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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Municipium Aelium Carnuntum,

Capital of Pannonia Superior

November 8th–9th, 166 CE

“Loose the cable!” Artorius shouted from the rear of the galley.

The triarch of the Dacicus didn’t even look up from where he and his under-officers were shoving the still-sleepy rowers to the benches.

A voice rose in a shriek-scream, punctuated by the thud of blows with a stick on a back:

“No, you Gods-detested wide-arsed imbecile of an irrumātor, you don’t run out the oar until you hear the command! It’ll break off against the slipway! And kill you, you son of a clapped-out whore! I hope!”

The slipway team hesitated, then one of them took a wooden mallet and knocked out the pin that held the cable to the sternpost of the ship.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sarukê scramble on board, using ruthless elbows and the boss of her shield; Filipa followed in her wake, and behind her Jeremy, clutching at the new crossbow he’d brought along—one of the first out of the workshops.

Down in the slipway proper, three teams of two swung their own mallets against timbers braced against the hull on either side of the ship and scrambled back to the pavement up the inset ladders behind them. For a long moment nothing happened, save that the scramble of the last of the crew to get onboard made the now-free hull rock back and forth. That was the marines, still hopping and struggling with items of gear and screaming insults when someone juggled a spearpoint too near their faces or posteriors.

That rocking broke the hold of friction and cold lard on the rollers. The ship started to move, only an inch or so, then a jerk, then faster as the last marine made a dive from the stepladder onto the deck.

Going a lot faster than last time.

The galley was tiny compared to the oceangoing varieties; that didn’t mean it didn’t weigh multiple tons. Once it was moving, it surged down the slip with ponderous, gathering speed. The rollers gave a squealing shriek that built rapidly along with a frying sound and a smell like the world’s dirtiest bacon grease burning from whifts of smoke, cutting through the white-noise burr of voices and thousands of pounding feet and braying trumpets and pounding drums.

Artorius ran forward, past the ship’s captain looking around and shouting volleys of orders full of Graeco-Latin technicalities, past the catapult, where the two ex-rowers were stolidly pumping away to cock it as the weapon’s crew settled in.

Then the ship’s ram plowed into the water of the river in two broad gull wings of spray; he managed to catch a stay and hold himself upright, while dozens fell and rolled over the deck about him and the heavy feel of inertia levered at him. One luckless marine went overside with a scream, but it was probably shallow enough here for him to wade back to shore.

Of course, that means he’ll be there when the Quadi arrive.

A shout and a flourish of trumpets, near enough to be metallic-scream loud, the trierarch’s own signalers. “Out oars” was nearly inaudible under that, but thirty of them did shoot out, in near unison. Then the hortator’s drum and voice began to sound: stroke . . . stroke . . . 

There was a jerk as the long ash shafts bit into the river, and steerageway came on the galley. Water began to curl back from the bows. There he found the man who’d been stationed at the forepeak, and he was ready. The first of the four-foot paper cylinders had been jammed into the iron holder, but the crewman was still standing waiting to be told what to do. The American flicked his own Ronsonius and touched it to the twist of paper at the top. It caught with a hiss of burning saltpeter and a chemical smell.

“When it’s done, start another right away!” he shouted in the man’s ear. “As long as you’ve got more or until someone tells you to stop.”

He’d thought about rockets. They wouldn’t be all that difficult. When he had time.

Roman candles . . . which he’d christened candelabrum Romanum . . . were even simpler. You put successive charges of gunpowder in a thick paper tube, separated by clay wads and each topped with some very basic pyrotechnics for the stars, with a fuse running down the center from top to bottom.

Whump! sounded with a flash and burnt-sulfur stink, and then less than a full second later: pop!

There were already more and more lights coming on; lamps like tiny yellow stars, the more violent flare of crescents, and from the tops of the low towers that studded the walls of the castrum the whooshing, spark-spewing rush of heaped pinewood in iron baskets, kept tinder dry with greased leather covers over wicker for just such an occasion as this.

The greenish light of the new star overhead was brighter. It lit up quite a stretch of the gray-blue Danube, in fact, beneath the low overcast and through the chilly fog that wasn’t quite rain now.

Je—” he began to shout.

He caught himself in midyell and modified it to: “Jeboza!

