Ranks of Bronze

But by Jove and the Styx, the guild would pay: for this, and for everything.

"Fellow soldiers!" shouted Vibulenus, words that he and no creature in a blue suit had a right to speak. "You will not raise your voices, you will not attempt to damage the ship or the crewmen or your fellow soldiers because of your distress at what you've seen here."

The snarling response from the faces lifted toward him was unpla

Vibulenus raised his arms with his fingers spread in a gesture of forcing back the anger by sheer dint of personality. The men quieted, his men.

"You brought me here to see this," the tribune cried into the feral silence, "and I have seen. Now, leave the matter in my hands."

He could feel the hatred boiling in the domed room, even without the growls and the anguished voice nearby which called, "No! We gotta kill the bastards!"

Vibulenus chopped his arms sideways and back, stilling the tumult again. "I give you my word," he said in a voice as clear as light dancing from the edge of his Spanish sword, "as a Roman, and as the man who fought at your head on more fields than any of us can remember… this will not pass unchallenged. "I swear it to you. I swear it to you." He waited a moment, then dropped his arms. The sounds that exploded into the room where no less bloodthirsty than those of moments before-but these were cheers.

The tribune was shaking with reaction, but the injuries and malaise he had brought from the battlefield were gone. He had thought slaughter was the only thing that could take him wholly out of himself, but he had been wrong. He stepped down.

"What do you want us to do, sir?" demanded Rusticanus in a husky voice while Niger, wrapping the tribune again in an arm, babbled excitedly, "What're you going to do, Gaius?"

Vibulenus looked from one man to the other, taking in the way other soldiers were pressing toward him from all sides with hopes, advice, and congratulations on their lips.

Clodius Afer gri

"Out," Vibulenus said, nodding toward the nearest doorway because he knew his voice might not be audible in the commotion.

"And then," he added for himself alone, "we plan how we're going to go home."

The soldier ahead of Vibulenus cycled sideways. "I still think-" the tribune heard Clodius Afer grumble as they stepped together into the paired cubicles.

"Quartilla," said Vibulenus, and he walked into the woman's room through the dissolving wall. "I need to talk to you."

Clodius had insisted the tribune should go to the head of the line on the basis of pla

Vibulenus had refused on the grounds that they were all in this together, however you defined "this"… and that there was no real haste, that he'd processed through the Sick Bay, eaten, and drunk already.

And all that was true, to the seasoned veteran Gaius Vibulenus Caper at any rate. He smiled at how the boy-soldier Vibulenus Caper would have reacted to the notion of eschewing the honors due his rankthe boy who had not yet fought beside his men in a hundred fields, fought and died. But the real reason he had not cut in at the head of the line to the women was cowardice. There was solace in the thought, a psychic mudwal-lowing in the fact that he was afraid and that he was giving in to that fear-somewhat.

He was here in the room lighted by a bead in the back corner, and Quartilla was facing him.

Vibulenus hadn't been a gallant-Carrhae and capture had come too soon for the boy to have developed polish even if the inclination were there. There had been a woman during the season he spent in Athens attending lectures by the philosopher Aristaneus. An Argive of good family, she claimed… a Carian from some nameless crossroads, Vibulenus had suspected even then. Everything about her was as false as the red of her hair, and Vibulenus' passion had been false as well-a boy's nonsense modelled on the poetry of Catullus and Theognis, and it hadn't prepared him to really care.

"I would have discussed it with you first," the Roman said softly, "but the offer was spur of the moment and there wouldn't be… time."

He was standing with his back straight and his hands gripped firmly so that they would not wash themselves in his nervousness. He was not skirting the discussion of his plans to take the ship home to Campania: he did not even remember those plans in the crash of personal emotions which, as always in a human, managed to claim precedence.

"You…" Quartilla said. She patted the couch beside her. She wore wristlets and anklets strung with tiny bells which sang at every movement. "Come, sit down, of course. You-must have been very brave for the guild to allow you…"

The tribune sat very carefully and faced the woman, because he forced himself to do so. "Brave's easy," he said, meaning physical courage. He was blackly amused at how much easier it was to face spears than it was to face the fact that he had blithely destroyed a relationship that just might mean more to him than life did.

"Everybody was brave," he went on, able to make his tongue function even though it was dry and his mouth was so dry he thought it would crack. "Either they were pleased because I was smart enough to pull the pan out of the fire when they fucked around-"

Vibulenus took a deep breath. "Or else," he went on, letting the words tumble out in their own time, "they liked the way I tried to save the Commander's life. Which was a stupid mistake, and the more so if it earned me the chance to make a worse stupid mistake. All I can say about either choice was that I did what I did; and I-wish I hadn't."

"I'm a slave," said Quartilla.

"We all are," Vibulenus broke in savagely. "We're less than that."

She waved him silent in a silvery murmur from her wrist. Apart from the bells, she wore nothing on her body-though her hair was piled around crystalline combs which refracted the dim red light.

"I'm a slave," she repeated, "but I can forget that, usually, with the part of me that lives." Her hand gripped the tribune's, and her eyes demanded that he meet hers. "Do you understand?"

He gave an upward nod of assent, afraid to speak but filled with sudden hope that it wasn't over, that there was something between them still to salvage.

"I'm good at what I do," Quartilla said with fierce emotion that was neither anger nor very far apart from it. "I have my pride, and maybe that's because of what they did to my mind after they bought me, the guild, but it's all I have. You had the right to make me your personal slave, Gaius Caper, you earned that and I'm very pleased for you.

"But why in the name of the god you worship did you decide to exercise that right? Why did you rob me of all the little fantasies that left me free in my own mind?"

"I thought…" the tribune said. He turned suddenly away and slammed the wall with his fist in a blaze of self-revulsion.

He hadn't thought. He had wished and acted on the wish, unwilling to consider anything but the way he wanted his world to be structured and arrogantly certain that his power to choose also gave him authority over the outcome of his choice.

He didn't want to die now. He wanted to have died that morning, before he had time to speak to the Commander and claim the reward which destroyed more of his life than remained.

There was a whisper of bells. Quartilla set her hands on his shoulder blades. Vibulenus let his shoulders loosen, but he would not, could not, turn around. He hid his face in the crook of his right elbow and squeezed back his tears of frustration with the muscles that enabled his sword to shear through simpler problems.