“Your folk may have been willing enough to die, Sir Dragon—aye, and brave enough to do it, as well! But it is not the English way to murder our own, and with this—” he raised the pendant “—we’ll not need that piece of meat to take his precious ship, now will we? And with us to hunt the guildsmen, and your folk to hunt Hathori, well—”
His grin bared his teeth as he and the mute dragon stood eye to eye, and then, slowly, the dragon showed its own deadly looking fangs in a hungry grin of its own and it gave a very human nod.
“Then let’s be about it, my friend!” Sir George invited, reaching up to clap the huge alien on the back, and the two of them started down the platform stairs together.
LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
David Drake
A trumpet called, giving the go-ahead to a detachment leaving by one of the other gates of the Harbor. Half of Froggie’s bored troopers looked up; a few even hopped to their feet.
The century’s band of local females roused, clucking like a hen-coop at dinner time and grasping the poles of the handcarts holding the troopers’ noncombat gear. Slats, the six-limbed administrator who Froggie was escorting out to some barb village the gods knew where, clambered into his palanquin and ordered his bearers to lift him.
“Everybody sit down and wait for orders!” Froggie said in a voice that boomed through the chatter. “Which will come from me, Sedulus, so you can get your ass back into line. When I want you to lead the advance, I’ll tell you.”
That’d be some time after Hermes came down and announced Sedulus was the son of Jupiter, Froggie guessed.
Three days after Froggie was born, his father had lifted him before the door of their hut in the Alban Hills and announced that the infant, Marcus Vibius Taena, was his legitimate son and heir. He’d been nicknamed Ranunculus, Froggie, the day the training centurion heard him bellow cadence the first time. Froggie’s what he’d been since then; that or Top, after he’d been promoted to command the Third Century of the Fourth Cohort in one of the legions Crassus had taken east to conquer Parthia.
Froggie’d continued in that rank when the Parthians sold their Roman prisoners to a man in a blue suit, who wasn’t a man as it turned out. A very long time ago, that was.
The girls subsided, cackling merrily. Queenie, the chief girl, called something to the others that Froggie didn’t catch. They laughed even harder.
The barbarians in this place were pinkish and had knees that bent the wrong way. They grew little ruffs of down at their waists and throat, and the males had topknots of real feathers that they spent hours primping.
Froggie’s men didn’t have much to do with the male barbs, except to slaughter enough of them the day after the legion landed that the bottom lands flooded from the dam of bodies in the river. As for the girls—they weren’t built like real women, but the troopers had gotten used to field expedients; and anyway, the girls were close enough.
“Don’t worry, boys,” Froggie added mildly. “We’ll get there as soon as we need to.”
And maybe a little sooner than that. Froggie didn’t understand this operation, and experience had left him with a bad feeling about things he didn’t understand.
Commanding the Third of the Fourth didn’t give Froggie much in the way of bragging rights in the legion, but he’d never cared about that. Superior officers knew that Froggie’s century could be depended on to get the job done; the human officers did, at least. If any of the blue-suits, the Commanders, bothered to think about it, they knew as well.
Froggie’s men could be sure that their centurion wasn’t going to volunteer them for anything, not even guard duty on a whore house, because there was always going to be a catch in it. And if the century wound up in the shit anyway, Froggie’d get them out of it if there was any way in Hell to do that. He’d always managed before.
The howl of the Commander’s air chariot rose, then drummed toward the gate. Froggie stood, using his vinewood swagger stick as a cane.