Someone might remember him calling on Jesus.

Not a smart thing to do. Though Marcus Aurelius does say he’s seriously considering making changes there.

He still felt like swearing at what he saw, and since blaspheming Roman deities just wasn’t very satisfying yet he settled for:

Pedicabo me!”

There were thousands of Quadi warriors on the water, in everything from coracles to dugout canoes through rowboats to big barges holding a hundred or more men; he even saw some sitting on logs turned into crude outriggers by lashing on branches, and paddling with their hands. The dribs and drabs and masses stretched out of sight in either direction, where the light of the Roman candle didn’t reach. The Quadi had shown far more discipline than he’d thought them capable of by staying quiet enough to be inaudible under the Roman shouts and screams and martial music growing steadily less ragged.

Whump!pop!

Another green light overhead.

Whump!pop!

Now the enemy roared, and water leaped higher as they rowed and paddled with all their strength in a heart-bursting spasm of energy.

And more water burst twenty feet into the air as the rest of the Pannoniorum classis came down the slipways, throwing plumes on either side of their bow rams.

Then there were more of the high bright green lights, from the other ships that had been refitted. He went back toward the stern, where the galley’s commander stood, pausing just long enough to shout:

“Load Roman Fire!” to the catapult’s crew chief before he ran back between the rowers’ benches.

At the tiller he called to the captain, who was looking around as if he didn’t quite believe in either what he was seeing, or the light he was using to see it with.

“There!” Artorius said.

Pointing eastward toward the largest concentration of barges—they were just big rectangular boxes of planks, hurriedly thrown together and probably leaking like sieves. But then, they only had to float for a few hundred yards, and only once; then their passengers would be either victorious or too dead to care.

“Attack that clump, Captain!”

Those barges also bristled with banners, horns and skulls and crude daubed cloth on poles. There seemed to be a lot of helmets and mail hauberks there too, which indicated commanders, chiefs and their full-time warriors. With any luck it might even include Ariogaesus, which was the way the Romans rendered the name of the leader of the anti-Imperial faction of the tribe and its would-be king.

There were six other Roman galleys in the water now, that he could see, and they swung into a ragged line; even then he felt pride as he saw that the other three which had been modified did it faster than the trio still relying on steering oars.

And whatever the Roman military’s other faults, you couldn’t fault the way their training produced a reflexive ferocious aggressiveness, a desire to get stuck in and start spilling blood.

Whump!pop!

Another star shot skyward from the bows of the Dacicus. As if that had prompted them, which it probably had, the other refitted ships began to fire theirs again.

And I nearly decided to put that off until spring! he thought, and broke into a cold sweat as he imagined trying to do this strictly by firelight.

Whump!pop! over and over, and the light grew brighter as they drifted slowly downward.

A bit to his surprise the big barges didn’t alter course, but kept driving straight for the southern bank of the Danube. They did sound lowing, dunting ox horns and tall upright trumpets with the heads of snarling beasts. Even more to his surprise, a small or not-so-small fleet of canoes and rowboats of various sizes and types turned toward the Roman ships, including a long raft towed by a dozen other craft and with scores of warriors on its sides beating the water to a froth as they tried to paddle with everything from oars through spears to shields and their hands. A few were slipping into the icy water, holding on with both hands and thrashing with their feet.

The triarius spoke in a worried tone. “Tribune, if any substantial number of those smaller boats get alongside, we’ll be swamped. We have fifteen marines on board. Even Hercules can’t fight two.”

Artorius nodded; the rowers could fight at a pinch, and had weapons under their benches . . . but it wasn’t their specialty and it would immobilize the craft.

“Let’s do what men can do,” he said.

He raised his voice: “Men! We fight under the Emperor’s eyes! He will be watching from a tower in the castrum!”

That did seem to stiffen a few backs.

Tunnngg-WHACK!

The catapult cut loose, surprising him. He followed the burning fuse with his eyes—

“Short!” Then: “No, it isn’t, not quite!”

They’d shot at the biggest target in reach, the raft. The wobbling ceramic container shed a thick coil of sparks as it flew, the passage whipping the fuse brighter and brighter. Then it struck, just a few feet from the foremost edge. The warriors there jerked up their shields in instinctive reflex.

