Last Plane to Heaven (20 page)

Only the broken legions, and those whose masters could not arrange their timely withdrawal, remained.

Longinus watched the smoke rise from the fires near the Salarian Gate. Rumor among the centurions and their troops was that slaves had let the attackers in. Not that it had done the poor bastards much good. The Visigoths seemed pleased to kill anyone unlucky enough to be in their path.

Now, atop a house partway up the Aventine Hill, he no longer wondered how long it would take them to reach him. A band of the Celtic warriors had ridden into the Vicus Frumentarius perhaps half a glass earlier and set to the serious business of smashing their way through the homes here.

He had four men with him—two of them drunkards, one barely old enough to shave, and another veteran like himself. Longinus had only bothered to learn the old soldier's name—Rattus—as the others wouldn't live long enough for him to need to remember them.

“We could just bugger off.” Rattus was slumped against the rooftop parapet sucking down the last of a broken amphora of wine from the house stores. The kid had been useful at least in handling the petty thievery on behalf of the older veterans. It wasn't very good wine, though. The vinegar stink rose up like pickling time in the kitchens.

“Bugger off where?” asked Longinus distantly. He wondered how many of the Visigoths would make it to this house. They were visibly drunk, and not moving with their reputed efficiency.

“Skin out of our kit, flee with the rest of the meat.”

Longinus understood from Rattus's tone that the old soldier wasn't serious. “Die here, die there,” he said. “They kill everything.”

Rattus burped. “What's so special about dying here? If we die there, might have a little longer to live first. Something could happen along the way. A man can be lucky.”

“Here is where we were sent to die.” Longinus remembered a hot, dusty hilltop in Judaea. He'd learned a lot about being sent to die at that place.

“Fair enough.” Another belch.

One of the drunkards poked his head up from the narrow ladderway. “You coming down?” he asked. “We got duck in brine.”

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” Longinus replied. He heard the raucous laughter of the Visigoths spilling back into the street, two houses down. Smoke was already rising—they'd finally set a real fire here, too. “For all too soon we shall die.”

There was no purpose defending this place. Their handful of legionaries had been set here to guard against looting, should the Visigoths be turned back or otherwise overlook the house. Now, well, it was a worthless fight. Nothing more.

Longinus regarded his
gladius
. As swords went, his was not a bad one. He'd claimed eleven lives thus far with the blade. Perhaps a few more today.

When they came, the Visigoths killed the drunkards out of hand. Rattus died swiftly as well, to his mild surprise. When they got bored with Longinus holding off three of them on the roof, they shot him with arrows until he could not stand. The kid they used like a girl until he begged them to permit him to die.

He watched it all through the filmy eyes of an apparent corpse. If speech had yet been granted to him, Longinus would have begged them to take his head as well.

*   *   *

I tell stories about them, too. Or would if I had anyone to listen to me. Another grumbling old man in a world with no patience or place for grumbling old men. Veterans have war stories that no one cares about but the men they fought beside.

Charles Martel is as dead as Abd al-Rahman. Nobody but me remembers them, or what happened in that rainy autumn deep in the forested country of the Franks. Anybody I might tell wouldn't believe me anyway.

Sometimes I've thought to write it all down. My memory used to be real good. A man isn't made to remember everything, not even last week's breakfast. But he should remember taking a life, a night with a woman, helping birth a baby.

I've done all those things, a thousand times over. Most of the details are gone. Sometimes it's like I've never lived at all.

*   *   *

Longinus had never felt much sympathy for the English. Once a Roman, always a Roman, he supposed. The English were edge-of-the-Empire rubes grown too proud of their mucky little island. But here in France, Charles VI,
le roi,
was a fool. The men who commanded his armies were little better.

One thing Longinus had never done, not as legionary, mercenary, or soldier, was turn his coat. Desert, yes—there was small point in remaining with a defeated army. He had never fought for his own flag, or whatever surge of patriotism drove the sons of farmers and butchers and priests to seek blood. But he did not leave in the moment of battle, and not to the harm of the army he fought for in that season.

What he never could forget was that the men at his side were just like him. The only difference was that none of them had ever been on a Roman execution detail one hot morning in Judaea. Other than that, they were all the same: soldiers in a uniform who would kill or die for the sake of their next hot meal and the pay to come. Whichever came first.

These names he knew, the pikemen in his line. Longinus was a
caporal
just lately. A dozen men to wrangle, and a sergeant to avoid.

The French had not paid sufficient attention to longbow. Longinus had. He'd served at Crécy. He knew what the English could do. Even a generation later, the idea that a peasant could slay a sworn knight still seemed too difficult for the French nobility to comprehend. Longinus understood. He'd taken a clothyard shaft in the breastbone and been left for dead. One of the worst injuries he could recall, in fact, a deeply blossoming field of pain that had almost overwhelmed even his strange, accurséd gift.

Finding new and interesting ways to die was an occupational hazard of going for a soldier, but that didn't mean he had to search them out. The frightened squad around him deserved better than their commanders would give them. Longinus was recalled to that by the smell of urine—Petit Robert had wet himself again. Mist and birdsong might have raised the dawn sun from the fields, but it was the smell of piss and blood that really reminded a man that he was at war.

“When you see the knights fall as if struck down by God, we will fall back into the woods,” he said, wondering how many different languages he'd given orders in. After a while, they all faded with disuse, except the Koine and Aramaic of his youth. Those were languages of his dreams. “Sieur d'Albret has promised us a great victory and revenge for the defeats of our fathers.”

The squaddies muttered, elbowing one another, a few grinning.

“I have a different promise,” Longinus continued. “I promise to keep you alive, if I possibly can.”

“Our names will all live on in victory,” shouted Henri le Doyeux, surely the most ardent partisan of their little unit.

