Vibulenus’s mouth quirked. Nobody in the whole Roman world worked as fast and well as legionaries. Back home, work like this would be done by slaves. Not as well, and much more slowly.
Many of the legionaries were working on the fortifications; twenty-five hundred men stood to arms, in case . . .
A centurion named Pompilius Niger trotted up. He’d been a ranker when the legion left Campania for the East; a ranker, and a neighbor and friend of Vibulenus since childhood, since his father’s farm adjoined the Vibulenii’s estate.
“Found any honey yet?” Gaius Vibulenus asked, smiling slightly.
Niger shook his head. “No, they don’t have any,” he said in frustration. “The wogs, they crush a sort of thick reed and boil the juice. It’s sweet, but it isn’t honey, you know?”
The junior centurion had been trying to find materials to make proper mead since they’d left Parthia. He was a round-faced young man . . . young in appearance, at least; his eyes had little youth left in them, although objectively they hadn’t altered an iota since the Guild decided that their Roman assets were too valuable to be left to weaken with age.
“Anyways, sir,” he went on, his voice growing more formal—business, then. “I wanted to ask you something. There’s a noise over by the northern gates.”
“Noise?” Vibulenus asked.
“Yeah. Sort of a grinding sound. Not really like troops mustering . . . more like traffic. Getting louder, though. So I sent a runner to Rusticanus—” Julius Rusticanus, the legion’s senior centurion, the primus pilus, the “first spear” “—and I thought you’d like to know, anyway.”
Vibulenus nodded; he’d been at loose ends. It was unlikely that men as experienced as Niger would miss anything obvious. He and the centurion began to walk over to the area covering the northern gate of the enemy fortress; there was a road running up to it, and it even had pavement. Not the smooth blocks Romans could have laid. It was rounded rocks from the riverbed, laid close together and pounded down into a lumpy surface that he supposed was better than the bottomless mud this alluvial soil would produce otherwise. . . .
The tribune looked down at the rocks under his feet. The hobnails in his caligulae gritted and sparked on the flint-rich stones, and he remembered . . .
“It’s a breakout!” he snapped, picking up the pace to a trot. “Sound the alarm!”
* * *
“I had seen the reports, of course,” the Commander said, in his neutral too-perfect voice, the voice of a hired teacher of rhetoric or a professional of the law-courts. Nobody spoke Latin like that every day. “But I admit that I am impressed.”
He was fucking terrified, Vibulenus thought, carefully keeping his features blank, not shaped in the derisive grin that his mind felt. He didn’t think that the Commander could read a Roman’s facial expressions, any more than the tribune could make sense of what went on behind the Commander’s face shield. There was no sense in taking a chance, though.
“What was it that enabled you to anticipate the enemy’s actions?” the Commander went on.
The sally had started with the abruptness of an axe dropping—a hinged section of wall that acted as a drawbridge had come down, and a wave of screaming spearmen had come tearing out behind a cloud of arrows and slung stones. That had been a diversion, though it might well have been a lethal one for a sightseer in a blue jumpsuit, if Roman cohorts hadn’t already been falling in in front of him, and more grabbing up stacked shields and javelins along the wall, turning themselves from working parties into fighting men again with the smooth efficiency of a machine turning in a pivot.
From the way he’d reacted, the Commander had known it too. He’d screamed—the sound had come through as its natural guttural bellow, not being words—and crouched reflexively, the claws flashing out from his fingers like straight razors as his mouth gaped and showed rows of serrated teeth like a shark’s.
The “ship” the Guild provided for its Roman assets could swallow waste, litter and spare weapons through its skin. Vibulenus wondered if the Commander’s blue jumpsuit could do the same with bodily wastes released in sudden panic. Not that the smell would stand out here; the windrow of bodies where the locals’ berserk onrush had met the serried ranks of the legion was two deep in places. None were Romans; their wounded were being carried back by the floating turtle or limping along with the help of friends as they walked to the Medic. There weren’t any who weren’t . . . repairable. If they hadn’t been warned, they’d still have won—Rusticanus had been taking precautions, on the theory that turning out for trouble never hurt—but the butcher’s bill would have been heavier. An edge of the chill pride he felt was in his voice as he replied to the Guild’s officer.