That was the worst possible thing they could have done; if it had plowed into someone’s stomach, it might not have shattered.

Though . . . let’s see, twenty-five pounds, travelling at about three hundred feet per second . . . yeah, it would have killed the man it hit, certain-sure.

Instead it ran into a wall of wood and metal and hard leather, disintegrated . . . and rained gobbets of clinging white-hot fire in a flying fan for yards back of the point of impact. Even over the growing white-noise burr of combat, the shrieks of agony were loud. Men on fire were jumping into the water, and either landing in patches of floating flame or coming back up in them and having their coating of Roman Fire blaze up again.

He felt a grudging respect when the Quadi kept right on coming.

The ones on the raft did surge back a bit, reforming their shield wall, and many of them behind the front line raising their oval or hexagonal shields overhead in a crude imitation of a Roman testudo, a tortoise formation.

Tunnngg-WHACK!

That was good time, only about twenty seconds from the first . . . but then, the crew had a very strong incentive to hurry.

This time it was one of the bronze balls. It slashed out, invisible in the murk and dark save for the fuse leaving a thin trail of sparks. They’d left that a bit too long, and the bronze sphere struck the raft and bounced back to head height, pinwheeling and wobbling because of the way it had bent out of shape.

CRACK!

This time the wrong setting on the fuse had worked to their advantage; the ball exploded at about six feet over the Quadi shield wall. The red flash of the explosion flicked through the dark, but the smoke was invisible against the patch of fog drifting past. That mercifully hid the details of what happened between the raft’s surface and the center point of the shower of high-velocity lead. Another twelve feet of the close-packed Germanii simply vanished or went up into the night in pieces. Another ten feet to the rear of that collapsed backward, blasted off their feet or killed by bullets that made nothing of shields or helms or chain mail.

Half a dozen of the boats that were pulling the raft cast off their towlines and swung into the sides of the raft; warriors scrambled to board . . . and then the boats headed for the oncoming Roman vessels.

God damn the poor brave bastards, he thought.

Then he yelled at the marines hefting their pila javelins:

“Don’t forget the pomegranates!”

Because with grenades, Hercules can fight two.

He pushed forward himself and snatched one out of the wicker baskets tied to the rails, snapped his Ronsonius to light the fuse and threw, blessing days spent in the Little League.

Crack! and it burst in a rowboat. Water and bits of board . . . and probably of the occupants . . . rose into the night.

Half the marines grabbed grenades of their own, their Ronsonii making a flicker through the darkness. Just then the Dacicus lurched; the ram had slammed into a dugout canoe. It didn’t slow the galley down, and there was another chorus of screams as the hollowed-out log and its occupants went under, thumping down the keel and the hull planking. A lit grenade went skittering across the deck, dropped when the boat heaved, and Artorius made a headlong dive after it. He snatched it up, threw—

Crack!

Something struck his helmet and his head whipped around; fortunately only a painful wrench as something went spang against the iron above his left ear. Low-velocity shards like that were why metal helmets had come back into use in his great-great-grandfather’s day, back around 1915.

He came back to his feet, shaking his head; just then there were slamming, grating noises from both sides of the ship forward. Artorius swept out his sword and dagger and started forward; some distant part of him admired how the rowers ignored everything.

Tunnngg-WHACK!

The shell arched off eastward; it wasn’t going to help against whoever had grappled the Dacicus, but it did burst—with malignant precision, this time—right over a clump of boats and canoes heading their way. Froth leaped upward, and then fell back, and what remained floating drifted away. Then he had something more immediate to worry about, as a helmeted head came over the starboard side, a gilded wolf crest on top and the metal below that framing a snarling bearded face. Hands clamped on the rail and the boarder heaved himself up. Spearpoints gleamed behind him.

Artorius charged flat out, and swung his foot at the man’s face at the last moment, catching him just before he could draw his blade. The boot heel landed precisely as the man was swinging a leg over the rail, and there was a crackling crunch sound and a shock that jarred up his leg. Hot droplets spattered into his face as he recovered with desperate speed.

As his right foot thumped down on the deck, he translated that into a downward slash with his spatha. The next boarder had managed to get his arms across the rail; the blade took his left off just below the elbow, and the jet of blood took Artorius right across his midsection, soaking through the padding under the mail. A familiar hot-rank metallic scent washed across him, like rust and seawater and sweat all at the same time.

