“Dress right —” shouted Clodius Afer, his voice as strong and no huskier than it had been when he started bellowing commands. A pause while the junior centurions echoed him, then: “Dress!”
The Tenth Cohort glittered as every man stretched out his right arm to the side, gripping the javelin against his palm with his thumb.
The ranks began to shift to their right as each man edged away from the extended fingers of the man to his left. The motion became increasingly pronounced as the men on the cohort’s right compensated for the few inches that every one of the fifty men to their left had closed up improperly during the march.
Cursing, the pilus prior of Cohort Nine continued the process. The legion wriggled to its right with a peristaltic spasm like that of a slug advancing.
Or a snail; a bronze-armored, steel-fanged snail.
Clodius Afer began striding between the files of his cohort, shouting in what was only partly-feigned nervousness. “Come on you fuckers, what d’ye think this is, a fuckin’ defaulters’ parade? They’ll kill yer fuckin’ asses if you don’t dress those lines! Second rank, shift right, yer not bum-fucking the first rank, you’re ready t’ lock shields with ’em!”
Each legionary stood with three feet of empty space on all sides of him: room to cock back his javelin or to swing his sword without fouling a comrade; room enough to stride forward and lock a shield wall with the rank ahead if the enemy advanced in a phalanx of its own.
It was not quite a parade formation, because irregularities in the ground skewed the array the way dense forest curves over the surface of a hill. But a parade is a purpose unto itself, sterile and emotionless. Here the legion breathed and its spearheads, sharpened as well as polished, quivered with restless animation.
There was still no one — no cavalry, no light infantry, nothing to close the legion’s left flank. The hordes of the enemy would be all over the Tenth Cohort as soon as battle was joined, as sure as dead men stink.
There was a noise from the enemy lines greater than the whisper of equipment. Voices drifted toward the Romans on the light breeze. Warriors holding short staves upright were walking forward from the hostile mass.
Standard bearers, Vibulenus thought, or heralds . . . but it was not until he realized that the warriors were swinging their staves that he understood what the sound was.
There was a rope at the upper end of each staff and, spinning at the end of the rope’s arc, a bull-roarer visible only as a shimmer in the air at this distance. The noisemakers had an angry drone, peevish in the upper registers and distinctly threatening in the lowest bass.
There were at least a dozen of the signallers being advanced from the enemy’s front. They were not — could not be — tuned to identical frequencies, and the disharmonies and near harmonies that resulted raised hairs on the back of the Romans’ necks the way the growl of a big cat could do.
The storm of battle was about to break over this arid plain; and unless there were immediate changes, the legion would be swept away in torrents of its own blood.
“Sir,” said the pilus prior from unexpectedly beside the tribune, “who’s supporting our left flank?”
Vibulenus’ heart jumped when someone else broke into the mental structure he was building and all the delicately-balanced probabilities crashed down into the one gut-certainty of disaster.
“Nobody,” he snapped, wholly an officer and not a man for the moment; a tribune of this legion and by all the gods its leader, whoever the trading guild might appoint to its command. “They’ve gotten greedy, and we’re not going to let ’em get away with it. Order the men to ground their shields and kneel while I straighten it out.”
He strode through the six ranks, oblivious to the looks of nervousness or curiosity which the nearest soldiers flashed him. Just now they existed only as statues, thoughtfully offset to provide Vibulenus a slanted path between them.
“Prepare to kneel!” bellowed Clodius Afer. It was not a standard command, but if he ordered “Prepare to receive cavalry” from the drill manual, the ranks would close up before kneeling with javelins slanted over shields.