Empress of the Seven Hills (18 page)

Soon enough the firm roads and traveler way stations of Germania gave way to the muddy tracks and forested hills of the Dacian border.
The centurion had the tents pitched close every night and began posting sentries on watch. “No one’s going to catch us napping,” the centurion said shortly, and Titus wondered if he’d heard the rumor too about the heads.

“I can take a shift,” Titus volunteered.

They all looked at him blankly. “Why, sir?”

Titus couldn’t think of a reason either.
Gods, I want to go home.

Weeks on the road, and it never stopped raining until the day they crossed into Dacia. “We’ll raise the first garrison tomorrow,” the centurion announced, “so get some sleep.” But Titus wandered out of his tent that night instead, away from the guttering campfire, feeling the mud squelch under his boots. He raised a hand in greeting to the shadowy shape of the legionary standing the dawn watch, getting a salute in return, and wandered farther down the muddy track that passed for a road.
Are there stars in Dacia?
If only the clouds would roll back for once…

The attack came silent, black, and sudden.

Stars exploded, not in the sky but in Titus’s head as something clubbed him behind the ear with shattering force. He was facedown in the mud before he even knew he was falling, and booted feet were buffeting his side. He let out a yell and choked on mud. Someone hissed a warning in words he didn’t know, and he felt a blaze of pain as a spear haft thumped into his belly. He fought to breathe, his mouth full of muddy water; he tried to curl around his belly but a knee pressed into his back. He felt fingers in his hair, yanking his head up, and then there was the touch of steel at his throat.

There was a sudden yell, and a clatter of blades.

The knee disappeared from Titus’s back. He heard a shout, more rushed words in a language he didn’t recognize. Two shapes were lurching across the muddy road, hardly more than shadows in the moonless night. A grunted curse; they both went down, and one shape got its hands into the other’s hair and banged his head into the ground. Titus’s breath froze as one of the men staggered upright, but then he saw the
outline of a Roman legionary helmet. Another shadowy figure lunged, and the sentry who had been on duty drove his
gladius
up under the man’s sword arm. There was a crack of thunder overhead, drowning the scream, and suddenly the rain began to drench down again. The sentry lifted his sword, but the two black shapes were disappearing into the rain, dragging their wounded friend between them. Titus blinked water out of his eyes, and they were already gone.

“Damn,” muttered the sentry, and turned to Titus. “You alive, Tribune?”

“Hopefully not.” Titus prodded cautiously at the lump he could already feel throbbing behind one ear. “But I believe I hurt too much to be dead.”

“Try standing up,” the legionary suggested.

Titus tried to gather his legs under him, froze, and sank back down. “Oh, gods. That was a bad idea.”

“It’s a very good idea, unless you want to lie here as bait for more Dacian savages.” The legionary put a hand out, found an elbow, and gave a haul. “Up you go, Tribune.”

Hammers banged briskly around the inside of Titus’s skull, but he found himself on his feet.
Don’t be sick
, he told himself, swaying.
You’re already the tribune who got himself beaten up by thugs and rescued by a sentry because he was too stupid to take his sword along stargazing. Don’t throw up too.
He swallowed hard, and the hammers redoubled.

“What were you doing wandering around the Dacian border in the middle of the night?”

Titus wished the man wouldn’t speak so loud. “The rain stopped for once. I thought I’d go outside and look at the stars.”

“You’re in Germania now.” The legionary sounded more amused than contemptuous. “No stars. Just rain. You should have taken a guard with you. It’s my head on a plate if something kills you on my watch, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Titus said, before he remembered an officer should never apologize to his own men. “Was it footpads?”

“Maybe not.” The soldier found the shield one of Titus’s attackers
had dropped, cursed the lack of light, felt over it instead. “Plenty of footpads in these woods, deserted legionaries and robbers and the like. They don’t usually carry round shields, though.”

“Dacian rebels carry round shields,” Titus said. “Not that I’ve ever seen a Dacian rebel, but reports say—”

“Better come back with me, Tribune.” The soldier rose, hardly more than a dark bundled shape in the shifting rain. “We reach the first of the Dacian garrisons tomorrow; you can stargaze safely there.”