The injured man toppled straight back with a shriek. There was a deep twang sound from just behind him and the one who’d been about to hit him with a one-handed war axe suddenly stopped as Jeremey’s crossbow bolt took him in the face.

“Thanks!” Artorius grunt-snarled as he wrenched his sword out of the oak and the man fell back.

Two of the Dacicus’ marines dashed up. They dropped lit grenades over the side and then crouched with their shields upraised. Artorius did likewise, putting his back to the rail. Jeremey was lying on his back, with a foot in the stirrup of the crossbow, drawing the string back with both hands.

Crack! Crack! from behind him, and more screams.

That position let him see what was happening on the other side of the bow. A warrior vaulted the rail and lunged a spearpoint at Sarukê’s face. She went forward under it with a fast, graceful dipping motion that left her on one knee; as it touched the deck she slammed her shield downward, the ironshod rim cracking into the top of the Quadi’s foot in its soft moccasin-like shoe.

It was too noisy to hear the crunch, but there were a lot of small bones in a foot. The warrior jackknifed forward, his own motion adding to the impetus as she sprang upward and punched the upper rim of the gryphon-painted shield beneath his chin. His jaw shattered and he fell backward. Just then another rammed his spear at her, but Filipa was in striking distance, and she did strike—a straight thrust to the throat.

The steel slid home in a gout of red. The Korean-American woman froze for an instant: you could virtually see—

I just stabbed someone in the throat!

—running through her mind.

In a remote sort of way he sympathized with that flash of buck fever, but another warrior had his spear back. Sarukê pivoted with a dancer’s grace and her backhand stroke flashed across his arm just up from the wrist. The hand flew free, the spear pinwheeled away, and his recoil put him in the path of the man following; the Sarmatian tucked her shoulder into her shield, took two quick steps and ran into them in a body check that bowled them over the rail and bounced her back into fighting stance.

This is like fighting in your bedroom! Or a broom closet!

Then more marines ran up on that side too, tossing grenades or throwing their pila directly downward. The heavy lead-weighted seven-foot javelins probably went through the bottoms of the boats as well as anyone who got in the way, and half a dozen grenades crackled there.

And the galley’s oars kept moving, a steady stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke . . . probably crunching on swimming men as well like giant bone-breaking clubs.

Jeremey was getting to his feet; Artorius put a hand down on his shoulder and used it as a lever to come erect, panting like a wheezing bellows inside the constriction of armor and padding. There was a cut on his left forearm that he hadn’t noticed until now; it stung like white-hot fire all of a sudden, and he worked his fingers to make sure nothing vital had been cut before he let a crewman wrap a bandage over it.

He poured double-distilled superwine over it too, and Artorius swore imaginatively—in English. Then it died away to a painful throbbing, which practice let him ignore for now.

There was more light; the Roman candles had stopped, but the burning raft and half a dozen other craft more than made up for it. Ahead of them the Victoria plowed into the first of the big barges, just as it touched bottom in the shallow water of the shore. The oars backed almost instantly, but the downward surge of the barge trapped the galley’s ram for a moment. Scores of Quadi launched themselves over the rail from the barge—

CRUMP!

Artorius fell on his back again as a surge of water made the Dacicus buck like a restive horse. When he managed to get his head up once more he saw that the whole bow of the other galley had disappeared, its boards and timber vanishing upward and outward; so had the barge that held it. Spurts and gobbets of liquid flame traced lines through the air as well, falling among the packed Quadi vessels crowded with men.

Someone touched off the magazine and all the ammo went up, Artorius thought, half dazed; probably three hundred men had died in an instant, and twice that been badly wounded. Possibly accidental, but I’d bet any amount someone over there did it deliberately when he saw they were going to be overrun.

There were times when these Romans reminded him a fair bit of studies he’d read on World War Two Japanese in some basic attitudes. At least the ones you met under arms here on the frontier did.

“Duty, heavier than mountains; death, lighter than a feather,” he murmured to himself.

Jeremey was doggedly trying to reload his crossbow. Behind Artorius the catapult cut loose again:

Tunnngg-WHACK!

