A warrior in the back of either cart was banging a mallet against a sheet of bronze slung from a pole. The rumble of changing harmonics explained the greater thunder emanating from the enemy camp.
“Ware!” called Clodius, and the tribune skipped aside as the legion rejoined him at the rate of two paces per second.
There was a slight gap in the frontage between the Third and Fourth Centuries — inevitable because the units dressed ranks within themselves, and useful because it provided a narrow aisle in which the non-coms could scurry between the six ranks for which they were responsible. Vibulenus fell into step between the Third Century file-closer and the centurion of the Fourth, a dull-faced veteran named Vacula whom the tribune had never heard speak a word which was not an order or the response to an order.
“How many do you think there are?” Clodius asked. “Sir?”
Vibulenus was trying to position his round shield. It was lighter and easier to carry than the big oval scutum of the line troops, but a similar piece of equipment had seemed horribly inadequate against the sleet of Parthian arrows. Startled by the question, but openly delighted that someone was treating him as if he had some purpose, he squinted across the valley at the army toward which they strode.
It was like trying to guess how many roses bloomed in the fields beneath Vesuvius, and an honest guess would have been in horrifying contrast to the five thousand, more or less, legionaries bearing down on those opponents.
So instead of blurting, “Thirty thousand, maybe as many as fifty” — the figures that clicked through his mind — the tribune said, “They look like they’re all naked, and only the ones in the chariots have shields.”
They also looked like they were ten feet tall, just like Rufus had said. Well, maybe eight feet tall.
“Yeah, well. . . .” said the file-closer. “At any rate, they aren’t shootin’ arrows over their backs as they ride away, this lot.”
With no more organization than water bursting a dam, and with the suggestion of equally overwhelming force, hundreds of additional war cars charged from the enemy line without appreciably diminishing the mass that remained. The rumble of flexible bronze as they approached had an omnipresence that horns or even proper drums could not have equalled. It was as if the legion were approaching a swarm of bees, each the size of an ox.
The warriors were shouting as their vehicles galloped onward, but their cries were surprisingly high-pitched for all the breadth of their torsos. Plumes of single feathers or perhaps blue-dyed plant fibers trembled stiffly from the sides of each warrior’s helmet.
The naked mass of infantry which remained on the hillslope seemed, when Vibulenus squinted, to be armed with clubs or maces. The warriors in the cars, however, each carried a long spear tipped with the black glint of iron. Some of those who clung to their vehicle with their spear hand brandished huge shields, allowing glimpses of breast-plates and swords or daggers in belt sheaths.
“The chariots that came first,” Vibulenus shouted. He was in effect a rank of his own, a stride behind the leading legionaries and a stride ahead of the second rank, but he was marching in time with the centuries to either side. The strap of his shield was already beginning to chafe the skin of his left forearm, and the unfamiliar effort of holding the piece of equipment advanced was causing his biceps muscles to cramp. “What happened to them?”
Clodius Afer twisted his head enough to look past the cheek-pieces of his helmet at the tribune. He grimaced, a facial shrug because those were the only muscles not bound by armor or clutching equipment. “Not our problem,” he shouted back; and he, like Vibulenus, hoped that was true.
The trees grew more thickly on the lower slopes of the valley. One of them forced the tribune to dodge aside to pass it between him and Clodius. Close up, the tree had even more of a snaky unreality than it and its fellows displayed at a distance in the mist that had already burned away. The bark was segmented into pentagonal scales, and the trunk, nowhere thicker than a man’s thigh, terminated without branches in a single fleshy nodule thirty feet above the ground.