The tall Roman said nothing. He was not even sure what he thought, except that there was a block of stone in his stomach as large as Etna and as cold as February dawn.
“It’s mostly just the humanoid ones, you know,” said Quartilla in a nervous attempt at reassurance.
“I’ve got to go,” said Vibulenus with the clarity that resulted from his mind forcing words through lips from which it had become disassociated.
“Yes,” she said, though he was not hearing her because now his entire body was stone. “And be careful, Gaius.”
The tribune’s intellectual part marveled that his body began to run toward the opening in the hall without him needing to direct the tensing and stretching of each separate muscle. Bodies were wondrous things. Minds were what got men into trouble.
He caught up with the rear rank of the Tenth Cohort just as they strode into the chill sunlight.
The sun was a green dot, low enough in the sky to cast the shadows of the enemy array halfway across the stony field to the Roman lines. Vibulenus shivered.
“Funny how it looks different depending on where you are when you see it,” Clodius Afer muttered, to himself but with a sideglance at the tribune. “The sun, you know. Stars too, it seems sometimes.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed that,” said Vibulenus, wondering how far the Commander was going to march them across the front of a hostile army. For that matter, who in Hades was going to close their flanks? Even in extended order, the legion formed too narrow a front to match that of the mass slowly accreting toward the east.
Hercules! there were a lot of the bastards.
“Really wouldn’t mind bein’ back home,” said the pilus prior in what was almost a whisper.
“Yeah,” said Gaius Vibulenus, who did not trust himself to say more.
The ground was of gravel averaging about the size of walnuts: unattractive, but solid footing. Hobnails sparked on it as the legion tramped along in a column only six ranks wide. The normal front rank was at the moment the left flank of the column, while the file on the right side would form the rear rank when the legion halted and faced left — toward the east and the enemy a half mile distant.
Unless the enemy attacked while the legion was still moving sideways. That wouldn’t be a disaster — they were veterans, after all. But it would be one more cursed thing along with being outnumbered ten to one and being commanded by a kid who didn’t know his mouth from his asshole.
A horn blew.
“Cohort —” roared the pilus prior.
“Century —”
One trumpet, that carried in the command group, sounded and all the other trumpets in the legion joined the piercing note.
“Halt!” bellowed the centurions, and the legion crashed motionless. Sparks shot from beneath boots and from the pointed iron ferule of the javelin each soldier carried in his right hand.
The ground looked flatter than the Commander’s description of it (“rolling”) but the tribune could not see the left flank of the enemy when the halt gave him leisure to observe them. In fact, the Commander had marched them so far across the front that the entire eastern horizon was filled with a line of shields whose garish colors were muted by the light behind them.
All the vegetation the tribune could see was the same variety, a gray-skinned plant whose center was a squat trunk the size and shape of a large wine jar. A dozen leaves two handbreadths wide and as much as twenty feet long trailed across the shingle from each trunk, covering much of the ground despite the sparseness of individual plants. The legionaries did surprisingly little damage when they trampled the leaves with their heavy boots, but the cool air filled with an odor like that of bergamot.
There did not seem to be any animal life except the other army. The region raised a right plenty of warriors, if it did nothing else.
“Cohort —”
“Century —”
“Left . . . face!”
Scrunch — crash! as slightly over four thousand men turned on their left heels, then slammed their right boots down in unison. Their capes and the crests above their helmets waved like the lovely, languid fins of a reef fish swinging into position to strike. Vibulenus looked at them, turning his back on the enemy, and his heart thrilled within him. He was no longer afraid.