A fire shell arched out and landed in another of the barges; it had just grounded, and the flames seemed to chase the Quadi ashore, but in moments the fire was leaping up across the crude heap of wood.

The CRACK! CRACK! of more shells sounded. The gates of the naval fortress opened; units of marines poured out, and he thought he saw a cohort of Praetorians coming too, their distinctive scorpion-blazoned shields up. Signal fires flared up from the castrum of the legion, and columns would be double-timing out of it. The four unmodified galleys were ramming the rear of the grounded barges, but doing it more cautiously—starting to back water before they hit, so they could retreat before the Quadi swarmed onto them.

The barges settled, and he noticed smaller craft turning about smartly and making for the northern shore again. He turned to the catapult crew and pointed his sword to the clots and straggling groups of Quadi wading ashore at the foot of the slope up from the water. Some of them were carrying long wooden scaling ladders, showing what they’d had in mind for the fort originally. They threw them down now, and massed for a charge.

“That’s your target,” he snapped.

Tunnngg-WHACK!

CRACK!

The bronze shot arched out and exploded almost exactly where the Danube’s water met the mud of the foreshore. Black gobbets and chunks of warrior flew. The other two surviving retrofitted galleys fell in line with the flagship; their captains were conforming automatically, and the massed warriors were an obvious target. Their charge toward the Roman troops forming up in front of the wall collapsed as volleys of bombs shredded it. Bolts and rocks rained down from the older engines on the fort’s walls.

Artorius caught his breath; someone passed him a canteen of water mixed with near-vinegar wine; he gulped down half of it, and passed it to Jeremey. A little way away Filipa was sitting on the deck with her head between her knees; Sarukê was squatting beside her, honing a nick out of her sword and leaning over to say something to her.

“You did good,” he told the younger man, and thumped him on the shoulder. “Very good for your first action. Kept your head, shot that, ah, nasty person trying for me.”

Jeremey coughed and drank again. “Well, seemed the thing to do, Prof,” he said. “Frankly, I’d rather be farming . . . and I don’t like farming much.”

There was a crashing bark of: “Roma!

Artorius looked up. The Roman formation under the naval fort’s walls trotted forward; there were trumpet and tubae calls, and the first rank stamped down their left foot, twisted their bodies and threw their pila. The weighted javelins disappeared in the darkness in shallow arcs, invisible save for the odd glitter of a pyramidal point catching firelight.

Then they sleeted down into the Quadi faces and shields and chests, a thousand or more of them.

Firelight glittered again as the Roman short swords snapped free of their sheaths and the pace of their formation went up to a quick trot, the sound of the hobnails pounding in unison carrying through the damp air.

He snorted and turned to the captain. “We should check up and down the river for a mile or so. There must be little parties of the enemy coming ashore. We’ll wreck their boats so the shore parties can handle them.”

The captain nodded respectfully.

“Yes, sir!” he said.

* * *

Optio Aulus Petillius Brucius, First Century, Second Praetorian cohort, was not in a good mood.

First time I was going to get laid since Savaria, he thought. And now I’m tramping up and down the freezing muddy godsforsaken Danube, my balls cold and looking for trouble.

Trouble appeared despite the wisps of fog that restricted visibility; a wrecked biggish boat, and thirty or so Quadi wading up onto the shore just ahead, dripping and in some cases crawling and coughing and puking; the boat must have been sinking, probably a brush with one of the patrol galleys. They all looked as drenched and chilly as he felt, but he could have sworn that even twenty paces away he could wind their stink over the sweat and iron of his own men.

Thirty was about as many men as he had with him; half the Prima Centuria left on their feet, after that cluster buggery at the naval base all night.

Ave! to Artorius, though. If he hadn’t called the warning . . . What a man! With him and a fine Emperor like the one we’ve got, what can’t we do?

Half of them had minor wounds; he was limping slightly from a bone bruise on his shin that sent a stab every time he came down on it. Still, it wouldn’t do to let the remnant sweepings of the barbarian host go wandering off to rape the provincials’ sheep and shear their daughters for wool. He couldn’t really complain about the senior centurion of the Guard’s orders to patrol aggressively.

