Ranks of Bronze

"Found my sword," Vibulenus said, drawing the weapon an inch or two from the sheath to indicate it. He had cleaned the blade as soon as he had leisure and the opportunity… using Falco's sash as a wiping rag. He did not have a stone to resharpen the steel. That would be done within the ship-by the ship, perhaps- after the tribune stacked the weapon with the rest of his equipment in the hall to the Sick Bay. "What have you got? Teeth for a necklace?"

Some of the men had been doing that lately. The ship stayed ripe with the miasma of putrefying alien flesh for a week or two after each of the past several battles.

"Better, sir," said Niger with a grin. He patted his bulging leather knapsack. "I found honey. Near enough!"

A bright yellow car howled past a hundred feet in the air. Crackling discharges played in its wake. Vibulenus' mouth opened and his body trembled between the choice of fight or flight… but the sizzling corona was not a weapon, only a sign of someone from the trading vessel headed in a great hurry toward the soldiers' destination-their ship.

The legion's transport always looked mountainously huge when the Romans straggled back to it; but even after so many battles, Vibulenus had no clear picture of what the vessel looked like when they disembarked. It was usually dark then, near dawn; and the ship was behind them-but it would require only a glimpse over a shoulder as he marched out…

Battle was still a matter of anticipation. Every time, even though there had been so many, even though the fantasy fights in the Recreation Room had multiplied reality by a score of visions that seemed real while they were being dreamed. Neither battle nor sex brooked any rival when they had engaged a man's emotional attention.

"Now where in this place d'ye figure to find honey?" Clodius Afer was asking with a sweep of his arm. "I've seen drill fields as looked like a garden compared to this."

"Found," said the other centurion. He paused beside the barrel stem of a plant whose spreading leaves had been trampled to rags by hundreds of sets of hobnails. Kneeling instead of bending, so that the buckled lid of his knapsack remained level-it was not fluid tight-he stabbed the stem with his dagger and made a quick circular motion as if he were boning a ham.

The blade withdrew along with a plug of the stem. Behind it oozed a thick green fluid in such quantity that it must have come from a reservoir instead of being intracellular sap.

"See?" said Niger with muzzy brightness. He wiped his blade with an index finger and stuck his tongue between blackened, swollen lips to lick the green sap. "Just like honey."

"I'll take-" said Vibulenus, pla

"I'll take a taste," the tribune said, dipping his own fingertip into the cavity rather than licking the digit which Niger offered him. The sap tasted sweet… and perhaps it even tasted like honey. The last time Vibulenus had tasted honey was too distant in time and incident for him to remember.

The sticky fluid had a smell like old bones, however, which he doubted had been true of honey.

"Well," said Vibulenus. He avoided the grimace which would have been insulting, but he wiped his finger carefully on the pebbles to cleanse it of the vile goop. "I wish you luck with your mead. It'll be… interesting, you bet."

"Wonder if that was the Commander bein' brought back?" suggested Clodius Afer as he shifted his loot. "Wasn't the tortoise picked him up, I hear, it was some liltle yellow bug from the trader. Like that one went past."

The expression on the pilus prior's face hinted that he wished he'd taken something less bulky, perhaps the spi

Vibulenus looked at his friend, trying to remember how he had thought of Clodius when he first knew him. The pilus prior looked to be the same veteran at the height of his powers as was the file-closer who had cowed and angered a boyish tribune named Vibulenus. Clodius was that man physically… and perhaps in mind as well, more or less.

Certainly more nearly the same man than the tribune was; but the tribune hadn't been a man, only a boy, and he had aged a very long time since he first fought in the line at Clodius Afer's side.

Gains Vibulenus, eighteen years old, drew his sword and almost lost it as he jumped down. A warrior thrust at him, and only Clodius' quick sideways chop kept the spear from taking Vibulenus through the chest…

It was also hard to remember that men who had been side by side so many times, and through so much of the battle just completed, had not been together in the immediate aftermath. The pilus prior had led the sweep mopping up the right flank, while Vibulenus had knelt at the Commander's side when "Yes, it was a flying wagon from the trading ship that picked the Commander up," said the tribune as the three of them resumed their ambling pace toward their own vessel. The great doors already swarmed like the entrance of an anthill, shimmering with the forms of legionaries happy in their victory. "The tortoise came by, but it ignored him. They-I guess they don't expect commanders't' be hurt."

Killed, Vibulenus guessed with a great deal of experience on the subject, by the time the vehicle with six panicky figures in yellow suits had arrived. The tourniquets could not prevent shock, and blood loss from the wounds had probably proceeded beyond hope of recovery by the time the tribune had bound the limbs off.

"You know," said Niger, who had been sucking at his finger off and on with a contemplative expression, "they didn't pick up the bodyguards a'tall. I'd have thought they might be alive, some of'em. Fixable, anyway," he added with a nod toward the tribune.

The three of them did not discuss the aftermath of the tower's collapse, so many… battles; what was a year?-battles ago. They had all received wounds since then, but none so serious that they could not stagger to the Sick Bay with the aid of friends.

"They can replace people to stand around and look ugly," Clodius said. "Wouldn't be surprised they could replace people to wear blue suits and stick their thumbs up their ass… though I du

"But anyhow, they can't replace us. Because nobody's ever been as good as we are."

Instead of clapping the senior centurion on the shoulder with a boastful echo of his own, Niger smiled oddly-the distortion was not solely a result of swollen tissues- and said, "Falco was there too. I guess they don't pick up the ones they can't, you know, help."

His voice paused for a moment. The scrunch of the trio's boots, in unison by habit, was the only sound the men made for several seconds. Then Niger resumed, "Mostly it'd bother me, you know, anybody I'd been together with so long. Even ones I don't rightly know. It'd be like it was-"

"Could've been you or me," said Clodius Afer, who kept his eyes straight ahead.

"Like that, yeah," the junior centurion agreed. "Only it isn't, you know? Nothing about that bastard has anything to do with me or anybody I care about. Alive or dead. The vultures around here-" there had been nothing in the local skies save the wagons after the traders landed "-can have what they want of him."

Vibulenus laughed harsly and said, "As much epitaph as he deserves." But in his heart he knew that he and Rectinus Falco had been shoots from the same vine, and the way they had twisted was the choice of the gods alone.

From habit, the soldiers began to strip away their gear as soon as they reentered the vessel. The hatch was the same one by which they had disembarked, but now the hall to the Sick Bay lay beyond it instead of the Main Gallery. Like the fact that the sun rose and set-used to rise and set-the internal workings of the ship had ceased to be matters for comment. None of the soldiers- none of the surviving soldiers-had enough philosophical bent to waste energy trying to explain the inexplicable.