Longinus met the glance of the
caporal
of the next squad in their line—a hard-bitten Basque who reminded him of Rattus, except for an unpronounceable name.
Idiot,
their eyes said to one another.

“I think you'd rather your body lived on,” Longinus replied. “Carrying your name with it.”

A bit more elbowing and grinning met that remark, then they settled down to the serious business of breaking their fast and tending their pikes.

When the arrows came, they chittered through the air like blackbirds on the wing and fell through the skin like knives. Longinus never did get his men to the woods, but he found out once again how badly a longbow could hurt a man.

*   *   *

A woman once told me that only in dreams are we truly free. I think she had it backwards. Only in dreams are we truly ensnared. A waking mind knows better than to hope for certain things. Wishes can be avoided for the sake of sidestepping the pain of life. But the dreaming mind, like the heart itself, wants what it wants.

I've spent centuries cultivating the art of not wanting. Married a few times, along the way. Even once staying around long enough to see your children grow to doddering age, then burying them, will put a stop to that.

Cultivating the art of not getting killed took more of my time. Like I said, I don't die, but otherwise-fatal injuries still hurt like blazes. Even so, I've walked off more battlefields than anyone in human history. Of this I am certain.

I've kept a few kids alive. I've sent a few fathers home. I've slain a lot more, of course, my own side's and others. Loyalty is where you find it. Kind of like those dreams.

Even as bad as the English archers were, it was gunpowder that made things impossible. When you could be killed without even knowing you had been fighting, that changed everything.

*   *   *

He hated trenches. Worst invention in the history of warfare. Worse even than guns and bullets. With trenches came mustard gas and bombing runs and tanks and all the things that could befall a man pinned down by position.

Longinus wasn't too happy about his Lee Enfield 0.303, either. With bayonet fixed, it was an incredibly inefficient spear. Mostly, though, it was a finger of death. One that didn't even require the training and sweat of an honest bowman.

The newest lieutenant came down the line, yammering about orders and an attack. Longinus figured he'd last three days at most. Given that the man's first act on arriving was to root out all the booze and cigarettes, then lead a prayer service to stiffen everyone's souls, no one was going to ask too many questions about who fired the bullet that would soon kill him.

After almost two thousand years of warfare, he'd long since realized that every army ever constituted had precisely the same process for producing foolish twits recklessly in love with the power of their commissions. Most of those armies also had an informal process for weeding out the foolish twits on the ground.

It would be pleasant to at least consider that natural selection, except the quality of the officers never seemed to improve.

“Corporal Longo!” shouted the twit.

“Sir?” Longinus gave the man his best tired old sergeant's stare. He knew the noncoms and the company commander had him pegged as a disgraced sergeant major serving under another name. You just couldn't hide the kind of experience he carried in every step, every glance, every word. The new lieutenant saw corporal's stripes and assumed malingering, as that's what the lower classes by definition did with themselves in the absence of proper leadership. Or so Longinus had been told.

A red face sweated at him despite the chilly, fogged-in morning. “Do not eyeball me, Longo. You may be my father's age, but you will respect my authority.”

“Sir.” Longinus didn't bother to conceal his contempt.

The lieutenant leaned close. “I'll be sorting out the order for our next assault. Would you like to be first out of the trench?”

“If you'll be leading the way, sir, I'd be pleased to follow your example.”

The resulting staredown ended poorly for the officer, who finally stomped off muttering.

When the order to go over the top came down the next morning, Longinus shot the lieutenant himself, saluted the captain, then took his squad through a barbed-wire forest into a hail of Boche bullets.

*   *   *

Did you ever figure how much of it all was connected? Just what you can remember now, at the end of the Imperial age, should be enough. Andersonville, Isandlwana, Katyn Forest, My Lai.

A curse, Christ's Harrowing of Hell.

I have been the blade of His plow down the centuries of history. Only now, the numbers catch up to me.

And so they have. A man came to me last night. He wore a suit and snakeskin boots and he ate an apple as he spoke. “Longinus,” he said in my own native Koine. He was the first person to call me by my right name since the fall of Rome. “Your days have numbered beyond counting.”

I was drinking coffee from a wretched paper cup on a sidewalk in a city of Africa. No one here should know me or speak my tongue, this I well knew. There was only one answer I could give. “I have waited for you a very long time.”
Whichever one you are,
I thought but did not say.

His eyes were violet, and spread wings were reflected in them as if an angel stood just behind me. “Are you done?”

“Ever have I been done. Good for evil's sake, evil for the sake of good.” I added, “I am tired.”

He touched me, just once, saying, “You are free to go.”

Where his fingertip had brushed the back of my hand, blood welled up. Two hours later, the scratch had not healed. The lingering pain was a marvel I had not seen since Judaea.

To test his word, I cut off the least finger of my left hand with a hunting knife.
It did not grow back.

Then, I knew I was free. The only question was what to do with my freedom? I could only go where I had ever been, the battlefield, but that was no longer so easy.

In these days, the recruiters can number the lines on a man's thumb. They can number the flecks in his eye. They can number the patterns woven into the seed of his loins. I have never bothered to learn the crafty skills of forging paperwork and changing records. Always, I could walk away and take another name.

Now, though, even the least of African tyrants wants a résumé and a cell phone number for the mercenaries who might bear weapons in his name. Tramp freighters of no fixed flag won't hire gunmen on their deck unless references are provided. There is no place left for me.

Sunrise greets me now with a sky of fire, as it has done down the long centuries. I have made my preparations. Just in case this last promise is another deceit, I will strike my last blow so well they will not find me after.

I used to wonder what it was like to die. Eventually I stopped, but on this last morning, another wretched paper cup of coffee in my hand, it occurs to me once more that my reward and my punishment are likely just the same.