“Yes it is, by the gods. I will be damned. I never thought he’d let the legion fight its first real battle without him there to mother his chicks.”
Ainsley raised his eyes, looking at a greater distance. In the valley far below, the legion was forming its battle lines against the still more distant enemy.
“How soon?” he asked.
Gaius glanced at the valley. His experienced eye took only seconds to gauge the matter. “Half an hour, at the earliest. We’ve got time, before we have to go in.”
The horseman was now close enough for Ainsley to see him clearly. It was definitely Clodius Afer.
Fifteen minutes later, the former centurion stamped his way up the narrow staircase leading to the crenellated wall where Vibulenus and Ainsley were waiting. His scarred face was scowling fiercely.
“I couldn’t bear to watch!” he snarled. He shot the historian a black, black look. “I hold you responsible, Ainsley. I know this whole crack-brained scheme was your idea.”
The centurion strode to the battlements and pointed theatrically toward the valley. “In less than an hour, thousands of witless boys-and girls, so help me!-will lie dying on that field. Crushed under the heels of their pitiless conquerors. And it will all be your fault.”
He spit (theatrically) over the wall.
Ainsley’s reply was mild. “It was the Poct’on’s idea, Clodius Afer, not mine.”
“Bullshit. Fludenoc and the other Gha just had a general plan. You’re the one put flesh and bones on it-I know you were!”
There was just enough truth in that last charge to keep Ainsley’s mouth shut. Vibulenus filled the silence.
“So we’ve no chance, Clodius Afer? None at all?” The placid calmness of his voice seemed utterly at variance with the words themselves.
“None,” came the gloomy reply. “Might as well put sheep-lambs-up against wolves. You should see those frightful brutes, Gaius! Fearsome, fearsome. Ten feet tall, at least, maybe twelve. Every one of them a hardened veteran. I could tell at a glance.”
Gaius shook his head sadly. “Such a pity,” he murmured. “Throwing away all those young lives for nothing.”
He pushed himself away from the wall, shrugging with resignation. “Well, there’s nothing for it, then, but to watch the hideous slaughter. Come on, Robert. They should have the scanners in the keep set up and running by now. We can get a much better view of the battle from there.”
As he strode toward the stairs, he held up a hand toward the centurion. “You stay here, Clodius Afer! I know you won’t want to watch.”
The centurion sputtered. Ainsley stepped hastily aside to keep from being trampled as Clodius Afer charged past him.
The room in the keep where the viewscanners had been set up was the banquet hall where the local clan chiefs held their ceremonial feasts. It was the largest room in the entire castle, but, even for Romans, the ceiling was so low that they had to stoop slightly to walk through it. Ainsley, with the height of a modern human, felt like he was inside a wide tunnel.
The poor lighting added to his claustrophobia. The natives normally lighted the interior of the castle with a type of wax candles which human eyes found extremely irritating. So, for the occasion, they had decided to forgo all lighting beyond what little sunlight came through the narrow window-slits in the thick walls.
“I still say we could have put in modern lighting,” grumbled Vibulenus, groping his way forward. “Temporarily, at least. The Guild command posts always used their own lighting.”
“We already went through this, Gaius,” replied Ainsley. “The Federation observers are going to watch us like hawks. Especially here, in our new Guild’s first campaign. They’ll jump on any violation of the regulations, no matter how minor-on our part, that is. They’ll let the established Guilds cut every corner they can.”
“You can say that again,” came a growling voice from ahead.
Peering forward, Ainsley saw Captain Tambo’s face raising up from the viewscreen.
“Come here and take a look,” grumbled the South African. “The Ty’uct are already deploying their Gha. The battle hasn’t even started yet, for Christ’s sake-and they’ve got plenty of native auxiliaries to begin with. They don’t need Gha flankers.”
Gaius reached the viewscreen and bent over.
“That’s it!” cried Clodius Afer. “Gha flankers? The legion’s doomed!”
Vibulenus ignored the former centurion’s dark prediction. Silently, he watched the formations unfolding on the large screen in front of him.
After a minute or so, he looked up and smiled. “Speaking of Gha flankers, you might want to take a look at this, Clodius Afer. After all, it was your idea in the first place.”
The centurion crowded forward eagerly. “Did Fludenoc and his lads move up?”
He stared at the screen for a moment. Then, began cackling with glee. “See? See? I told you those stinking hyenas were just a bunch of turbo-charged jackals! Ha! Look at ‘em cringe! They finally ran into something bigger than they are. A lot bigger!”
Ainsley managed to shove his head through the small crowd and get a view of the screen.
“I will be good God-damned,” he whispered. He patted the former centurion on the shoulder. “You’re a genius, Clodius Afer. I’ll admit, I had my doubts.”
Clodius Afer snorted. “That’s because you modern sissies never faced war elephants in a battle. The great brutes are purely terrifying, I’m telling you.”
“As long as they don’t panic,” muttered Gaius.
“They won’t,” replied Clodius Afer confidently. “These are that new strain the geneticists came up with. They’re really more like ancient mammoths than modern elephants. And they’ve been bred for the right temperament, too.”
He pointed to the screen. “Besides, the Gha know just how to handle the damn things. Watch!”
The scene in the viewscreen was quite striking, thought Ainsley. The main body of the Ty’uct army was still milling around in the center of the field, whipping themselves into a frenzy. On the flanks, Gha bodyguards had pushed forward on their “turbo-charged” giant quasi-hyenas. But they were already falling back before Fludenoc and the other Poct’on members who were serving the legion as a special force. There were thirty-two of those Gha, all mounted on gigantic war elephants, all wielding the modified halberds which human armorers had designed to replace the traditional Gha maces.
The Poct’on warriors loomed over their counterparts like moving cliffs. The giant “hyenas” looked like so many puppies before the elephants. Bad-tempered, nasty, snarling puppies, true. But thoroughly intimidated, for all that. Despite the best efforts of their Gha riders, the hyenas were slinking back toward their lines.
Ainsley could hardly blame them. Even from the remoteness of his televised view, the war elephants were-as Clodius Afer had rightly said-“purely terrifying.” These were no friendly circus elephants. They didn’t even look like elephants. To Ainsley, they seemed a perfect reincarnation of mammoths or mastodons. The beasts were fourteen feet high at the shoulders, weighed several tons, and had ten-foot-long tusks.
They also had a temperament to match. The elephants were bugling great blasts of fury with their upraised trunks, and advancing on the hyenas remorselessly.
“Jesus,” whispered Tambo, “even the Gha look like midgets on top of those things. They seem to have them under control, though.”
“I’m telling you,” insisted Clodius Afer, “the Gha are wizards at handling the brutes.” He snorted. “They always did hate those stinking hyenas, you know. But with elephants and Gha, it was love at first sight.”
Tambo glanced up. “Whatever happened to their own-uh, ‘hyenas’? The ones they had on the ship they seized?”
Gaius whistled soundlessly. Clodius Afer coughed, looked away.