Ranks of Bronze

The Commander would lie in an instant, for any reason or for none at all. Vibulenus knew that; but he also knew that the guild would not throw away a tenth of a legion's strength. The vessel itself and the floating, sentient paraphernalia it sent out in the aftermath of each victory proved that the Commander could have the absolute knowledge of the enemy which he claimed.

That put him one up on Crassus; and they, the survivors of the legion, weren't the men Crassus had led to disaster either-not any more, not for a long time.

"There was that cave off the back of it," the centurion was saying. "Some locals tried to hide there with their herd when we come up."

"And I told you to keep to blazes out of it," the tribune agreed. "Some of those places go down forever."

The peasants herded leggy beasts that looked more like donkeys than sheep. Their terror when the cohort blocked passage from the sinkhole was evident in the way they grunted and flicked their ears at one another, but they had nothing to fear.

The soldiers of the enemy were squat figures, somewhat shorter than the Commander's bodyguards but built along the same lines. The peasantry was nowhere near as bulky, either from race or from diet, and some of the females might even have been attractive if you got used to ears the length of a man's hand.

"He's been wanting to get away for a long time," Niger interjected. "He even said it to you, sir. He didn't think it was leading anywhere."

"Did he figure he was going to be consul if we got back home, then?" Vibulenus snapped.

His anger was always close to the surface now. Here it had the advantage of sending a surge of warmth through his shaking limbs. The willowy shrubs fringing the creek had been trampled flat or leafless during the fighting. Their bare silhouettes marked but did not block the huge sun which was bloating into a red oval on the horizon.

"If we were home," the tribune said, arguing with himself rather than his listeners or even his memory of Decimus Helvius, "he'd have died on campaign, or on a farm. Now, well, there's fewer choices but the payoff doesn't have to be anytime soon." He looked up from the hands he had clenched in front of him.

"He could have raised sons," said Clodius simply.

"Well, he can't fucking do that here either, can he?" the tribune blazed. "If we ever get back somewhere I recognize or somebody recognizes, then we'll talk about ransom or maybe even ru

The stars above them as they bivouacked in the sinkhole the night before had proved to anyone who cared to understand that they were very for from home indeed.

The battle had gone according to the Commander's desires and perhaps even his plan-though probably not. The hostile force had marched straight toward the sinkhole, apparently intending to laager a camp there, instead of arraying themselves against the nine cohorts which were counterfeiting the entire legion.

That wasn't by plan either: the enemy was moving in utter ignorance. Their scouting was quite as abysmal as that which led Crassus' army, and so many Roman armies before his, into disaster. Though Vibulenus had lived through a major intelligence failure, it was not until he became used to working for the guild that he realized how valuable knowledge of hostile dispositions could be.

That didn't help when you were in command of four hundred men, and almost ten thousand heavily-armed opponents were headed for you.

"I thought I saw Helvius during the fighting, though," the tribune said in puzzlement. He fingered his dripping scalp and remembered that he needed to pick up his helmet, tossed to the stream edge when he decided to duck himself. No need to look for his shield: it had been literally hacked to splinters by the swords and axes of the enemy.

"Oh, he wouldn't desert us," said Niger in real surprise. "Nor Grumio and Augens neither. But afterwards, I saw them jogging back toward the sinkhole and I knew what that meant." He paused, then added, "I was looking for bees, you know."

"That's who the others are, then?" Vibulenus asked struggling with the pin under his right shoulder that would unlatch his body armor. It caught with an inch or more still within the interlocked tubes of the breast and back plates. "Grumio and Augens? And you think they'll try to hide in the cave in the end of the sinkhole."

"Yeah, that's right," said Clodius.

"Here, I'll get it," said Niger, reaching for the recalcitrant pin with short, strong fingers. His hands and forearms were drenched with alien blood that fell deeper into orange and red as it dried and scaled away.

"Leave it," said Vibulenus, batting away his friend's hand when he had meant only to block it with his own. "Let's go find the cursed fools before the crew decides it has to."

The little Summoners with blue beacons atop were begi

The enemy's course had eliminated any chance of striking their army from the rear while they were heavily engaged with the rest of the legion. To cower in the sinkhole would have meant massacre by missiles hurled down unanswerably from the rim.

Vibulenus had marched the cohort out to a hillock with enough wood to shade them. They stood there, bristling like a bronze-flanked hedgehog, while the hostile force broke against them in furious waves. The legion, double-timing to the clash of weapons regardless of the heat, smashed into the attackers' rear with nine times the force and a hundred times the effect that the Commander had pla

The tortoise which chose the badly wounded and the repairable slain was still hovering over the hill the Tenth Cohort had defended.

"They wanted us to come along, too," Niger blurted suddenly.

The older centurion struck him a fierce blow in the ribs with the heel of his hand, driving the breath out despite the leather-backed mail shirt. "Shut up and move," he growled.

"Why didn't you?" the tribune asked, pretending that he had not felt an impulse to slap both the centurions for hiding the plan from him. They of all the men in the legion should have known better!

"Sir," said Clodius Afer in the embarrassment the tribune had hoped to spare him by ignoring the dereliction, "we thought we'd talked 'em out of it. And you had a lot on your mind just then. We all did."

"Don't know what I could've done to change their minds if you couldn't," Vibulenus said. Nor did he, now that he thought about it, which made his initial fury all the sillier. He grew angry too easily, now. He hadn't always been like that.

The skirted another straggling pile of bodies, all of them hostiles when alive. The victims wore helmets and most had, besides their ironbraced shields, body armor: scales sewn to leather, or a plate (often cast in a fanciful shape, bestial or geometric) strapped to their broad chests. The few who fought naked did so as a statement of courage like the Celts, charging at the front of the army and gnashing their teeth as if they intended to gnaw through the Roman line.

Hie enemy had been ill informed and ill commanded- all the chiefs, bright with gold armor and capes of brilliant scarlet, had been in the front rank, facing the lone cohort, when the remainder of the legion began butchering the force from behind. But the enemy had never been negligible, soldier by soldier, and there was Death's own plenty of them.

Without the volleys of javelins which fouled their shields and dismayed troops unfamiliar with missiles of such weight and accuracy, the native army might even have been able to reform after the first shock had worn off. It would have been a tough fight for the legion; and just possibly a losing fight.