Exiles of Arcadia: Legionnaire (3 page)

Titus smiled slightly. The old man’s eyes were on the dice game but Primus didn’t think he was seeing it. “Marius was out to make a name for himself back then. He’d just been given command of the eastern legions. I heard he was paying his men wage-and-a-half, so I made my way out east. I made it out there just in time to join the invasion. The Roanish tribes. Hard fighters.”

Titus was silent for a time. Lepus won a toss at dice, and let out a whoop. The others shoved him and hissed at him to be quiet. Lepus was unrepentant, jangling the coins in his purse as he held it beside his ear. After a moment, when Titus continued silent, Primus asked: “What made you side with Marius? I mean later, when he fought Tiberius.”

Titus looked startled and Primus quickly regretted the question. Even though he’d spoken quietly, one or two of the gamblers were watching him from the corner of their eyes. He spoke quickly, loud enough for anyone to hear. “I mean, I know that Marius was—is—a hero to the common people. And I know that Tiberius wanted to be a tyrant. I just wondered, what was it that made up your mind? Was it politics, or just loyalty… or did the tyrant hurt someone close to you?”

Black Titus looked at him for a long moment. His thin lips were drawn into a frown and deep lines stood out on his forehead. “You ask too many questions, boy. Did no one ever tell you that?”

Primus lowered his gaze. “Yes, sir.”
 

“Well. I’ll answer you, because someone ought to. I don’t suppose any of these others will ever talk about it. It wasn’t politics or loyalty, boy. And Tiberius never hurt anyone close to me. Tiberius doesn’t even know my name. I fought for Marius because I thought he would win.”

Primus looked around. A few men were listening openly now. Another veteran, a man named Gaticus, watched Primus over the heads of the few gamblers who still huddled over their dice. Unlike the others, Gaticus wore his hair long and pulled it back into a thick grey braid that hung past his shoulders. That and his height and coloring marked him for one of the Woade. As he listened to them, Gaticus reclined on his bunk using his pack for a pillow. His right arm rested across his knee. His left arm ended at the elbow.

“I was with the legion at Hands when the old man took us north,” Titus went on. “We caught up with Tiberius in Levis, north of the city where the country runs smooth for about a hundred miles. There wasn’t much talk of politics. I guess if I had thought about it I would’ve agreed with Marius. At the time it was just a question of following orders. And the old man had never lost a fight. That’s something you stick to, no matter what your politics are. The man who keeps you alive.”
 

Titus paused for a long time. “That was an ugly time for us,” he eventually said. “Fighting the Roanishmen had been bad. This was much worse. The legions don’t break easy. They—we—grind each other down. The phalanx is like a machine for cutting men apart. You’ve been told how it works. You’ve drilled it. But you’ve never had to face it.”

Primus looked at Gaticus. The stump of his arm lay useless against the old man’s side. He thought of the gladius—the short, broad-bladed sword carried by the legionnaires.
You can cripple your enemy or you can kill him
, his combat instructor had said,
either one will do. And cripples are easier to make than corpses
. They said that the gladius could lop a man’s arm off as easy as chopping wood. Gaticus’ black gaze was fixed on him. Primus turned away. The dice game had stopped.
 

“After the war… I couldn’t return to the city for Maria,” Titus said. “I couldn’t do anything but run. Those of us that made it to the forest left everyone behind. As for letters… I guess Marius and your father have ways to get letters back and forth to home. They’ve got to keep up with what’s happening. Plan things out, get things organized. But for me, there’s no way I could send a message to my wife. Too late now in any case, probably. For her, I died ten years ago.”

Primus could remember their flight into the northern wilds. He had been a small child then, living in his father’s villa northwest of the city. Marcus Seneca arrived with what seemed like a huge army to Primus’ young eyes. He could remember the smell of sweat, from men and horses. He remembered his father kneeling in front of him, in all his armor, blood still smeared across his face.
Son, you’re going to be a soldier.

 
Black Titus lay back on his bunk, hands folded behind his head. For a moment the barracks was still. Then men began to drift back to their beds. There were quiet words as the gamblers sorted out their winnings. Primus stood up from the floor by Titus’ bunk and walked down the long aisle to his own bed. Gaticus watched him go, a solemn look on his narrow, weathered face.

