Quartilla slid her left hand from Vibulenus’ shoulder to the back of his neck. Her fingertips toyed with his scalp while her free hand plucked open the knotted sash of his tunic. She smiled again.
Vibulenus knew that he was not being given an answer, however much his body was willing to believe otherwise.
But he knew also that the woman was willing to try to work through it; and that was perhaps as much undeserved mercy as he could have accepted anyway.
The sweat of Tenth Cohort in sword drill overloaded the Exercise Hall’s ventilation system with an effluvium made bitter by fatigue poisons. Men grunted, and the clack of practice weapons was supplemented frequently by the duller sound of a riposte getting through to human flesh.
“Up, Decimus, up,” snarled Clodius Afer as his swagger stick — which looked like, but probably was not, vine wood — prodded the legionary who had just been knocked down by a head blow. “You’re favoring your right hip, and that’s why he’s coming over your guard.”
Decimus’ duelling partner, a gray, featureless automaton like the hundreds of others in the Exercise Hall, waited with its sword crossed over the face of its shield — both pieces of equipment equally-gray extrusions from its body.
“Yessir,” the legionary muttered, though his eyes were crossed, and the only movement of which he seemed capable was to clench and unclench his hand on the hilt of his practice sword, formed from the same material as the automaton. It was heavier than a real sword, and — though its edges were rounded and slightly resilient — a blow from it could send a man to the Sick Bay easily enough.
“Let’s get him checked over, pilus prior,” said Gaius Vibullenus, threading his way a step behind Clodius through the ranks of duelling pairs.
His own temple throbbed in sympathy with the blow Decimus had taken. The Medic had assured him that there was no organic injury — the booths would have seen to that. But something in the tribune, his mind if not his body, remembered the blow it had taken in the ancient distance.
“Cohort,” roared Clodius Afer, “at ease!” He would not have had to raise his voice, because in this room a unit leader spoke directly to all his men as if he were the Commander. Battle practice for a pilus prior, however, was not limited to exercise in swinging personal weapons.
At the Roman’s order, all the automatons froze into their upright position, waiting for another command to reactivate them. Soldiers who had kept moving on adrenalin knelt, wheezing and supporting themselves on the shields which, like all their practice gear, were overweight. Drill had to be harsher than the real thing, because real battle could not be halted save by victory — the victory of either side.
“Good drill, boys,” the pilus prior said mildly, this time letting the vessel’s communications system do the work. “File-closers and watch clerks’re responsible for getting whoever needs it to the Sick Bay. Rest of you, stack arms and dismissed.”
“Yessir,” repeated Decimus in the hubbub. He was still playing with his sword hilt on the floor. The file-closer from that century clumped over, swearing softly.
“Not bad,” Clodius Afer said to the tribune as men streamed past them. “They’re good. Pollux, they’re the best.”
“Stacking arms” meant carrying all the practice equipment to the wall at the distant end of the Exercise Hall where the smooth gray surface would reabsorb the helmets and body armor, swords and shields. With dismissal as a spur, the men moved as fast as their exhaustion would permit them — and that prevented their muscles from cramping as they would if allowed to cool suddenly and completely after that level of exercise.
“They’d better be good,” Vibulenus answered grimly. “We’ve got to make our play soon, before the ship goes into Transit. And if we try and it doesn’t work . . . they won’t let things be. The Commander won’t.”
“Nobody in the whole fuckin’ legion won’t be willing to try, sir,” said Clodius Afer, flexing his swagger stick gloweringly to the curve just short of breaking. “Nobody said there wasn’t a risk when they swore us in, did they?”