all of them were able to keep their true thoughts from being read in their faces, something that Caesar chose to ignore. As long as the army was moving in the right direction, that was what mattered to him, even if it wasn't at the pace he normally set. Caesar knew the general location of the enemy capital; his scouts had drawn close enough to see the smoke from the fires of the inhabitants of the city, but he still had no idea of its size or composition. None of the population centers they had come across qualified being called anything more than towns and villages to that point in the campaign, but Caesar supposed that being the capital, this could change. However, he wasn't particularly concerned; this land was so mountainous that he was hard pressed to see where there was enough flat land to plant a city anywhere near the size of Rome, and certainly not Alexandria. Before that happened, however, there was an obstacle that had to be navigated, a huge freshwater lake that lay directly athwart the line of march. The lake was oriented on a roughly northeast/southwest axis, and on the western side of the lake was another ridge that ran roughly parallel to the lake. It was on the other side of that ridge that the enemy capital lay, and his scouts had only gotten to the top of the ridge before turning back. However, the lake itself presented its own challenge, because it appeared that their target was located roughly equidistant from either the northeast or southwestern end of this body of water. And from the calculations of his exploratores, this lake was more than 30 miles from tip to tip, and was so wide in places that the far shore couldn't be seen, only the ridge beyond. Starting their march from the northern end of the ridge the camps had been located on, it would have been shorter to skirt the lake around its northeast edge, but his scouts had informed him that there was only a narrow strip of land between this lake and another one, but that this passage was extremely hilly and rough. Not only would it have been hard to pull the wagons over this terrain, it also was good ambush country—at least that is what his scouts had told him—and while Caesar felt in his bones that the Wa army had been shattered, his confidence had been sufficiently shaken that he wasn't willing to take that risk. Although he had managed to salvage his command over the men of his army, even if it was by what some would say was a shabby tri
ck in using his badly hurt Primus Pilus, he knew that if there was another setback, he would lose his hold for good. Therefore he was willing to take the longer, more southerly route, which would add at least a day to the march.
Making camp the first night, there was still a pall hanging over the fires of those Legions who had suffered the most, as the fire in front of every tent section was missing several men, and in some cases, there were only one or two men at most. Sextus Scribonius, acting Primus Pilus of the 10th Legion, his arm now not only bound but in a sling, walked down the streets assigned to his Legion. Men were talking, but it was in subdued tones, much the same as the last several nights, with very little of the laughter and normal banter that Scribonius realized he missed a great deal, if only because it was missing now. At that moment, Scribonius had never felt more alone; Balbus dead, Titus still recuperating, and even young Gaius Porcinus, whose company he enjoyed despite their age difference, was busy. Part of it, he realized, was also being the Primus Pilus, and for perhaps the first time Scribonius had a glimmering of how it felt for his giant friend, the burden that was on his shoulders with every waking moment. The realization that he essentially held the power of life and death over these men, all of them, in every Century and Cohort for the entire Legion, or what was left of it, gave Scribonius a true appreciation of what his friend had dealt with every day, for almost two decades. Stopping at almost every fire, Scribonius did his best to emulate his friend, joking with one man, chiding another for something, but in a teasing manner. Yet even as he did so, he felt as if he was a fraud, but fortunately none of the men took it that way. Although Scribonius didn't know it, he was held in almost as much regard and esteem as Pullus, despite the fact that their styles couldn't have been more different. Scribonius rarely raised his voice, and while he used the vitus, the twisted vine stick that most rankers swore was an invention made by Dis himself to torture poor Legionaries, he did so judiciously. More than anything, Scribonius was respected as a firm but fair Centurion, who never played favorites, and who could be counted on, not only in battle, but in what composed the vast majority of time, the interludes between battles. His bravery was unquestioned, and although he didn't possess the huge strength and natural skill of his friend Titus, he was still a formidable fighter in his own right, the fact he had survived as long as Titus had in the ranks bearing testimony to that.
"Pilus Pri...er, Primus Pilus," the man corrected himself, but Scribonius didn't admonish him; he was just as unaccustomed to wearing the title as the men were bestowing it, "what's the latest word on the Primus Pilus?"
Despite the fact that Scribonius had answered this question more than a dozen times by this point, his patience was a virtue he was well known for, and his answer was the same as it had been the previous times.
