A legionary — it should have been a mounted man — jogged across the front. He was coming from the pilus prior, the cohort’s senior centurion. “Ready as ordered, sir,” the man muttered as he passed Vibulenus, but he was on his way to the Commander waiting among his terrible body-guards behind the center of the legion.
The tribune nodded and tugged at one end of his sash, a token of rank like his trailing horsehair crest. Empty rank. He didn’t command anything. It required a minimum of ten years’ bloody service to become senior centurion of a cohort, and at least that — plus family and connections — to become the legate in charge of a legion.
When his newly-formed legion had marched away from Capua with its standards sparkling, the horns and trumpets calling triumphantly, Vibulenus had believed that he was part of Rome’s splendid conquest of barbarians. Mesopotamia and the gilded armor of the Parthian cataphract horsemen had cured him of that mental posturing; and disaster had left nothing behind but his youth, and the empty “oversight” of the left flank which his breeding gained him.
He could probably manage to die heroically, but it was clear that the new commander would care even less about such a death than Crassus would have.
Three cavalrymen trotted from the left flank, their shields slung and their reins spread wide in both hands against the chance of horses slipping and throwing them down between the lines. Vibulenus stamped his right boot to test the footing himself. The hobnails grated a little, but the grass rooted the surface into sod and there was no evidence of shingle to make a horse or armored soldier skid.
But the riders were scouts, not fighters, and they were understandably skittish about the potential problems which they were sent to search out. In battle mode, these men would gallop across the same terrain with shrieking abandon, each of them trying to be the first to come to grips with the enemy. They and their fellows had done just that under the leadership of Crassus’ son, disappearing in pursuit of Parthian horsemen who fled until the Roman squadrons were out of touch and support of the infantry.
It was so easy to blame others for the fact that Gaius Vibulenus Caper was here. And it did so little good.
There was a series of horn and trumpet signals from the right flank, distorted by distance and possibly multiplied by echoes. The thunder from the hostile encampment continued, but it was supplemented by deep-throated shouting.
A pair of vehicles drove from the mass of the enemy. With two axles apiece and a flat bed laden with warriors, the vehicles looked like wagons, but their drivers lashed them on like racing chariots. They were drawn by teams of six beasts which looked more like rangy oxen than like anything else in Vibulenus’ experience, two pair pulling in yokes, and a beast attached only by hames to either side of the yoked leaders. They made for the scouting horsemen with the singleminded determination of gadflies seeking blood.
Mingled horns and trumpets from the command group called the advance. The signallers of the individual centuries picked up the concentus, until the massed call had spread past Vibulenus to the horn of the cohort’s First Century.
“Cohort —” called the senior centurion, his voice audible because he had raised it more than an octave to pierce the bleating signals.
“Century —” the other centurions echoed with greater or lesser audibility, depending on their experience with getting real power behind a shout that was above their normal range.
“Advance!”
Raggedly, because some men did not hear the command and responded to their comrades’ motion, the legion began to stride forward. Most of the men gave a shout, and a few clashed the javelin in their right hand against their shield boss.
The three horsemen were cantering back to their fellows, the task of scouting the intermediate ground accomplished by the enemy. The war carts bounded over irregularities, hurling the half-dozen warriors in the back of each into contortions as they clung to ropes looped around frame members. The vehicles lurched awkwardly where the opposing slopes met at the valley bottom, but there was no gully there and not enough of a bog or watercourse to affect the advance of the legion.