"Gnaeus," said the tribune when he had recovered enough from the grip of panic and the file-closer to speak. "I was down there." He glanced toward the pit, but there was nothing to be seen but rings of couches- more of them filled than before, though some legionaries were beginning to leave the hall. "Down there!"
"Right," said the file-closer. "Me too. Till you, you know, shook me out of it."
Vibulenus started to speak but paused instead with his mouth open, wondering how he could explain to the veteran that he had been a participant in the fantasy struggle, not merely a disembodied viewpoint.
Before he could find the words, Clodius Afer had said, "I was a mouse, myself. Were you? I've always hated slimy frogs. And look, wasn't there a poem about this, the Frogs versus the Mice? I swear I heard some old bastard bellowing it out in the public baths years ago, 'cause he liked what the echo off the tiles did to his voice."
"Let's…" said the tribune before he lost his train of thought while his eyes drifted across the figures reclining in rapt attention on something which did not really hang in the middle of the amphitheater. What would he do if he spotted Falco? He already had his knuckle and his memory to regret from the last time.
"Let's get out of here," Vibulenus said gruffly. The knuckle at least could be cured. It didn't hurt at all while he was a frog… but the scars of that experience, though mental, would never leave him.
"Let's go find the Sick Bay and see if this-" he pointed to his puffy right hand with the other one "-can't be taken care of."
As they walked up the narrow aisle, the tribune in the lead, he continued over his shoulder, "I don't know why they don't want us to fight each other. It doesn't seem to matter even if we-" he hadn't admitted this even to himself before "-get, get killed."
"That isn't true," said the file-closer in a voice that surprised Vibulenus more for its peculiar thoughtfulness than it did by its content.
"What?" the tribune prompted, pausing in the hallway outside the amphitheater for his companion to come abreast.
Clodius would not meet the younger man's eyes, however. "Well," he said, squinting down the corridor as if to estimate its length, "they offered me the centurion's slot in the Fourth Century. Told 'em I'd think about it. You know, up a rank but down a century, and I'm… you know, the guys came through real good today."
"But Vacula…" said the tribune, seeing what the non-com meant.
"Yeah," Clodius agreed. "Vacula's gone, dead as Crassus. Some others, too. They said-the voice said, you-" He shook his head angrily, trying to clear the nervous mannerism from his speech. "Anyway," he continued, "they told me it was because his brain got stabbed they couldn't do a thing for him so they just left him lay. Brains and spines, they say."
The file-closer shook his head again, this time in puzzlement. "Why d'ye suppose that should be? Brains and spines?"
"Why should any of this be?" Vibulenus answered as bleak awareness descended on him. "I don't know. But I think-" and the bluntly gleaming spearpoint swelled again as it descended on the eye of his memory "-that Rectinus Falco had heard about brains and spines too."
He shrugged. "No matter. Let's find the Medic, and then maybe some food."
"Right," said the file-closer. "It don't bother me so much now things're starting to get organized."
Vibulenus' mouth was open to ask directions from the voice of the ship. He paused and swallowed. For a moment, he tried to pretend he did not understand what the file-closer meant.
"Lead us to the Sick Bay," Clodius Afer said nonchalantly to the ceiling, where a yellow bead obediently sprang to life.
And the blithe acceptance of their situation which the tribune felt also within his own heart frightened him as much as the spear plunging toward his eye had done.
BOOK TWO
"Get your fuck-"
KA-BANG! rang Vibulenus' helmet under the impact of the crossbow bolt.
"-head down!" completed the new commander of the Third Century of the Tenth Cohort, Gnaeus, Clodius Afer, hunching along the rampart.
"Oh," he added as the tribune rolled out of the sprawl into which the bolt had knocked him, helmetless and recognizable. "Sorry, sir, but one a' those bastards has the communications ramp like he'd taped it."
Local auxiliaries, slightly-built bipeds like those who held the fortress with skill and tenacity, began banging shots over the rampart in what was obviously a pointless exercise. The light bolts sparked against the stone walls of the fortress or flew wildly over the crenellations.
It was notable that none of the auxiliaries raised their heads above the earthen rampart which protected them. Their right hands jerked the cocking levers of their repeating crossbows, while their left hands clamped the fore-ends to the fortification to roughly steady the weapons. As the archers' muscles worked feverishly, the dark green of their skin showed beneath ruffles in the short, almost translucent, gray fur that covered them.
A bolt slightly longer and heavier than those the auxiliaries were shooting-and much better aimed- grazed the timber parapet and thudded into the guard-walk so close to the tribune's boots that he jerked them closer to the wall. The auxiliaries ducked down again also. A film of greenish poison colored an inch or so of the shaft above the buried head.
"Sorry," muttered Vibulenus, snatching up his helmet which had been ringing softly on the guardwalk where it had fallen. Near the crestholder was a dent with a gouge and a smear of poison in the center of it. The bronze was already beginning to verdigris where the poison touched it. The tribune sucked in his lips and rubbed the metal clean against the turf. "I forgot how damn much that tower overlooks us since they burned us out last."
"This's the sharp end, right enough," the centurion agreed grimly. "We're supposed't' be issued some oxhides't' cover the guardwalk so at least they can't see us so easy from up there."
Vibulenus nodded upward in agreement, then donned his helmet again. The blow had not hurt him as much as it surprised him, but three inches to the side and the quarrel would have been through his forehead.
The tribune's sweat was as cold as the morning air. There were no small mistakes; only times you were luckier than you deserved to be.
There were times you weren't lucky as well, and in the air as a reminder hung hints of the charred ruin of the siege ramp which the present one replaced.
Twenty-seven legionaries had been caught in the conflagration which wrapped the first ramp in flames so hot that corpses could not be recovered, much less reanimated. Hundreds of the local auxiliariesarchers mostly, like these-had died at the same time… but that didn't matter, because they were bound to die some day, finally and irrevocably, unlike the members of the legion.
Unlike Gaius Vibulenus Caper, whose fingers traced the dent in his helmet as he thought and shuddered.
Clodius Afer was thinking along the same lines because the breeze carried a whiff of roast flesh on the cleaner odor of wood smoke. It was there if you knew to sniff for it… and that was as hard for a legionary here to avoid as it was to keep from picking a scab. "Looked so simple," said the centurion.
"This much timber around-" Afer continued as he nodded toward the hills sloping everywhere within his arc of vision, covered with the stumps that had provided material for the siege works "-wasn't even a risk, just hard work muscling the frames into place and backfilling with dirt."