"The doctor says he's almost out of danger," Scribonius told the man, a Parthian whose name he couldn't remember but whose face he knew, from the Third Century, Fourth Cohort if he remembered correctly. "The wagon ride isn't helping, but he's about as comfortable as he can be made. But that doesn't mean he's still not in rough shape. Not that he thinks so," Scribonius concluded, and like the other times, the Parthian and his comrades laughed at this sign that their Primus Pullus might be wounded but was unchanged.
"Tell him we're making sacrifices every day to every god we can think of," another man called out, this one a Roman that Scribonius did know.
Even as he promised the men that he would do so, his mind was occupied with the thought that it was even easier to remember the Romans left in not just the Legion but the entire army, there were so few left. His face didn't betray him as he moved away from this fire, heading to the next one. Perhaps the strangest sight to Scribonius was the camp itself. Because there were so few men left, there had been something of a consolidation, but neither the Centurions nor Caesar had been willing to go to the extreme of combining Legions. This meant that the Legion streets that normally contained one Cohort per block, with blocks of 5 ten-man tents, one end butted against the other with the opening for each tent facing the opposite direction, were only partially filled. Since there were sections with just one, two, or three men left out of the ten, these men had been folded into other sections. Within the same Century, if possible, but always within the same Cohort, if not, but that meant there were large, vacant spots among the normally ordered rows of tents. It looked, Scribonius said, much like an old Legionary who was missing half his teeth. Finally, shortly after dark, Scribonius had spent time with every section, something that should have taken him almost a full watch more.
Only when he was finished did he stop at his tent; he refused to occupy the tent of the Primus Pilus, although it was also the office of the Legion and even now, here in the middle of only the gods knew where, Caesar insisted that the documentation that was almost as famous as the battlefield exploits of the Legions of Rome be continued. Normally, Diocles was the chief clerk of the Legion, but that work had devolved onto the shoulders of Eumenis and Agis collectively, the other two slaves belonging to Pullus. Scribonius, after a short rest, did stop at the tent to make sure that the daily report that told Caesar of the condition of the 10th on this first day would be sent to the praetorium. As slowly as they marched, there had been no stragglers, although some of the walking wounded had struggled a bit, but only three had been forced to resort to the wagons. With that business settled, Scribonius went to the wagon where Pullus was recovering. Normally the wagons for the army were kept in a corner of the camp, but now the wagon containing Pullus was in the forum, near the tent used by the medici. Since the men wounded in the battle had been transferred to the fleet, the tent now contained only those men whose condition had worsened on the march, those walking wounded who had begun running a fever or whose sutures had ripped open from the exertion of the day's march. Announcing his presence, then climbing into the back of the wagon, Scribonius wasn't surprised to see his giant friend was awake and seemed to be waiting for him.
"How are the men?" Pullus asked immediately, not bothering with any formalities with his good friend.
If Scribonius was surprised that his friend didn't ask after his own health, he didn't show it, precisely because he had expected this reaction. Before anything else, Titus Pullus was the Primus Pilus.
"About how you'd expect, I suppose," Scribonius replied, "they're still trying to adjust to so many missing faces. But," he gave Pullus a grin, "the one thing they all said was how happy they were you were slung up in here like a roasting pig and not out there bashing them over the head."
Pullus gave a very brief laugh that was quickly cut short by the stab of pain it caused, and Scribonius winced, upset that he was the one who had caused it.
"Sorry," he said quickly. "I didn't mean to make you laugh."
"Yes you did, you ungrateful bastard," Titus grunted, but his tone was as light as his discomfort allowed.
"True," Scribonius grinned. "I'm just paying you back for all the bruises you've given me over the years."
"That's the only way you could do it, with me lying here like, what did you say? A roasting pig?"
Diocles, who had been sitting unobtrusively on the bench affixed to the side of the wagon, was quietly amused and, if the truth were known, very encouraged by the sight of the two friends who seemed to pick their relationship back up where it had been, before Pullus had suffered his near-fatal wound. To the Greek, this was the best sign yet that his master and friend was on the mend and was truly out of danger. On the other side of the wagon, the Han doctor watched the interchange with bemusement, not understanding what was said but drawing the same conclusion as Diocles, whom he was beginning to respect more with each passing day. Like most Han, he hadn't thought very highly of these pale-skinned barbarians, thinking that despite their martial prowess they were by and large bereft of anything that would classify them as civilized. However, his close contact with not just the diminutive barbarian but this giant had forced him to recognize that perhaps there was more to these
strange people than just the ability to wage war.