How did a vole feel when the shadow of a stooping hawk grayed the sunlight?
Human feelings had brought Vibulenus to the gates of the Underworld. There they abandoned him to die or be saved by the chill intellect of command which spared no more emotion for the body it wore than for any other.
The tribune’s muscles worked to thrust him across the gameboard. The sound of moving air and rock grinding lazily against rock seemed only a distant whisper, but it covered all other noise completely as the wall prepared to bury the ground at its foot.
Striding like a distance runner, the body in his arms as disregarded as was his own, the tribune raced toward the mobile gallery. The body of the defender who had bounced off the roof — the only enemy whom Vibulenus had seen within spearlength in all the months of campaign — lay smoldering in his path. He tripped over the corpse and plunged into the open end of the shelter, scarcely aware that he was no longer upright nor that the first crossbar stripped the centurion from his arms with a smashing blow.
Boiling like the surf, stone tumbled across the mobile gallery.
The first impact was from the front, a block ricocheting up from the dead archer whom it had crushed and blended into the soil beneath. The end of the structure lifted as if it had not been a massive burden for twenty strong men some minutes before. As the gallery poised, the remainder of the man-made rockslide worried it like a shark with a gobbet of flesh too large to bolt entire.
Had the gallery been in vertical line with the collapsing wall, the sturdy shelter would have been ground to splinters indistinguishable from the remains of anyone who had chanced to be inside it. Because the thrust of the hollow log kept the wall from tilting outward, the stone fabric crumpled from the bottom when it lost integrity and only then sprang out to cover the ground.
The upper reaches of the wall slipped downward smoothly, even fluidly, while the layers at their base exploded into a fury like that of a waterfall but fed with the inertia of stone. The mobile gallery rushed backwards on the wave front, disintegrating as if its beams were not of four-inch hardwood.
The roof of mud and wicker slid into the siege ramp, compressed the fascines momentarily, then flexed a few feet up the face of the stabilized earthwork. The stones driving the gallery thundered above and across it. A few of them jounced over the lip of the Roman works and careened angrily down the corduroy surface, spreading panic among noncombatants and those legionaries who thought they had gained a place of safety.
Though the stone was dark, the dust into which the great blocks ground themselves rose in a pall as white as wheat flour. It drifted instead of rising on a column of heated air the way the smoke had done as flame gutted the tower.
Beneath that choking, settling shroud of rock died Gaius Vibulenus Caper, military tribune and one-time Roman citizen.
The first thing he remembered was fire.
Not the tower, destroyed by its own defenses — though after a moment he recalled that too, standing like a bloody sacrifice against the pale blue sky.
But all his mind had room for at first was the way his body burned as it was squeezed and rubbed to bits. There had been no sound — or rather, the cosmos had been entirely of sound and the false lights flashing in his brain but not his eyes, so that he could not hear his bones breaking in sequence. He had felt the fractures, though, the momentary slippages and loosenings as one part after another gave up the struggle with inexorable forces.
There had been no pain, then: only fire in every cell.
His name was Vibulenus. He was a soldier, and he was dead.
Everything was muted gray, an ambiance rather than a light. It could have been part of the dream Vibulenus was having since there were no lines or junctions, but he could see his own limbs. Half afraid of even the attempt, he decided to wiggle his toes — and those appendages, deep scarlet like every part of his body that he could see, moved normally.