***

They were marching along the river road now, and Lepus’ banter had fallen silent. The grey cliff rose steep on their left and the river rushed past on the right. The road was built like a shelf against the cliff, high enough above the river that spring flooding would not drown it. After nearly an hour’s walk, the cliff gradually fell away until by mid-morning the troop was out of the valley entirely and the road turned sharply from south to east.

Outside the valley the Boreal forest dominated the landscape. The great trees rose like pillars of the earth, so tall that fog gathered in the forest canopy. Each pale red trunk was so wide, ten men linking hands could not encircle it. Their canopy cast the forest floor in perpetual shadow; no underbrush sprung up in the wide spaces between the trees. Even now, with autumn just beginning, snow could be seen. There was something terribly unwelcoming about the forest. To stare too long made the small hairs rise on the back of Primus’ neck.

Here the road turned away from the river and ran eastward all the way to the coast, three hundred miles away. But Primus and his comrades left the road and doubled back north along the edge of the river canyon. Along the edge of the river valley the greatwoods gave way to pine and spruce, trees of a more human scale. In the early years of their exile, the Arcadians had felled many of these. Now a field of stumps extended from the edge of the cliff for perhaps two hundred yards. The stumps ended where the greatwood forest began; to bring down one of these giants was far more difficult that the simple harvesting of a pine tree. But after ten years in the Boreal forest, there were no pine trees left.
 

Among the stumps, green saplings poked up from the rotten bed of leaves and needles. A cold wind whipped down from the north to tug Primus’ cloak out behind him. Beyond the river to the west the land rose steeply, and the snowy peaks of the Yeti’s Teeth marked the western edge of the world. Today the sky was thick and grey, and the mountains were shrouded in fog. As they walked along the cliff, the sound of the waterfall grew louder and soon the wind brought a stinging mist against their faces. If Primus walked to the edge of the cliff he would be able to see the citadel in the valley below. But the party kept marching, until they passed the point where the river plunged over the falls. Then they were marching beside the river and gradually the roar of the waterfall faded behind them.

Their destination was roughly half a mile north of the falls: one of the giant greatwoods was surrounded by a wooden scaffold. Chips of wood lay thick on the ground. A rope of twisted hemp ran through a block which was attached to the trunk near the top of the tree. The rope stretched all the way across the river, where it was anchored to the opposite shore. On the trunk, at the level of the scaffold, a wedge had been chopped from the base of the greatwood. Even from a distance, the scale of the thing impressed Primus. The wedge they’d chopped out of the tree was tall enough to stand in, yet it looked like the work of woodpeckers from a distance—or perhaps termites.
 

It was a new idea, to fell a greatwood tree. If all went as intended they would pull the trunk down across the water, where the current would bring it downstream and over the falls. From there another crew would catch it in their nets and guide it ashore near the citadel. One tree would supply six thousand men with firewood and lumber for a year.

Today they would deepen their cut while the pulling team waited across the river, ropes in hand. If they worked swiftly it might be possible to bring the tree down before sunset. Primus and Lepus were partnered up, as were Sextus and an older man called Felix. They scrambled up the scaffold first, while the other half-dozen men gathered up the chips scattered by the previous day’s work, now dry of sap and ready to burn.

Primus and Lepus worked together smoothly inside the tree, one wielding the axe while the other tossed the loose chunks of wood onto the ground below. The trunk was so thick that both teams could work inside the wedge at the same time, and they did not get in each other’s way. As they worked, sap oozed slowly down from the trunk above Primus’ head. It collected in the rough edges left by the axe and formed tiny stalactites that caught painfully in his hair. When he took his turn collecting wood chips for Lepus the sap got onto his hands, and when he took back the axe in order to take his turn chopping the sticky resin pulled against the axe handle, raising blisters on his palms. They hacked away for the rest of the morning while the foreman walked around the scaffold, examining their progress.
 

