But it took a long time to come to terms with the fact you’ve been killed. Maybe it took more time than even the gods had.
The scene in the Main Gallery was chaotic but chaotically cheerful. Legionaries, a number of them still wearing tunics among their naked fellows, milled and boasted and compared their loot. Almost all the men had at least superficial wounds, but slashes and bruised muscles were too much a part of normal affairs to dampen spirits significantly.
The change in routine put life in the air the way fair day made a country hamlet sparkle. The legion had just turned near disaster into a victory as stunning and sudden as defeat had promised to be. With that behind them, nobody seemed to think that this “special assembly” could be any form of bad news.
Nobody except Gaius Vibulenus, who had been studying the guild with the mind of a man whose family owed much of its wealth to land bought from neighbors whom Sulla had executed. . . .
Soldiers have nothing to teach a good businessman about ruthlessness.
“Sir,” said a heavily-cheerful voice. “You’ll know, won’t you? What’ve they got going on?”
Vibulenus turned to see that it was the first centurion, Julius Rusticanus, who was hailing him.
It was surprising that Rusticanus was no worse mauled than seemed to be the case — scores of cuts on his limbs and several on his face, but able to talk and move with only the half-hidden twinges that might result from wounds received before the guild bought the legionaries from their Parthian captors. The point of the right flank, where the first centurion stood in battle, would have been enveloped instantly by the native army and cleared last of all by the Tenth Cohort’s counterthrust.
A tough man, Julius Rusticanus. But then, they all were by now. Even the tribune who looked like a youth with more lineage than strength of character.
“You’re looking all right for somebody at the sharp end, First,” Vibulenus said in real approval. Nobody was indispensable, but the first centurion’s combination of education and battle-bred experience could not have been equalled in the legion. “But Hades, no — I don’t know, I’m not sure anybody does, in a blue suit or not. They’re stirred up over losing the Commander, that’s sure enough.”
“He got chopped?” said Rusticanus. His face went neutral; then, as he judged his audience, broadened into a smile. “Well, that’s a terrible thing to happen, isn’t it?”
He saluted and stepped back into the crowd, bending some of his particular cronies close to hear the news. Men on the right flank would have had no way to learn of the command group’s massacre. For that matter, only a few hundred of the nearest legionaries would have been close enough to see the incident or its aftermath.
“You forget,” Vibulenus said as he and his two companions drifted by habit toward the front of the gallery, “that other people don’t know things just because you do.”
“What do I know?” asked Niger, misunderstanding the tribune’s mumbled statement.
“You know,” said Vibulenus instead of correcting the error, “how to make mead.” He patted the knapsack, finding the leather surface squishy but not, thank Fortune, stickily permeated with that awful juice. “Among other things.”
There was a sudden commotion from the rear of the big room, catcalls. The tribune turned and caught the flash of a yellow bodysuit beyond a sudden motion of Romans toward them.
“Hey, what ye got there?” somebody cried distinctly. The edge of hectoring command in the voice would have been familiar enough to civilians in barracks town, meeting a squad of legionaries recently spilled from a bar.
“Come on,” the tribune ordered curtly, shouldering his way toward the trouble. This could get out of hand real fast — maybe already had. Why had the cursed fool decided to walk a gauntlet of killers loosened by fatigue and victory? And where were the guards who always accompanied guild employees in the presence of soldiers.
That was easy to answer: dead on the field, enough of them, and this fellow with his yellow suit and apparatus floating before him ignorant of what a bad pair of mistakes he had just made at his life’s risk.