“Agreed,” Titus said, and fell into step beside his rescuer. The road was black and quiet—in the driving rain, clearly no one had heard the shout of alarm and armed themselves for a rescue.

“You probably saved my life, legionary,” Titus said after a moment’s silence. “What’s your name?”

“Vercingetorix of the Tenth Fidelis. Most call me Vix.”

Titus paused. “Do I know you?”

“Took you long enough.” Definite amusement in the soldier’s voice now. “Five years back I was a guard in Senator Norbanus’s house. You were a sprat with an armload of violets come courting his daughter.”

Titus raked his memory. “That was you? The one who fought a mock bout with Emperor Trajan at a party?”

“You nobles never remember pleb faces.” Vix pointed out a pothole in the road before Titus stumbled in it.

“I remember the name, anyway,” Titus said. “Anybody would remember a name like yours.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Well—it’s not a name, really.” In Latin,
vix
was just a nebulous adverb, something along the lines of
slightly
or
hardly
or
barely
. “I don’t meet too many people named Slightly.” The hammers in Titus’s head were starting to subside, but the lump behind his ear was already the size of a plum.

“Vercingetorix is a
Gallic
name,” Vix snapped. “Not Latin. Means ‘great warrior king,’ I’ll have you know. There was a famous warrior king in Gaul named Vercingetorix—”

“Who got himself by defeated by Julius Caesar, spent years wallowing in prison, and was finally strangled to death,” Titus pointed out. “How well-omened of a name is it?”

“Well, it still doesn’t mean
slightly
.” Vix sounded defensive. “Nobody’s ever called me
slightly
anything unless they wanted a fight.”

“At least it’s a short name,” Titus offered in apology. “Better than Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus.”

Vix grinned through the dark; Titus barely caught the gleam of his teeth. “How did you get saddled with all that, Tribune?”

“Titus after my father.” Titus supposed this wasn’t a proper conversation to be having—
A certain distance must be maintained between legionaries and their officers
, the tribunes were instructed often enough by the legate—but on a rainy night in Germania with blood trickling down the back of his head and mud sticking to both of them head to toe, legion etiquette didn’t seem to matter much. “Aurelius because it’s the family name—the Aurelii. Fulvus because it’s my father’s second name, and why not be as confusing as possible by having two of us. Boionius, that was after a rich uncle my mother was hoping might leave me some money. Antoninus, another family name. Arrius, that’s supposed to be from my mother’s side of the family, but I think it really came from the fact that my father loved the gladiatorial games. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, but there was a famous gladiator years back named Arius the Barbarian—”

Vix let out a shout of laughter.

“What?” Titus looked at him quizzically as they rounded the curve in the rough road and came back to the camp.

“Nothing, Tribune,” Vix chortled. “Maybe I’ll tell you someday. I need to make a report to the centurion now, but you’d better go back to your tent. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s wet out.”

VIX

The following morning dawned sunny and rain-washed when we mounted up. Tribune Six-Names rode ahead with the centurion and the
optio
, very grand again in his plumes and red cloak, and I assumed that our odd informality of the previous night had been banished by daylight and the proper order of things. But just a half mile down the road, he twisted in his saddle and beckoned me to ride up on his right side. He was still scrawny for his height, and his armor positively creaked with newness, but his face was friendly.

“I found our conversation of last night most interesting,” he said a trifle pompously. “‘As long as we are among humans, let us be humane,’ as Seneca would say, and good conversation is truly the most humane of all arts. Particularly necessary in barbaric settings like these.”

I stifled a grin as I nudged my horse up beside his. So the young bugger was lonely. Tribunes did tend to keep to each other for company, since no one else particularly needed them, and Tribune Six-Names here had been on the road several weeks without a friend. He ignored the reproving scowl of the centurion on his other side and pressed for a little of my history, riding along sniffing the rain-washed air with as much pleasure as any legionary on a pleasant march. The horses’ hooves clopped cleanly on the road, and everywhere was the smell of wet earth and leaves that hadn’t yet been deadened by the approaching winter.

