“Well, you know Helvius, sir,” said the centurion. “He gets an idea and you can’t shake him out of it.” He looked around instinctively to see who might be within earshot. No one was. Vibulenus was almost alone in using the stream to wash instead of struggling for position at one of the water carts. Habit. . . . The carts were always there after a battle, so there was no need to search for local water — or even to remember the creek you battled your way across an hour before.
“Pollux and Castor,” the tribune muttered. He was too exhausted to control his bouts of shuddering, and he felt that his body was on the verge of wracking itself to pieces. “Let’s get, get out of here,” he said and began to walk carefully out of the stream, feeling flat stones slide beneath his hobnails.
Clodius offered the younger man an arm in something more than comradeship; though the gods knew, the centurion had been in the hottest part of the fighting. Even if unwounded, he should have been weary to death.
Perhaps he was, but his job wasn’t over after all — and neither was the tribune’s.
Together the soldiers slogged to the bank. Pompilius Niger, who had taken Sixth Century when Clodius got the cohort, was waiting there trying to look as though he were not a conspirator. His hand helped Vibulenus up the knee-high step that had momentarily looked insuperable.
He hadn’t been this wrung out when he stumbled into the creek to cool off. He’d have said that he was getting old if his reflection in the water did not give the lie to that thought.
But he was getting old. His mind knew that, even if his body didn’t.
“All right, what happened?” the tribune said, slapping the front of his armor to shake out dribbles of water trapped between the bronze and his chest. His studded leather apron had a clammy feel as it brushed his thighs. Whatever had possessed him to splash back into the creek?
Most of the enemy who had fallen in the water had been washed away by the current. There was a straggling rank of them just up the bank and beyond it, those who had stumbled at the edge of safety or paused when they thought they had gained it.
There was no safety for those in flight from the legion. Bare backs drew swords the way iron filings slid toward a lodestone.
“The sinkhole where we hid last night?” Clodius said while Niger pursed and unpursed his lips.
“Go on,” prompted the tribune.
The Commander, who had six limbs — arms or legs as he chose to use them at the moment — had sent the Tenth Cohort on a roundabout course to what he had chosen for the battlefield. It had been a nervous journey, with no local guides and only the Commander’s word that the hostile force would not ambush them.
The Commander would lie in an instant, for any reason or for none at all. Vibulenus knew that; but he also knew that the guild would not throw away a tenth of a legion’s strength. The vessel itself and the floating, sentient paraphernalia it sent out in the aftermath of each victory proved that the Commander could have the absolute knowledge of the enemy which he claimed.
That put him one up on Crassus; and they, the survivors of the legion, weren’t the men Crassus had led to disaster either — not any more, not for a long time.
“There was that cave off the back of it,” the centurion was saying. “Some locals tried to hide there with their herd when we come up.”
“And I told you to keep to blazes out of it,” the tribune agreed. “Some of those places go down forever.”
The peasants herded leggy beasts that looked more like donkeys than sheep. Their terror when the cohort blocked passage from the sinkhole was evident in the way they grunted and flicked their ears at one another, but they had nothing to fear.
The soldiers of the enemy were squat figures, somewhat shorter than the Commander’s bodyguards but built along the same lines. The peasantry was nowhere near as bulky, either from race or from diet, and some of the females might even have been attractive if you got used to ears the length of a man’s hand.