Besides, after losing my chance with that fluffy little blonde piece, I am not feeling well disposed to these scum. To Hades with taking prisoners for the mines. They’d suffer more there, but I want to kill them myself, sink my blade in their guts and watch them die.

“Deploy!” he rasped, his voice hoarse from shouting orders over the roar of battle through the night. “Double line, open order intervals!”

The men shook themselves out in two staggered lines with drilled-in ease, two contubernia in each, the eight-man squads who shared a tent or a room in barracks. Minus the night’s dead and badly wounded, of course. Three feet on either side of every man—to give full room for sword-and-shield work—and the second line covering the intervals in the first.

“Advance at the double-quick!” he called, trotting forward himself at the right of the front rank.

That was usually the centurion’s position, but he was in charge here. Hobnails grated in unison on dirt and rock, and the hoops and bands of their armor rattled and clashed. It was about dawn. Or what passed for it in this miserable, rainy fog-begotten wilderness—he’d been born in decently warm and sunny Campania, southeast of Rome—but there was enough dim pale light for work. At least trotting in armor warmed you up a bit, though he’d be glad to get his weight off the damned leg for a while.

Preferably somewhere with a fire, wine, good bread and oil, hot soup and a pretty barmaid rolling her rump like Venus Callipyge.

The enemy were shouting, in that grunting, squealing language of theirs that always reminded him of—

“It’s a boar hunt for some Quadi hogs!” he snarled.

Then, when they were close enough to see mouths gaping in horror or bellowing some uncouth challenge:

“Front rank, pilum ready . . . ”

The shields came up as the long javelins cocked back.

“ . . . iacite pila!”

A chorus of grunts as the left feet came down harder, the shield was brought down too, and the heavy throwing spears flew. Each one had a head like a long narrow metalworker’s punch on a two-foot iron shank, with a tang slotted into the wooden part and secured by a pyramidal block and rivets and iron cullet. Behind each of those was a three-pound lead ball to add punch when they hit. They weren’t long-range weapons, but they didn’t have to be. Screams of fear and then of pain sounded almost but not quite human among the animal snuffling and grunting of what passed for a language among these savages.

Some of the enemy had their shields up, but the simple plank types they used here hardly even slowed a pilum down. The tock-tock-tock sound of impact was accompanied by more screams as they smashed through into arms and chests and faces.

“Second rank, pila ready—iacite pila!

Once the spears were all in the air, twenty-nine callused hands slapped down in the reversed grip on the grooved hilts of the gladii slung high on their right hips and snapped them out in a long ripple. The broad blades glinted as the weak sunlight caught on their honed edges and sharp points.

He pointed his own sword forward, lips peeling back from teeth behind the scorpion-stamped cheek pieces of his helmet:

“Time to make some bacon, boys! Charge!

* * *

Abgar bar Mirhbandaq looked closely and anxiously at his bow. The damp climate of Pannonia was not kind to the glue that held laminations of horn and sinew on either side of the wooden core. Nothing seemed wrong right now, and the surface of melted antler he’d brushed on to preserve it was only lightly beaded with moisture.

“Praise and honor to Tarʿaā, the Great Goddess; I pledge her a dove in sacrifice,” he said in pious thankfulness, using the hem of his tunic to wipe it down.

“Silence in the ranks,” the decurion snapped, the nasal Palmyran accent strong in his Aramaic.

The men poling at the rear shoved the barge further along; the water was shallow here, and the mud stank of rot and ancient sewage as it was stirred up. The wastes from the naval base had been accumulating for a long time.

Not as shallow as it is over there, the Syrian archer thought cheerfully.

In the dark this particular band of Quadi had grounded their barge hard on the mudbank, probably because they couldn’t see it, black mud in the black night with a thin film of water over it anyway. Then the Roman galleys had struck it with a pair of granite balls to smash the flimsy improvised thing to fragments and a firebomb to set the splinters alight. It had burned right down to the bottom planks, leaving nothing for the survivors to stand on.

They’d leapt out into the mud rather than be set alight, and were now standing thigh deep in it, looking like a field of a hundred statues coated in glistening black muck. Roman soldiers were all taught to swim; evidently the local barbarians weren’t, and the ones who could or who could find a chunk of intact wood had all struck out for the north bank hours ago. With Romans on the water, not many of them had made it.

