“I’ve seen worse towns,” Froggie replied. “It’ll do, I guess.”
The village was a whole lot bigger than Froggie’d figured. If the barbs lived as tight together as they did in the old capital, there must be nigh onto three thousand of them here. They weren’t all warriors, and a lot of what warriors there’d been had probably joined their king for the battle. Most of those had been feeding the eels for the past three months.
It was still a damned big place for one century to garrison.
The troops remained in marching order, but everybody wore his helmet with the crest mounted. Froggie’s crest was transverse and twice as wide as those of the common troopers. Originally they’d been made of bleached horsehair. These most recent replacements weren’t from a horse’s tail—Froggie hadn’t seen a real horse since Parthia—but they did the job.
The village gates were hung from towers made of irregularly shaped stones mortared together. A mound with a timber stockade on top surrounded the rest of the village. The posts were thicker than those of the troopers’ marching camps, but the wall wasn’t in good repair.
“It looks very strong, Centurion Froggie,” Slats said. “Does it not?”
Froggie snorted. “Give us two hours to build a siege shed and we’ll bore through that sorry excuse for a wall in another ten minutes,” he said.
That was bragging; it’d take a bit longer. Though if wet rot had eaten the posts as bad as it just might have done . . .
After the battle in the bow of the river, the barb king had escaped inside the thick stone walls of his capital. It had taken the legion just two days to undermine them, replace the pilings with props of dry timber, and then set the timbers ablaze. The barbs ran around like a stirred-up anthill when smoke started coming out of the ground, but even then they didn’t seem to realize that the walls were going to collapse into a fiery pit along with everybody who was on the battlements at the time.
The Fourth Cohort was the lead unit through the breach. The barbs were too stunned by the disaster to put up much of a fight, but the troopers still had to kill like a plague to show what’d happen anytime the barbs didn’t do just what the Guild said. The muscles of Froggie’s right shoulder still twinged at the thought of how he’d lifted his sword again and again and again.
The gates of Kascanschi were open. From inside, barbs clacked the flat blocks of wood they used instead of trumpets. A procession of males came out: the six village elders, like enough, and a section of forty soldiers. Froggie felt his muscles tighten, but he hoped nothing showed on his face.
Slats stepped forward and started jawing the village chief, using his lavaliere. Glabrio edged toward Froggie and slid his shield out of the way so he could whisper. He saw it too. Dis, they all did, they were all veterans.
And so were the soldiers who’d just come through the gates.
They weren’t big. One by one they were shorter than the warriors the legion had slaughtered three months before. These troops didn’t move one by one, though: they moved like a team, like disciplined soldiers, and that was all the difference between being sheep and being the butcher.
“They’re a funny color pink,” Glabrio said. “And look, they got axes instead of spears.”
The knives Froggie had seen previously in this place were of brittle iron that he wouldn’t have used for a plow coulter back in Latium. These short-hafted axes had blades of real steel, and the iron-strapped wooden bucklers were a lot solider than the brass-faced wicker that the royal army had died with.
Slats returned to Froggie. “The chief bids us welcome,” he said. Because of the translator, it was hard to tell if Slats was as worried about the situation as he ought to be. “They’ve prepared housing for us in the village temple, the big building just inside the gate.”
Froggie looked around instead of immediately answering Slats or giving the troops an order. For most of the past mile they’d been marching between fields of broad-leafed root vegetables, each growing in a little mound of compost. The area for nearly a bowshot outside the walls wasn’t planted. At one time it must have been cleared for defensive purposes, but for at least a decade it’d grown up in brush.