The combatants were not Romans and not humans. Epidius was quite right: the tribune was now watching — had nearly become a part of — a battle of frogs and mice. His viewpoint swooped down the line of frogs . . . or almost frogs. The beasts stood upright and their legs were straight instead of splaying outward at the knees the way those of true frogs did.
The scene was without scale. Certainly there was nothing to prove that the facing armies were made up of minute individuals rather than things the size of men. The ground was very marshy, and the broad webbed feet of the frogs were an obvious advantage to them.
Their equipment was crude, however, and it seemed to have been adapted from local vegetation rather than being created by art. Their shields were of pale, heavily-veined leaves whose edges were wrapped but not smoothed to a regular outline. They wore breastplates of darker material which also seemed to be individual leaves; their helmets looked like Phrygian caps but on closer examination — the viewpoint froze even as Vibulenus considered the question — were seashells bound on with grass ropes.
Unlike their feet, the hands of the frogs were not webbed — though they looked strange enough, having only three digits to grip their shields and the long stone-pointed spears with which each warrior threatened the enemy.
That enemy was as surely an army of mice — and not mice — as they were frogs. In contrast to the smooth, mottled-green hide of the latter, the mice toward whom Vibulenus’ unvoiced question slid his viewpoint were covered in brown fur. Their bellies were the same color as their backs and limbs, but the multiple dugs of many of the warriors were so full that they must be females.
The panoply of the mice showed greater artifice, though not necessarily greater efficiency, than that of their opponents. Vibulenus could not tell for sure the material of the spears and shields the mice carried, but they seemed to be ceramic — glazed at the spearpoints and, in a variety of grotesque designs, on the facings of the shields.
The mouse breastplates were of painted leather, framed and cushioned by wickerwork and bound to them with leather thongs. At first glance, their helmets were of leather also, fur side out — but the close inspection which the tribune’s wonder granted him showed that the helms were gigantic nut-shells with the shaggy husks still clinging to them.
Neither army carried edged weapons; and, unless Vibulenus were wrong about the spears of the mice, neither army had any metal even as items of adornment.
The tribune’s point of view swooped up to a godlike perspective from which the armies, beginning to flow together, were blurred into two unities: the individual warriors shrank from man-size to mere colors, a green jelly and a brown jelly, sliding toward one another across a pan of neutral gray.
“Gaius Vibulenus Caper,” said the voice, “you have received the challenge of Lucius Rectinus Falco. Do you accept?”
“What?” blurted the tribune. Below — directly below, not “down” in sense that one looked down from the bleachers onto a gladiatorial combat — the field rang with the cries of the combatants, individually audible when the voice was not speaking in his ears.
“You must accept or not accept,” the voice said tartly. “Do you accept?”
“Yes, damn you, but what —”
And Vibulenus spiraled vertiginously down to the marshy battlefield.
He was no longer watching the battle as he lay on a couch which he felt even if he did not see. The shield on his left side was supported by a strap of woven grass over his right shoulder and across his back. It weighed more than even a full-sized legionary’s shield, and the leaf from which it had been formed was cured to the density of half an inch of oxhide. More awkward still was the breastplate, a harder, thinner leaf whose serrations prodded the skin of his belly when he strode forward.
That skin was green, with a dozen subtle shades ranging from almost black to almost yellow. His toes splayed at each step, giving him better support than his mind expected when it confronted soil so marshy that water stood around the stems of the coarse, knee-high grass.