“Let’s get out of here,” Vibulenus said gruffly. The knuckle at least could be cured. It didn’t hurt at all while he was a frog . . . but the scars of that experience, though mental, would never leave him.
“Let’s go find the Sick Bay and see if this —” he pointed to his puffy right hand with the other one “—can’t be taken care of.”
As they walked up the narrow aisle, the tribune in the lead, he continued over his shoulder, “I don’t know why they don’t want us to fight each other. It doesn’t seem to matter even if we —” he hadn’t admitted this even to himself before “—get, get killed.”
“That isn’t true,” said the file-closer in a voice that surprised Vibulenus more for its peculiar thoughtfulness than it did by its content.
“What?” the tribune prompted, pausing in the hallway outside the amphitheater for his companion to come abreast.
Clodius would not meet the younger man’s eyes, however. “Well,” he said, squinting down the corridor as if to estimate its length, “they offered me the centurion’s slot in the Fourth Century. Told ’em I’d think about it. You know, up a rank but down a century, and I’m . . . you know, the guys came through real good today.”
“But Vacula . . . ,” said the tribune, seeing what the non-com meant.
“Yeah,” Clodius agreed. “Vacula’s gone, dead as Crassus. Some others, too. They said — the voice said, you —” He shook his head angrily, trying to clear the nervous mannerism from his speech. “Anyway,” he continued, “they told me it was because his brain got stabbed they couldn’t do a thing for him so they just left him lay. Brains and spines, they say.”
The file-closer shook his head again, this time in puzzlement. “Why d’ye suppose that should be? Brains and spines?”
“Why should any of this be?” Vibulenus answered as bleak awareness descended on him. “I don’t know. But I think —” and the bluntly gleaming spearpoint swelled again as it descended on the eye of his memory “—that Rectinus Falco had heard about brains and spines too.”
He shrugged. “No matter. Let’s find the Medic, and then maybe some food.”
“Right,” said the file-closer. “It don’t bother me so much now things’re starting to get organized.”
Vibulenus’ mouth was open to ask directions from the voice of the ship. He paused and swallowed. For a moment, he tried to pretend he did not understand what the file-closer meant.
“Lead us to the Sick Bay,” Clodius Afer said nonchalantly to the ceiling, where a yellow bead obediently sprang to life.
And the blithe acceptance of their situation which the tribune felt also within his own heart frightened him as much as the spear plunging toward his eye had done.
BOOK TWO
THE FIFTH CAMPAIGN
“Get your fuck —”
KA-BANG! rang Vibulenus’ helmet under the impact of the crossbow bolt.
“—head down!” completed the new commander of the Third Century of the Tenth Cohort, Gnaeus, Clodius Afer, hunching along the rampart.
“Oh,” he added as the tribune rolled out of the sprawl into which the bolt had knocked him, helmetless and recognizable. “Sorry, sir, but one a’ those bastards has the communications ramp like he’d taped it.”
Local auxiliaries, slightly-built bipeds like those who held the fortress with skill and tenacity, began banging shots over the rampart in what was obviously a pointless exercise. The light bolts sparked against the stone walls of the fortress or flew wildly over the crenellations.
It was notable that none of the auxiliaries raised their heads above the earthen rampart which protected them. Their right hands jerked the cocking levers of their repeating crossbows, while their left hands clamped the fore-ends to the fortification to roughly steady the weapons. As the archers’ muscles worked feverishly, the dark green of their skin showed beneath ruffles in the short, almost translucent, gray fur that covered them.
A bolt slightly longer and heavier than those the auxiliaries were shooting — and much better aimed — grazed the timber parapet and thudded into the guard-walk so close to the tribune’s boots that he jerked them closer to the wall. The auxiliaries ducked down again also. A film of greenish poison colored an inch or so of the shaft above the buried head.