The other miscreant in our group did not run afoul of the Centurions, his crime being the type that goes unreported and never appears in his permanent record. By this time, gentle reader, it should not surprise you when I reveal the identity of this individual, and I recognize that at this point you may have suspicions that I am being somewhat unfair to the man. I assure you that if anything, I am being kind. Didius loved to gamble, but more than he loved to gamble, he loved to win, and was not one to scruple much over how he did it. His favorite game was dice, and his gravest crime was that he was too stupid and greedy to know that it did not take long for others to suspect that his winning streak might not be attributed to the many sacrifices he supposedly made to Fortuna as he claimed. Yet he did have a certain amount of skill, because for the greater part the most that he aroused was suspicion since nobody could quite catch him in the act of cheating, as it were. Until one day in early spring, when his run of “luck” expired, courtesy of an “accidental” jostling of his person just as he was making a throw, a bumping that caused the extra pair of dice he was hiding in his other hand to fall to the ground, followed down immediately by Didius himself. It was only because Romulus and Remus were there to intercede that he was not beaten to death; there are few crimes considered more heinous to Legionaries than cheating a fellow soldier, in any fashion, at just about anything. The only exception to that are attempts made to get out of any kind of extra duties of some sort; the ability to do so is universally admired by every soldier I have met, until you gain the vitus of course. Even then, I found I held a grudging admiration for the ingenuity that some of the men under my command displayed in their attempts to avoid shoveling manure or some such. And it was due to the fact that, as much as we may have despised Didius ourselves, he was one of our tent section that required Romulus and Remus to come to his rescue. Now one might think that, under the circumstances, a man who found himself rescued under such dire straits would express gratitude to his rescuers, and view himself as forever in their debt. Perhaps the fact that Didius expressed no such gratitude will be an indicator that when I speak of him, I am not judging him too harshly. Not only was Didius ungrateful, to hear him tell it the brothers had stopped Didius from exacting revenge for the unfair accusations made against him by thrashing the half-dozen or so men who had set upon him. The fact that his face was massively swollen, his nose now going in a different direction, with the rest of his body covered in greenish-purple bruises, was a contradiction if one were to listen to his words. Apparently, however, he was simply lulling his antagonists into a false sense of security by allowing them to appear to beat him senseless, and was just about to unleash his master stroke counter-attack when the brothers so rudely interrupted. It took the intercession of Calienus to keep the brothers from finishing the job that the other men had started, with both of them making a solemn oath, swearing on Jupiter’s stone that they would never come to his rescue again, no matter what the circumstances. For my part, I must admit that I took some vindictive pleasure in paying particular attention to some of his sorer spots during our weapons drill, in which he had to participate because of an awkward situation, at least for him. Didius could not exactly present himself for the sick and injured list, since the circumstances of his condition would prompt a series of questions that he really had no wish to answer. Despite his protestations of innocence in the matter, Didius was at least smart enough to know that on the face of it the evidence was not in his favor, so there was a relatively good chance that there would be some official punishment. Because the penalty for cheating a fellow Legionary at anything is extremely severe; it is not uncommon for men to be sentenced to death for particularly egregious offenses, Didius’ reticence was understandable. Much later in my career there was a case of a Tesseraurius who stole the money of the men he had been charged with banking and the punishment for him was the same as when a unit is decimated, except that nobody had mixed feelings about beating him to death. Therefore, Didius was forced to perform his normal duties, including giving me a chance to beat him senseless with a wooden sword, something I enjoyed immensely.
Every morning, either in winter quarters or in garrison, starts with a formation, where the orders of the day are announced before everyone goes about their business. The winter had passed, the spring had come and gone, and we still performed our normal duties, with no prospects of action. In short, the situation was disgustingly peaceful. We still did our forced marches twice a month so we maintained a certain level of fitness, but to keep Legions honed to a sharp edge for long periods of time is practically impossible. No matter how hard the Centurions tried, those of us stationed at Narbo lost all of the edge that we gained during the campaign in Lusitania. However, one man was prospering; we followed the rise of Caesar’s career with great interest, jumping onto every scrap of news about his fortunes. Other officers came and went but the army, particularly the 10th, thought of themselves as Caesar’s men, even in those days of inaction. Rarely a day went by where his name was not mentioned, a fact that I imagine the other nobles who were assigned to command us at that time did not particularly care to hear.
It was during our first year at Narbo that Caesar was made Consul, and what is now referred to as the First Triumvirate began ruling Rome, and by extension, my life and those of all of my comrades in the army. Because of the quiet state of affairs, many of the men started relationships with women in the town, and despite marriage not being allowed, they took wives in everything but name. These men were easy to spot, all of them being exceedingly anxious to be secured from duties for the day so that they could rush back to town to be with their women. Naturally, it was not long before the women got pregnant and families began to sprout. These de facto families, no matter what their legal status, would be a regular feature of our lives and the officers almost always turned a blind eye, their only requirement being that the small army that followed the larger one as it marched never impeded the progress of the Legions. Many of these women would help their men carry their loads for them, trooping along behind the Legion marching drag, putting in just as many miles as we did, and in many ways enduring more hardships. As much as I cared for Juno, I was hard pressed to see her living like that, and I was glad that Vibius resisted the temptation to send for her, because I knew that she would come without hesitation.
The second enemy struck towards the end of our first year in Narbo, in September, during the Consulship of Caesar and Bibulus, although for all intents and purposes Caesar ruled alone, since Bibulus despised Caesar so much that he refused to serve with him, prompting the joke that this was the Consulship of Julius and Caesar. An illness swept through camp, a horrible affliction that saw men dying while spewing the most noxious fluids from almost every orifice of their bodies. Even all these years later, I still find myself questioning the Fates about the justice of allowing men to live through battle, only to be struck down by some invisible phantom, denying all that it strikes from the clean death that a soldier deserves. As I have mentioned before our tent section, while suffering from wounds, had escaped the loss of one of us in battle during the campaign against the Lusitani. We were not to escape unscathed from this enemy, however. Remus contracted the affliction, dying after only a few days, at the end deliriously calling for his mother and telling her that he was done with his chores. Romulus sat next to him, clutching his hand and weeping, begging him not to die, while the rest of us frantically made sacrifices to every deity we could think of, all to no avail. The illness raged for weeks, striking fully a tenth of our numbers, and killing well more than half of those afflicted. The doctors and medici did what they could, which was little more than making men as comfortable as possible, with the rest of us searching for anything that would help us ward off the horrible disease. There was a small industry of quacks and false healers who made a small fortune off of all of us, myself included, peddling amulets and potions that they swore would save us. I took to wearing the claw of a hawk around my neck, which a man who claimed to be Greek swore would protect me from the ravages of the disease. While I am of a mind to sneer at this, I am still here many, many years later, so there is a part of me that thinks perhaps it was not such quackery after all.