Ranks of Bronze

All sounds paused, as if the world were drawing in its breath.

Vibulenus did not have to look up to know what was happening, but he could no more forebear to do so than a falling man could fail to scream. The facing of the tower was coming down like a backdrop of painted fabric. The log whose weight had propped the stone curtain was tearing through, causing the halves of the wall to twist outward from the slow rending trajectories which their scale made seem lazy.

How did a vole feel when the shadow of a stooping hawk grayed the sunlight?

Human feelings had brought Vibulenus to the gates of the Underworld. There they abandoned him to die or be saved by the chill intellect of command which spared no more emotion for the body it wore than for any other.

The tribune's muscles worked to thrust him across the gameboard. The sound of moving air and rock grinding lazily against rock seemed only a distant whisper, but it covered all other noise completely as the wall prepared to bury the ground at its foot.

Striding like a distance ru

Boiling like the surf, stone tumbled across the mobile gallery.

The first impact was from the front, a block ricocheting up from the dead archer whom it had crushed and blended into the soil beneath. The end of the structure lifted as if it had not been a massive burden for twenty strong men some minutes before. As the gallery poised, the remainder of the man-made rockslide worried it like a shark with a gobbet of flesh too large to bolt entire.

Had the gallery been in vertical line with the collapsing wall, the sturdy shelter would have been ground to splinters indistinguishable from the remains of anyone who had chanced to be inside it. Because the thrust of the hollow log kept the wall from tilting outward, the stone fabric crumpled from the bottom when it lost integrity and only then sprang out to cover the ground.

The upper reaches of the wall slipped downward smoothly, even fluidly, while the layers at their base exploded into a fury like that of a waterfall but fed with the inertia of stone. The mobile gallery rushed backwards on the wave front, disintegrating as if its beams were not of four-inch hardwood.

The roof of mud and wicker slid into the siege ramp, compressed the fascines momentarily, then flexed a few feet up the face of the stabilized earthwork. The stones driving the gallery thundered above and across it. A few of them jounced over the lip of the Roman works and careened angrily down the corduroy surface, spreading panic among noncombatants and those legionaries who thought they had gained a place of safety.

Though the stone was dark, the dust into which the great blocks ground themselves rose in a pall as white as wheat flour. It drifted instead of rising on a column of heated air the way the smoke had done as flame gutted the tower.

Beneath that choking, settling shroud of rock died Gaius Vibulenus Caper, military tribune and one-time Roman citizen.

The first thing he remembered was fire.

Not the tower, destroyed by its own defenses-though after a moment he recalled that too, standing like a bloody sacrifice against the pale blue sky.

But all his mind had room for at first was the way his body burned as it was squeezed and rubbed to bits. There had been no sound-or rather, the cosmos had been entirely of sound and the false lights flashing in his brain but not his eyes, so that he could not hear his bones breaking in sequence. He had felt the fractures, though, the momentary slippages and loosenings as one part after another gave up the struggle with inexorable forces.

There had been no pain, then: only fire in every cell.

His name was Vibulenus. He was a soldier, and he was dead.

Everything was muted gray, an ambiance rather than a light. It could have been part of the dream Vibulenus was having since there were no lines or junctions, but he could see his own limbs. Half afraid of even the attempt, he decided to wiggle his toes-and those appendages, deep scarlet like every part of his body that he could see, moved normally.

The motion did not even make the pain worse, but the pain was already fiercer than the tribune could have imagined at any time before this awakening.

There was something beneath him, a bench or a floor, but he could not tell where it joined the walls that must surround him. He tried to roll to his feet, screaming and scratching at himself in a fury of frustrated disbelief. He had been somewhere just before he became here, and he could remember nothing of that other place except that he wished he were back in it.

Heat spread over the surface of Vibulenus' body and, like a blanket on a fire, suffocated the pain. His skin rippled as tremors pulsed through the muscles beneath, but that feeling-though disconcerting-was in no way kin to the agony of moments before.

The tribune did not even realize that he had flopped back on the floor-there was no furniture in what must be the room-until he started to get up again. The tension that his muscles had released by trembling left them feeling normal, though extremely weak. The sensation of heat vanished as suddenly as it had come on, and the pain did not return. He stood cautiously.

Instead of a door opening, the wall in front of Vibulenus dissolved completely. The room had shape and dimensions; it was a paraboloid little more than the man's height and twice that on the longer horizontal axis. One end was now open, like an egg topped by a knife, and a man-well, a figure in a blue skinsuit who was not the Commander or the Medic-lounged there with an expression of mild interest.

"C'mon, walk," the figure said, making walking motions with two of the three fingers of either hand. "Do they work or don't they? Let's see 'em move, cargo."

"Where am I?" Vibulenus demanded, walking toward his questioner. He had heard the question clearly-the words were in the flawless Latin spoken by everyone on the vessel except the legionaries themselves. Many of the line soldiers were of Oscan or Marsian origin and had learned Latin as a second language. The tribune's nurse had been a Marsian, and he still framed some thoughts in that ancient Italian language himself…

He was alive, and he was the man he had always been. All he needed to know now was where, in the name of all the gods, Gaius Vibulenus was standing at the moment.

"Where am I?" the tribune repeated at barracks-square volume, striding out of the egg-shaped room in which he had awakened. The room beyond was the yellow-orange of clean flames, a circular hall into whose sidewall bulged eleven man-high convexities-the twelfth was the opening through which Vibulenus stepped.

"Hey, hey there!" yelped the other, skipping back from the tribune. "That's no way to treat the fella who's saved your life, now. Look at yourself and think what ye were before I put the new tissue on ye."

Vibulenus had not been angry, only disoriented-and perhaps as dangerous as the figure in blue seemed to think he was. That thought gave him pause. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, grimacing away the brief mixture of emotions he felt when he saw the whole limb was stained a red which only time would fade.

"Look," the Roman said, feeling for the first time that he dominated a guild employee because of his greater size, "I'm not angry with you, my man, but I need to know where I am. Are you the new Medic?"