Since the rest weren’t going anywhere, they’d been left for the after-battle cleanup. He could smell the ones who’d burned, even hours later, a singed-pork stink under the smoke of wood and the odd smell of the new Roman Fire that was like scorched metal. Over on the south bank of the Danube fifty yards away half a cohort of ordinary auxiliary infantry were leaning on their spears. Or hooting invitations to the Quadi to wade on over, and making mocking beckoning gestures, blowing kisses, occasionally hiking up their tunics and mail shirts to wave their privates or slap their buttocks.

Or yelling jocular greetings along the lines of:

Got any messages for your wives and daughters? We’ll be seeing them before you do!”

The barge stopped, and the decurion called: “Front rank to the side, and nock shafts! Ranks will rotate every ten arrows!”

Abgar stepped forward, drew a shaft from the quiver at his belt, put it to the string and locked his thumb under it. The string rested on the metal ring that protected his drawing thumb, and two fingers clamped firmly over the top of the digit. The side of the barge rose to a handspan below his breastbone, which shouldn’t be a problem, but he scuffed his feet to make sure there weren’t any more loose kernels of barley under the soles of his boots. That had been the barge’s last cargo, evidently, and he didn’t want anything he could skid on under his sandals.

Some of the Quadi tried to run. Abgar frowned as many of his comrades laughed at the heaving, floundering mess that created. Killing was serious business. The auxiliary infantry spearmen on the shore were falling about in helpless, hooting, staggering mirth, but he felt the ancient, much-honored Cohors Prima Syriaca Sagittaria should show more dignity.

“Draw!”

Thirty bows creaked, and Abgar’s heavy arm muscle knotted as the string came back to the angle of his jaw, tickling a little as it brushed the thick black curls of his full beard. The short sleeve of his mail tunic fell back with a chinking rustle as he raised the bow carefully, estimating the range with experienced eyes.

A chorus of despairing shrieks and pleas came from the mudbank, and some of the Quadi covered their eyes. Others waved their weapons and tried to wade toward the barge with the archers, wrenching a leg free with each slow bogged-down stride and gasping out war cries.

Shoot!

* * *

“You have been wounded and shed your blood in Rome’s service, Tribune,” Marcus Aurelius said.

There was a somber approval in his voice. One of the seriously wounded from the ship groaned as he was helped down the gangplank behind Artorius, red glistening on the bandages that encased his left leg.

“Sir!” Artorius said.

He was startled; he hadn’t expected the Emperor to be down at the dock when the Dacicus tied up a little after noon. He looked down at the sword in his hand, then wiped it and sheathed it before he saluted. The seawater-and-rot smell of blood was heavy in the air by the docks, only slightly muffled by the chill, and a shriek rose from where the medicii had set up a forward dressing station—at a guess someone had slathered on the new disinfectant.

Better some pain now than gangrene later, of course.

I’d forgotten that stupid-tired sensation after a hot action. How not nostalgic feeling it again is! I’m not twenty-two and hot to trot anymore either. Old enough to know down in my gut how quickly and easily a man can die. Julia and I’ve got a child coming now, for God’s sake!

His left forearm twinged, but the last thought warmed him and he said dismissively:

“It’s only a scratch, sir.”

The Praetorian Prefect snorted derisively; by his scarred face he had a right to comment:

“The difference between a scratch and death is about two digits, Tribune,” he said, holding up two fingers pressed together.

There was an underlying stench of burnt flesh lingering in the damp cold air too, and of burning in general, and the harsh scent of Roman Fire. Working parties along the shore of the Danube were throwing corpses into two-wheel oxcarts. Occasionally they made sure that the bodies were corpses. Even after a half day’s labor the numbers were impressive, drifts and lines and piles up from the shore halfway to the fortress walls, blind eyes staring up into the slate-gray overcast that dripped like tears.

Marcus Aurelius stepped forward. “Go now, eat and bathe and rest, soldier of Rome,” he said, gripping his shoulder briefly. “Have your wound seen to—by Galenos himself. Tomorrow we will meet to discuss all this, and the campaign to come.”

Artorius saluted again; that sounded like a good idea.

And I could really, really use a drink. The peach schnapps tastes like cough syrup, but damn that, it’s the effect I want.


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Framed