The fires had burned down. Slats’ tent was leather like all the rest, but the cold light that the Guild bureaucrats used leaked out the seams and underneath the tent walls. It didn’t look like the administrator was going to make trouble over the business this evening. Froggie knew there’d been a risk in killing Sawtooth, but Hercules! he just couldn’t feel in his heart that one barb more or less made a difference.
“Hey, boss-man!” Queenie called in a fluting whisper from the tower protecting the front gate. “Come up, we talk-talk.”
Froggie looked at the night sky. He missed having a moon. In all the places the legion had been, there’d only been half a dozen where the moon was as big and bright as it ought to be. There was no moon at all here.
“Yeah, sure,” Froggie said. He wriggled the pole that served as a ladder, making sure it was solid, then climbed. They’d trimmed a young tree, leaving stubs of branches on alternating sides for steps. The sap of the trees here dried hard and as smooth as glass.
Calling a platform with a waist-high parapet “the gate tower” was bragging a bit, but this was a damned impressive marching camp for a single century to lay out. The Third of the Fourth would survive this business if anybody could.
Of course, they might be in for nothing but a short march and a few days of boredom. Froggie’d been a soldier too long to complain about being bored. There was lots worse that happened.
“This bad shit, boss-man,” Queenie said as she offered Froggie a skin of wine. “We watch out or we get chopped, right?”
“You can break your neck stepping off the curb, Queenie,” Froggie said. Hercules, did everybody think they were all marching off a cliff? He squirted a stream of wine into his mouth like he was milking a ewe.
The girls and the troopers had gotten together pretty quick after the legion stood down from the battle; within a few hours, mostly. A lot of them were widows and orphans, but not by any means all. Females turned to strength as sure as the sun rises in the east; and when the legion was in town, strength spoke Latin.
Queenie spat over the parapet. She said, “Three-Spire a—” Froggie didn’t catch the word, but she mimed squishing something against the platform. “A little bug, you know? He nasty bug serving king, he same-same nasty bug now. You chop him like you chop Sawtooth, boss-man?”
Froggie shrugged and passed the wine back. “No chance, Queenie,” he said. “King boss-man, the blue guy, him love Three-Spire. Me just little boss-man.”
Queenie patted him. “You find way, boss-man. You find way.”
Far off in the night an animal gave a long, rising shriek. It wasn’t a cry of pain because nothing that hurt so much could live to finish the call.
“New girls virgin,” Queenie said unexpectedly. “Feed ’em up meat, they be ready in one day, two day. Want me save them for you, boss-man?”
“What?” said Froggie. Frowning, he took the offered wine and drank deeply. “Oh, Slats’ porters, you mean. So it’s the meat that warms ’em up, huh?”
He hadn’t known that, but he’d seen that the girls on army rations had a lot more life in them than those eating mush in labor teams bossed by male barbs. Sometimes he wondered—he always wondered, every place they went where there were girls—what happened when the legion pulled out for the next campaign. Froggie’d met a cute little Armenian girl in Samosata while Crassus was getting ready to march east. . . .
Froggie sighed. “Naw, me no care, Queenie,” he said.
Queenie finished the wine and clucked contentedly. She turned and fixed Froggie with eyes larger than a human’s and perfectly round. “You no want me, boss-man?” she said. “Queenie too old?”
Froggie thought about it, then reached for the girl. “Naw, Queenie first rate,” he said.
After all, with what they were getting into, he didn’t know how many more chances he’d be getting.
* * *
“What do you think of Kascanschi, Centurion Froggie?” Slats asked. He’d climbed out of his palanquin as soon as they came into sight of the walls.