“Oh, I’m much better than that,” said the female simply as she met his gaze again. Her eyes in the bright illumination were a little too large, a little too round — or were men’s eyes different from women’s, so that he was mistaking as racial details which were only a matter of sex? How long had it been since he had seen a woman?
“I can give you a good time, tribune,” Quartilla went on, not boastfully but with the flat assuredness of Clodius Afer discussing his century. “You and any number of your friends, in ways that no one of your own race could manage.”
She shrugged. The gestures lifted her breasts in brief arcs that damped themselves quickly. Her nipples were small and erect even now. “They aren’t real,” Quartilla said, touching one breast as she gave it a critical glance. “Weren’t — what I was born with, you understand.”
She met Vibulenus’ eyes again, and added with a fierceness she had not before displayed, “A lot of this body’s like that, different, and I know that they — that I don’t think the way I remember I used to. But they started with good material, tribune, and I don’t care — the Ssrange eat their prisoners, except us they sold to the trading guild. I don’t care!”
“Yes, they bought us too,” said Vibulenus, his mouth making conversation while in his mind memories of lust wrestled with awareness of the scaled monster before him. Neither image was a reality, but reality has no emotional weight.
“I think I’d better go now,” he said, and part of him did indeed think that.
Quartilla shrugged sadly and said, “I understand,” as if she possibly did. “The men,” she added, stretching out one plump leg and staring at the toes as she wiggled them, “usually keep the lights down, you know?”
She looked up with as much hope as she was willing to chance having disappointed. “It could be really nice, you know? I’m here to make it really nice.”
“Get me out!” shouted the tribune in desperation, clamping his balled fists against his eyes.
“If —” said Quartilla.
“Out!” Vibulenus screamed. He turned and tried to batter at the door through which he had entered. It was already open, and his fury carried him into a corridor.
He sprawled there, weeping, for some minutes. He was trying to remember home, but the closest he could come to that was yellow-gray dust blowing across the plains of Mesopotamia and within it the deadly shadows of Parthian archers.
Even that memory was better than the ones which crowded it: the tower collapsing with so loud a roar that the sound bludgeoned a man groggy before the stones ground the flesh from his bones; and a green thing with scales and a sad smile, which brought Vibulenus to full sexual arousal as he lay screaming in the corridor, avoided by the soldiers who hurried past on their own errands.
BOOK THREE
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CAMPAIGN
“Sir,” said Clodius Afer, centurion pilus prior and leader of the Tenth Cohort, “I think we’ve got a problem. Three of the boys’ve deserted.”
“Fuck,” said Gaius Vibulenus. He ducked his head and shoulders into the water. The chill shrank his steaming flesh away from his body armor, and the current sent thrilling tendrils of water down his backbone.
Either the stream or the news cooled the tribune more than he expected, because when he raised himself his torso was shivering spasmodically. The swollen yellow sun that had baked them throughout the afternoon’s bloody work seemed now to glance off his breastplate with no more power to warm.
“What do you mean?” Vibulenus demanded as his palms scrubbed fiercely at his unlined, boyish cheeks and forehead. “There isn’t any place to desert to that the crew won’t find them.”
The stream was so clear that the soldiers’ boots could be seen against the gravel bottom. The spillage dripping from the tribune’s face left whorls on the current, grime and sweat, red blood and most especially blood the color of drawn copper. The corpse against the bank, its arm tangled with a root, had bled out so completely that the water tumbling past was as pure as that upstream.