Ground water had dissolved a pocket in limestone. When that bubble in the rock had reached the surface, or an earthquake had shaken the area, the roof had collapsed to leave a sheer-sided valley a quarter mile in diameter and a hundred feet deep. The channel cut by the water at one end still ran down into the earth, probably as deep as the stratum of limestone itself.
The floor of the sinkhole was covered with debris from the roof and windblown loess trapped by the sides. Rock fragments, gorse-like vegetation, and quantities of droppings from the animals corraled here made the footing difficult even before the trio of Romans reached the cave.
A hundred yards down its sloping throat, the cave would be pitch dark even at noon on Midsummer’s Day.
“Helvius!” the tribune shouted. The trio could be anywhere, not even within the cave. He stumbled forward. Breaking your neck here in the darkness might be as effectively fatal as having your spine hacked through by a slope-browed swordsman. “Helvius! Will you at least come out and talk to somebody with sense before you do this!”
“Careful here, sir,” said Niger, whose night vision seemed to be better than that of Vibulenus. The throat of the cave dropped away slickly, but broad steps had been roughed into one side. The other side. The sky still looked bright if you looked at it directly, but that was by contrast with the lumpy blackness of everything on solid earth.
There didn’t seem to be any peasants around — the sound and smell of their herds was unmistakable — but that made little difference. When the legion was to work with local auxiliaries, the men mustered out with the ability to speak the necessary languages as long as they kept their helmets on. Here they had been operating alone.
So, for that matter, had the enemy: a force of heavy infantry moving across the face of the land more as conqueror than defender. The politics of what they did at the guild’s behest sometimes bothered Vibulenus, but he never had — the legion never had — enough information to decide whether or not they really agreed with the choices the guild had made.
For that matter, he had never been sure why they were invading Parthia. It had something to do with the Kingdom of Armenia, he’d been told, a Roman ally . . . or with rivalry between Crassus and the partners in his political machine, Caesar and Pompey, if you listened to other opinions. He’d been scared green himself — gods! but that had been a long time ago — but he’d have been just as scared if he were being called up because Hannibal was at the gates of Rome again. Nothing political in fear.
His father might have had doubts about the expedition, but the Vibuleni had made a very good thing out of farming taxes in the Province of Asia and weren’t the people to decry military adventurism in the East. Besides, a family of their stature had a duty to the Republic, to act as exemplars for lesser folk in taking arms to Rome’s glory.
The tribune’s fingers caressed the bone hilt of the sword which he had learned to use so much better after he left Rome’s service than he ever had before.
As for the “lesser folk,” the common legionaries and the non-coms who had fought their way up from that status — so far as Vibulenus could recall, their major concern had been whether the King of Parthia drank from gold cups or hollowed jewels, and which would bring more from the merchants who trailed the army to buy its loot. After a time, they all had more pressing concerns — heat and thirst and the arrows that fell like rain — but those were not political either.
And besides, by then it was too late to matter.
“Decimus!” called the pilus prior, a hand on both Niger and Vibulenus to keep them from trying to descend dangerously farther. The cave had only a slight average slope, but descents when they came tended to be abrupt. “Marcus, Gaius. C’mon and talk for a minute so we don’t fall and kill ourselves, all right? It’s just me, Niger, and Gaius Vibulenus — you know he’s all right. No tricks, just a little talk that can’t hurt nothing.”