“Now you can get your thumbs out, troopers!” he said in a roar they could hear inside the huge metal ship that the legion had arrived on. Froggie was short and squat—shorter than any but a handful of the fifty-seven troopers in his century—but his voice would have been loud in a man twice his size.
The troopers fell in with the skill of long practice; their grunts and curses were part of the operation. Men butted their javelins and lifted themselves like codgers leaning on a staff, or else they held their heavy shields out at arm’s length to balance the weight of their armored bodies as their knees straightened.
They wore their cuirasses. They’d march carrying their shields on their left shoulders, though they’d sling their helmets rather than wear them. Marching all day in a helmet gave the most experienced veteran a throbbing headache and cut off about half the sounds around him besides.
Froggie remembered the day the legion had marched in battle order, under a desert sun and a constant rain of Parthian arrows. They all remembered that. All the survivors.
Besides his sword and dagger, each trooper carried a pair of javelins meant for throwing. Their points were steel, but the slim neck of each shaft was soft iron that bent when it hit and kept the other fellow from pulling it out and maybe throwing it back at you. After you hurled your javelins it was work for the sword, and Froggie’s troopers were better at that than anybody who’d faced them so far.
Slats stood on his two legs with his four arms crossed behind his back. He’d travelled in the same ship as the legion for the past good while. Slats wasn’t a Commander any more than Froggie was, but he seemed to have a bit of rank with his own people. Like all the civilians who had to deal with the barbs, Slats wore a lavaliere that turned the gabble from his own triangular mouth into words the person he was talking to could understand.
“The bug’s been around a while, right?” murmured Glabrio, a file-closer who could’ve had more rank if he’d been willing to take it. Though Slats looked a lot like a big grasshopper, he had bones inside his limbs the same as a man did.
“Yeah, Slats was in charge of billeting three campaigns ago,” Froggie said. “He’s all right. He’d jump if a fly buzzed him, but seems to know his business.”
Glabrio laughed without bitterness. “That’s more’n you could say about some Commanders we’ve had, right?” he said.
“Starting with Crassus,” Froggie agreed.
Froggie’d stopped trying to get his mind around the whole of the past; time went on too far now. Little bits of memory still stuck up like rocks in a cold green sea. One of those memories was Crassus, red-faced with the effort of squeezing into his gilded cuirass, telling the Parthian envoys that he’d explain the cause of the war at the same time as he dictated terms in the Parthian capital.
The Commander’s flying chariot came over a range of buildings. The guards in the gate tower here, a squad from the Ninth Cohort, leaned over the battlements to watch. One of them made a joke and the others laughed. Glad they weren’t going, Froggie guessed.
The Harbor, the Commander’s city across the river from what had been the barb capital, had started as a Roman palisade thrown up half a mile out from the huge metal ship from which the legion had landed. The open area had immediately begun to fill with housing for civilians: those from the metal ship and also for barbs quick to take allegiance with the new masters whom Roman swords had imposed.
Glabrio must’ve been thinking the same thing Froggie was, because he eyed the barbs thronging the streets and said, “If anybody’d asked me, I’d have waited till I was damned sure the fighting was over before I let any of the birds this side of my walls. The men, I mean. They strut around like so many banty roosters.”
“Next time I’m having dinner with the Commander,” Froggie said sourly, “I’ll mention it to him.”