By mid-afternoon Primus’ shoulders were burning and his eyes stung from the sweat. He stepped back to rest his axe and pushed his drenched hair back from his forehead. Lepus stepped in as Primus took his break, collecting the latest crop of wood chips, and Primus stepped aside to let him pass. He leaned on his axe handle as he caught his breath. The smells of sweat and sap filled his nostrils.

Then the wind picked up and the tree began to groan.

For a moment Primus stood very still, listening to the sound of the creaking wood. Lepus froze where he was crouched, one hand touching a chunk of greatwood, the other arm cradling a stack of chips. The wind grew stronger and the tree groaned louder, a sound that seemed to come from all around them. Primus felt the trunk vibrate beneath his feet.
 

Lepus whispered “
Look!”
His eyes were fixed on the pale green wood a few inches from his face. A long, thin crack was forming there, growing before their eyes.

“GET OUT!” the foreman shouted. But Lepus squatted, frozen in place, staring wide-eyed at the growing fissure. Primus dropped the axe. He grabbed Lepus by the shoulders, intending to haul him to his feet. The world shrank as the greatwood bent over in the sudden gale. The wedge began to close above their heads. The other axe team had already scrambled out. Primus could hear them shouting from the scaffold. He tugged hard on Lepus’ shoulders.

 
Lepus finally awakened from his reverie and clutched at Primus’ arm. “Go!” he shouted, and they crawled together toward the edge of the trunk for it was already impossible to stand.
Too late
, thought Primus. A terrible, slow
CRAAACK
filled their ears, and the old man of the forest shuddered, and then came crashing down.

Nothing binds men together in common cause, through hardship and infamy, better than the sure knowledge that their hopes are the very will of the gods.

–
Gaius Marius Venator,
 

 
Collected Letters

BLAME

Primus stood against the infirmary wall,
 
his back brushing against shelves of potted unguent and bright steel instruments. He watched with wide eyes as Lepus lay on his back on the doctor’s table, pulling feebly at the ropes that held him down. Just hours before, Lepus had boasted and teased him. Already it seemed a lifetime ago.
 

Lepus had frozen up when the gale began to blow, and he watched as if turned to stone as the cracks in the trunk grew wider before his eyes. Primus shook him as the tree bent over on top of them. When the trunk began to snap Lepus roused and they crawled desperately for the edge. Primus felt hands gripping his arms, and they hauled him bodily out of the gap and onto the scaffold that encircled the trunk. Before he could put his feet beneath him, his rescuers flung him off the platform. The world spun brown and green as Primus fell, and the wind rushed out of his lungs as he slammed into the earth.

Primus lay on his back, coughing and clutching his wrist to his chest. For a mad instant he saw the wheat of his father’s plantation rising over him in place of tree trunks, golden stalks bending double as a gale rushed across the fields.
Father, I’ve fallen off my horse
. Then the roar of the wind grew louder, and the tree gave way with a final crack that echoed off the greatwood trunks across the river. The earth leapt beneath Primus’ back as the trunk slammed down, and dirt sprayed his cheek. He blinked to clear the grit from his eyes and rolled onto his side. After a moment of dumb awe, Primus reached up and touched his fingers to the rough, rust-colored bark. He had been spared.
 

After a few moments, Primus struggled to his feet and looked around. The greatwood had twisted as it fell, coming down at an unintended angle—along the riverbank instead of across the water. At its base, the trunk had splintered, and tremendous cracks ran along its length. The scaffold had been shattered. The planks now jutted up from beneath the trunk like the legs of a giant insect beneath a man’s boot. One of the men was pinned beneath the wreckage. Two others were prying the splintered boards away from the trunk, working the nails loose in order to free their comrade. The foreman paced around them, guiding their efforts. Primus began to limp toward them, leaning on the tree-trunk with one hand. Then his eyes fell upon Lepus and for a moment he simply stared.

Lepus was pinned to the earth by the trunk of the greatwood. The others must have thrown him clear, just as they had Primus, but the tree had come down across his legs, and Lepus was trapped belly-down against the earth. Horribly, he was awake. He was pulling feebly at the ground, grabbing fistfuls of dirt as he tried to drag himself free. But one leg was buried to the thigh, the other to the shin. He whimpered as he tried to crawl. Primus could see that Sextus, crouched over him, was weeping.