The thunder from the enemy camp ceased. Legionaries from the right flank were climbing over the low earthen wall, unresisted by those within.
Vibulenus tried to stagger forward in pursuit of the enemy. Someone grabbed him by the left shoulder. When the tribune attempted to brush off the contact in single-minded concentration on his task, he found that he had a nasty wound in the left biceps which he could not remember receiving.
All the strength and determination drained out of the young tribune. He slipped into a sitting posture on the ground. The lower edge of his breastplate gouged him as he slumped, but at the moment he did not have the intellect to care or the energy to do anything about the discomfort.
“That’s right, boy,” said Clodius Afer, releasing Vibulenus’ shoulder and sprawling down onto the ground himself now that he had stopped the younger man. “We’ve done our job — leave the rest to those as are fresh.”
The file-closer took off his helmet and gestured with it at the rear ranks of the legion streaming on in distant pursuit of the enemy. The legionaries would not catch many of their naked foes, but their pressure would keep the enemy from regrouping and launching an attack on men exhausted by victory. “You get so tired,” Clodius went on musingly, “you run right up on a spear and you don’t know you’ve done it. Got to know when to stop, boy.” He began to massage the back of his neck. Vibulenus could see the skin there had been scraped when the hostile mace drove down the helmet edge.
The tribune looked at Clodius. The younger man’s vision had, since he sat down, been an apathetic blur for want of brain capacity to process what he was seeing.
Now the non-com’s face sprang into sharp focus. The skin was flushed, and ghostly red and white outlines remained from the pressure of the helmet rim and cheek pieces during the battle.
Clodius’ eyes were open. They held no expression, but the crow’s feet at their corners belied the youthfulness suggested by the man’s thick black hair.
The file-closer was breathing through his mouth, though the breaths were controlled and not the gasping spasms which thrust Vibulenus’ ribs against the inside of his body armor. The non-com had the look of an ox in the traces, tired but stolid and immensely powerful.
The tribune remembered the way Clodius had struck Rufus as the legion deployed. He realized now that the veteran had known too well what the next hours would be like, and his knowledge had made him savagely intolerant of lapses in discipline.
Vibulenus glanced at his sword. Fresh, the blood on it had looked normal enough; but as the fluid dried, it took on a purplish sheen. His face stilled to hide his awareness that his right arm to the elbow was covered with the same inhuman fluid, Vibulenus began to wipe the flats of his weapon on the grass and gritty soil. His left arm was too stiff to use, and when he tried to move it, the scab and exposed muscle crackled painfully.
“What’s that?” demanded Clodius Afer in amazement, his fingers hesitating in the midst of releasing the laces that held the shoulder straps to the front of his mail shirt.
The tribune shifted his whole body to follow Clodius’ gesture, finding as he did so that it was much more comfortable to be facing back down the slope anyway. Coming toward them was a device that resembled a piece of siege equipment. It was circular and turtle-humped, twenty feet in diameter and as high at the center as a man standing. The tortoise-like object was a saturated blue in color, and — though this might have been a trick of the angle — it appeared to move by drifting a foot or more above the ground.
“I don’t know,” Vibulenus admitted. He did not have enough emotion left to be concerned. “Maybe it’s something like what they loaded us onto,” And had later marched them out of, though neither he nor any member of the legion to whom he had talked could remember anything about the intervening period. “A boat.”