“Easy does it, Gaius,” said Pompilius Niger from the next couch with a grin that opened the cut in his lips. He reached across with one broad hand and lifted the tribune’s feet onto the couch. The two of them, and Clodius on the tribune’s other side, lay back together.
Vibulenus found the battling animals of the Recreation Room — a different set every voyage — to be a splendid way to sharpen his skills as well as a matter of amusement. No doubt that was what the trading guild had in mind when it provided this “game” at what was as surely great expense as the gladiatorial shows with which politicians paid for votes throughout Rome’s Latin-speaking domains.
Real drill with weighted swords was the only way to develop muscles for battle, but timing and judgment could be taught better on the mental fields of the Recreation Room. Pain was the penalty for misjudging an opponent’s strength or speed: instant, agonizing pain that was wholly real until another dream figure finished you off. Learning that sort of lesson on a physical battlefield was likely to cost your life — permanently, despite the magic of the trading guild. Certainly it took you out of action when your friends might need you.
But lessons in tactical maneuver were more important, at least for the tribune, than training in the physical aspects of battle. Though the contending armies were marshalled from animals and were often equipped in equally silly fashions, their tactics were those that could be applied to bodies of men.
Vibulenus could not change the movements and dispositions of the armies: those proceeded according to some higher law, just as the legion in the field was commanded — if not led — by a figure in a blue bodysuit. But the game aspect of the situation, the certainty that no permanent harm would occur to his real flesh, let the tribune study the fantasy battles with a detachment that carried over.
That morning he had pulled a cohort out of line, changed its front, and smashed a new threat without panic — because he had so often in his mind been a participant when the wheels came off a maneuver in the face of the enemy.
The first feeling Gaius Vibulenus had when his consciousness entered the fantasy scene was physical relief. The Recreation Room did nothing to alleviate his injuries the way the Sick Bay or even a bath would have; but by isolating the tribune from his body, it deleted the body’s pain for the time being.
The next feeling was incredulity. Almost at once it became anger that hissed like a red-glowing sword being tempered in an oil bath . . . but he directed his mind downward, into the action, because he had come here to get information.
The animals on one side were spearmen who carried huge shields and rode to battle in wagons. They were more manlike than not, but their skins were purple and they had long feathery appendages in place of ears.
The animals on the other side were Roman legionaries. This battle was the first one the legion had fought on behalf of the trading guild.
Vibulenus directed his consciousness into one of the giant aliens. Vagrantly he considered entering the mind of a Roman, of poking and sampling the memories of a fellow who might lie on the couch beside him. The thought squeezed the tribune with nausea even though he did not at present have a stomach to turn. As suddenly —
he was a warrior with a harness of bronze bangles, more ornamental than protective. He gripped the rope frame of his jouncing chariot with his left hand; in his right was an iron-headed spear half again as tall as he was. The cartwheels and the hooves of the team threw up reeds and mud and water as the vehicle lurched out of the swampy depression at the valley’s center.
The slope above them held the hostile army which was advancing like a single monstrous creature.
The driver hauled back and left on his reins, swinging the chariot to a broadside halt in front of the enemy. Two of the other warriors vaulted from the vehicle while it was still slowing, slamming Vibulenus off balance in their haste to plant themselves on the ground.