“Better, sir,” said Niger with a grin. He patted his bulging leather knapsack. “I found honey. Near enough!”
A bright yellow car howled past a hundred feet in the air. Crackling discharges played in its wake. Vibulenus’ mouth opened and his body trembled between the choice of fight or flight . . . but the sizzling corona was not a weapon, only a sign of someone from the trading vessel headed in a great hurry toward the soldiers’ destination — their ship.
The legion’s transport always looked mountainously huge when the Romans straggled back to it; but even after so many battles, Vibulenus had no clear picture of what the vessel looked like when they disembarked. It was usually dark then, near dawn; and the ship was behind them — but it would require only a glimpse over a shoulder as he marched out. . . .
Battle was still a matter of anticipation. Every time, even though there had been so many, even though the fantasy fights in the Recreation Room had multiplied reality by a score of visions that seemed real while they were being dreamed. Neither battle nor sex brooked any rival when they had engaged a man’s emotional attention.
“Now where in this place d’ye figure to find honey?” Clodius Afer was asking with a sweep of his arm. “I’ve seen drill fields as looked like a garden compared to this.”
“Found,” said the other centurion. He paused beside the barrel stem of a plant whose spreading leaves had been trampled to rags by hundreds of sets of hobnails. Kneeling instead of bending, so that the buckled lid of his knapsack remained level — it was not fluid tight — he stabbed the stem with his dagger and made a quick circular motion as if he were boning a ham.
The blade withdrew along with a plug of the stem. Behind it oozed a thick green fluid in such quantity that it must have come from a reservoir instead of being intracellular sap.
“See?” said Niger with muzzy brightness. He wiped his blade with an index finger and stuck his tongue between blackened, swollen lips to lick the green sap. “Just like honey.”
“I’ll take —” said Vibulenus, planning to continue, “—your word for it.” But why not?
“I’ll take a taste,” the tribune said, dipping his own fingertip into the cavity rather than licking the digit which Niger offered him. The sap tasted sweet . . . and perhaps it even tasted like honey. The last time Vibulenus had tasted honey was too distant in time and incident for him to remember.
The sticky fluid had a smell like old bones, however, which he doubted had been true of honey.
“Well,” said Vibulenus. He avoided the grimace which would have been insulting, but he wiped his finger carefully on the pebbles to cleanse it of the vile goop. “I wish you luck with your mead. It’ll be . . . interesting, you bet,”
“Wonder if that was the Commander bein’ brought back?” suggested Clodius Afer as he shifted his loot. “Wasn’t the tortoise picked him up, I hear, it was some little yellow bug from the trader. Like that one went past.”
The expression on the pilus prior’s face hinted that he wished he’d taken something less bulky, perhaps the spinner alone without the heavy shaft and line of the bull-roarer. It had been an exhausting battle for all of them; and under the guild, the legionaries did not have the lines of slaves that would have carried the loot they did not comprise.
Vibulenus looked at his friend, trying to remember how he had thought of Clodius when he first knew him. The pilus prior looked to be the same veteran at the height of his powers as was the file-closer who had cowed and angered a boyish tribune named Vibulenus. Clodius was that man physically . . . and perhaps in mind as well, more or less.
Certainly more nearly the same man than the tribune was; but the tribune hadn’t been a man, only a boy, and he had aged a very long time since he first fought in the line at Clodius Afer’s side.