For a moment the tribune could not move. His torso crackled with dry yellow fire, and he could not tell whether or not he was breathing.
The patter of stones and startled oaths brought Vibulenus around to present awareness. He remembered where he was a moment before his shield slapped him, lifted by a foot that trampled its inner rim. Men were striding past, on their way to finish a battle and another native enemy. The tribune was debris in their way, to be avoided if possible because he had been a comrade — but an obstacle nonetheless to men who would prefer to save their remaining energies for the foe.
“Sir, y’all right?” demanded a soldier who took Vibulenus’ feeble attempts to shrug off his shield as a request to be lifted. Because the man — he was Titius Hostilianus; the whole cohort must have shifted to its new front after all — had only one free hand and that after dropping his sword, he jerked the tribune brutally into a sitting posture. “You all right?” he repeated anxiously.
Vibulenus let his shield slide off his left arm and quiver against the soil on its concave face. “I’m — Pollux. . . .” He had a bruise beneath his ribs where his diaphragm had thrust against his bronze armor in desperate attempts to draw air into his lungs.
“I’m fine,” he said, straightening to keep the cuirass from pressing flesh already abused. “Gimme . . . you know, help me up.”
Suddenly the two men were in the wake of the battle again. They were alone on trampled gravel with discarded equipment, bodies crumpled like waste rags, and a few legionaries hobbling but determined to catch up with the action despite their wounds.
It felt amazingly good to stand up again. He could breathe without his equipment pressing in ways that made his lungs scream . . . but without the legionary’s steadying arm, Vibulenus could not have stayed upright.
The sky was thunderous with the trading vessel’s descending bulk, and the body-recovering tortoise already loomed over a shingle ridge in the direction of the legion’s own ship.
Vibulenus nodded his companion forward; it would be pointless to try to talk until the trading vessel was grounded and silent. Did their own ship sound like that when it landed and took off. . . ?
The tribune’s spur-of-the-moment response to the encircling native army had been successful beyond his conception. All Vibulenus had intended to do was to block the enemy’s flanking motion and take the pressure off the portion of the legion which already had screaming warriors on three sides.
But the soldiers in the rear ranks, though leaderless, were no cowards. They had turned defensively to meet a threat from what should have been the direction of safety. When the cohort swept past them in formation, they fell in behind the attack and multiplied its weight. Warriors, checked by the resistance of the command group, fled the rush to heavy infantry as abruptly as they had attacked. Most threw away their meager equipment. Those who did not were hacked down atop it as legionaries caught any who were in the least burdened.
And all the time, the legion’s original front continued to butcher the natives before it, though swords grew dull and arms ached with the motions of slaughter.
Falco lay on his back, but his head was turned to the side by the weight of the javelin’s shaft. His remaining eye had rolled up in the socket as blank and white as that of an unpainted statue, and his face was frozen into an expression of terrified disbelief.
“Wonder if he saw it coming,” said the surviving tribune in a normal voice that not even he could hear over the roar of the descending trader.
Probably Falco hadn’t. You don’t really see anything in a panic like that, only the image of fear your mind creates for you. The image could have been anything, a warrior or the gravel as his mount fell or even the enveloping fury of a laser putting paid to a deserter’s account.
Death was a point of blue steel, its edges polished smooth by a Roman hand that morning.