“So you came all the way from Britannia just to join the legions?”
he said after hearing my (carefully edited) life story. With all the interesting parts left out, like the Emperors I’d helped to kill and the bouts in the arena that I’d fought, it made short telling. “I don’t mean to be rude—but in the name of all the gods, why?”

“I’ve asked myself that a time or two.” Particularly in the first year, when I was getting poked and weighed and measured by critical recruiters, or slogging through sword drills I’d mastered at eight years old, or gritting my teeth as centurions shouted at me about the point beating the edge,
you gladiator-trained scum
—and let me tell you, they were not nearly as kind about that last point as Emperor Trajan had been.

Why had I joined the legions? I was twenty-five now, and I still didn’t know. But I’d finally broadened into my height; I had scars on my back from the odd caning and was hoping to get a few scars on my front from battle wounds; I had friends in the ranks who were like brothers, and a place in the world. Like it or not, I was a soldier of Rome, Vercingetorix of the Tenth Fidelis, and even now I had to grit my teeth when I thought how right Sabina had been—that it had been the place for me all along.

“Have to do something with this life,” I said finally, and it was all the answer I could give.

“Pity to get stuck in Germania, though,” he sympathized. “I was hoping for Africa. Some place very hot and thoroughly uneventful.”

“Or Egypt,” I agreed. “I hear it’s all sunshine there, and sparkling rivers and big temples and women with painted eyes.” Though they couldn’t be as pretty as the girl I had waiting for me back in Mog—
she
was a beauty and no mistake. And besides, what use was dreaming about Africa or Egypt or the world’s hot places? I was stationed in the cold north, and likely to stay there the next twenty years.

Anyway, Germania was where the heat was, in battles if not in weather. Anyone with eyes in their head could see that. I wasn’t planning on being a legionary forever, but you didn’t climb the ladder in the Roman army without either family backing or glory in battle. I couldn’t do anything about the family backing, but the glory…

My bad-tempered horse took a sideways leap away from a puddle and nearly unseated me. I clung to the saddle, swearing.

“He’s being a bastard, isn’t he?” the patrician boy said tactfully. “Try tucking your foot into the girth on each side; that should keep you steadier.”

“All horses hate me,” I grunted, hauling myself upright. “What’s the point of a horse, anyway? One end bites, the other end shits, and all four corners kick.”

“You can’t ride to save your life,” the
optio
jeered. “Vix here could get bucked off the wooden horse of Troy!”

I glared. There wasn’t an
optio
in the Tenth who wasn’t universally hated. Every centurion had one, a second-in-command, and for the most part they were bullying tattling toadying prigs. I was still trying to figure a way to climb the ladder to centurion without becoming
optio
first. And after more than five years in the Tenth, neither option was exactly presenting itself.

“We can’t all ride like you,
optio
. To each his gifts.” The tribune smiled. Under the plumed helmet he had one of those profiles that all patricians like to think they have, but so rarely do; the kind that shouts at least fifteen generations of distinguished ancestors. He lifted that aquiline nose and sniffed the clean air appreciatively. “I suppose we’ll all be marching this way again if there’s war with Dacia?”

“Hope so,” I said, wistful.

He grimaced. “I’ll never be a soldier.”

“Then why are you?” I asked boldly. The centurion glowered at my impertinence, but I ignored him again. “Don’t you want a career in the legions?”

I couldn’t help but be envious. Tribune at twenty-two—with his connections, he could be vaulted straight on up to legate in a few years if he showed any aptitude at all. What I’d give for backing like that…

“Wet,” the tribune said. “Cold. Blood. No thank you. My dearest wish is to go home and become a thoroughly dull little public servant.
The kind who never gets out from behind his desk and is always home in time for a good supper.”

“At least you won’t be cold and wet,” the centurion conceded. “Plenty of that in the legions, sir, sure enough.”

“And how did you come to the legions, Centurion? A Greek, I can hear that in your voice—”

With the two of them nattering, I saw the smoke first. It should have been the centurion—he prided himself on his eagle eyes—but he was too smug at being flattered by a tribune to see the wisps of black rising suddenly beyond the next bend in the road.