Nobody Loves a Centurion (10 page)

All too soon, I heard a
tuba
sounding the officer’s call. I was abominably weary, but there was to be no rest for me. With my helmet beneath my arm I strode smartly toward the praetorium. One advantage of belonging to a family like mine is that one is given a very thorough schooling in all the rhetorical arts. These include not only the art of public speaking but also of presenting oneself, both standing and in motion. Since a man bent upon high office must serve with the legions, he is taught how to show himself before the troops. There is a genuine art to getting the rough military cloak to flutter behind you as you walk, and draping it casually over the slightly raised arm when you halt so that it bestows the dignity of a toga.

Vinius might be able to outshout me, but he could never match me for poise and sheer, aristocratic style. And I was certain that I would have to carry this off on style alone, since I had nothing else at my disposal.

The faces gathered around the staff table wore a wide variety of expressions, from the carefully noncommittal to the violently hostile. The only smile present was my own, and that was as false as a whore’s. Caesar looked as grim as death, but maybe, I thought, he was just thinking about all those Gauls.

“Decius Caecilius Metellus,” he said, destroying another of my fond delusions, “the First Spear has leveled some extremely serious accusations at you. You must answer them.”

“Accusations?” I said. “Am I supposed to have misbehaved?”

“You would do well to acknowledge the gravity of your situation,” Caesar said. “Foolishness that can be overlooked in peacetime, in Rome, is not to be tolerated in a legionary camp at war.”

“Ah, yes, foolishness,” I remarked, my eyes not on Caesar
but on Vinius. “I think forcing sentries to go night after night without sleep in the presence of the enemy is foolishness of the most dangerous sort.”

“Proconsul,” Vinius said, keeping a tight rein on his voice, “this officer has interfered with my sentry postings. Since his arrival here, he has sought to coddle his precious client who happens to be a member of my century. Last night that man and the rest of his
contubernium
slept on guard duty. I want them executed.”

There was a collective indrawing of breath.

“Those men slept at my command. Their guard posts were not deserted. I manned them with troopers from my own
ala
.”

“He let
Gauls
guard a legionary encampment!” Vinius said witheringly. “It’s worse than treason!”

“The offense is grave,” Caesar said. “Even so, capital punishment at this point would be excessive. The men were acting on instructions from a superior, however idiotic those instructions may have been. We must, after all, consider their source. No, the fault lies not with the legionaries but with this officer.”

Vinius stood there fuming. Nothing looks sadder than a man cheated of a few executions.

“I believe that I acted with perfect . . .”

“Silence,” Caesar said, without special emphasis. I shut up. Caesar had that admirable ability to make a common spoken word sound like thunder from Jupiter.

“Decius Caecilius, what am I to do with you? I could pack you off to Rome in disgrace, but that is what I suspect you most dearly wish. I could reduce you in rank, but you are already about as low as a man can get and still be an officer in this army. I could make you a common soldier, but you are a Senator and I would not offend the Senate by making a member of that
august body serve as a foot-slogger.” This may have been the very last time Caius Julius Caesar ever worried about offending the Senate.

“There is always beheading, Caesar,” Labienus murmured. “It is a gentlemanly punishment, worthy of a lordly Caecilian.”

Caesar stroked his chin as if he were giving the suggestion serious consideration. “There is his family to consider. The beginning of a war might be a bad time to alienate the most powerful voting bloc in the Senate and the Assemblies.”

“Oh, we won’t miss him,” my cousin Lumpy assured Caesar. “We have plenty more where he came from.” Some men will stoop to anything to get out of paying off a hundred sesterces.

“The idea is tempting,” Caesar said, “but an execution before hostilities have properly commenced might be viewed as severe. No, I shall have to devise something else. No matter, I’ll think of something. First Spear, rest assured that this officer will never again interfere with your men or with your performance of your duties.”

Vinius was far from satisfied, but he knew better than to argue. Even a First Spear could not demand the execution of a superior officer.

“As the Proconsul wishes,” he said, not quite churlishly.

Thus far I seemed to be getting away with my pose of aristocratic disdain, but I was far from easy about it. This chitchat about execution was almost certainly just scare talk, but I could not be perfectly certain. A military commander is permitted tremendous leeway in the measures he deems appropriate to secure order and discipline within their forces. He could be hauled into court when he returned home and laid down his
imperium
, but juries in such cases usually sided with the commander.
All citizens understand that the security of the State and the Empire depend utterly upon the discipline of our soldiers, a discipline that is unique in all the world.

Lucullus had declined to execute Clodius (still called Caludius back then) when he had every right to. Clodius had incited officers and men of Lucullus’s army to mutiny against their commander. But he had not wished to offend the powerful Claudian clan, and Clodius hadn’t accomplished much, anyway. Other commanders were less tolerant.

Caesar ignored me for the rest of the staff conference, during which he sorted through the mundanities and complexities of the army’s situation with great efficiency, dispensing duties and special assignments in a crisp, clear tone that left no questions as to exactly what was expected. Once again I was impressed. I later learned that it was Caesar’s opinion that more military disasters had occurred because of unclearly worded orders than from all other causes combined.

Once his duty was assigned, each man saluted and left to carry out his orders. Last to go was Titus Vinius. He was glaring pointedly at me and Caesar was not unaware of the fact.

“That will be all, First Spear,” Caesar said. “You have leave.”

Vinius almost said something, thought better of it, saluted and left, trailing a miasma of hatred so palpable you couldn’t have heaved a spear through it.

“Well, Decius Caecilius, what am I to do with you?” Caesar said when Vinius was gone. It was a good question. The duties of tribunes and staff officers are seldom clearly defined. Everyone knows what a legionary is supposed to do, likewise with
optios
and centurions. A general and his
legatus
have a clear commission from the Senate and People. The rest of the
officers are pretty much the general’s to dispose of in whatever fashion pleases him. Sometimes, a general will think a tribune capable enough to be given command of a legion. More often, a tribune is expected to keep out of the way.

“Am I to take it that I have already forfeited my cavalry command?”

“You could forfeit much more than that. Do not provoke me, Decius. I am not favorably inclined toward you just now. I requested your presence here as a personal favor. I know that I had at the time what seemed like a good reason for wanting you with me on this campaign, but I confess that the reason escapes my memory.”

He pondered for a while and I sweated. I was sure that there had to be some loathsome duty he could put me to. There always is, in an army.

“It is clear that you have too much time on your hands, Decius. You need something to keep you busy and at the same time remind you of the discipline required of a soldier’s life. From now on, you are to report to an arms instructor at first light every morning and you are to exercise at arms, interrupting only for officer’s calls, where you are to stand in the back and say nothing. At noon, you are to return to your clerical duties here. At night . . . well, I shall find something for you to do at night—something that does not involve the sentries.”

So I was in for humiliation. It could have been worse.

“It may seem to you that I am showing unwarranted leniency with you. It is only because I, too, consider Vinius’s treatment of that
contubernium
to be unwise. However, he knows the men and he knows the legion and you do not. If he wishes to make an example of them, that is not unreasonable, at the beginning of a campaign. That way, the other men will
know exactly what to expect. However, I voiced no such doubts to Vinius, and if his general deems it unnecessary to reprimand a centurion for measures he employs to discipline his men, it is certainly not the job of a newly arrived officer of cavalry to countermand his instructions. I am not accustomed to explaining myself to subordinates, Decius. I trust you appreciate this extraordinary privilege.”

“Certainly, Caesar!” I said fervently.

“I do this only because I know you are an intelligent man, despite your many deceptively stupid actions. As to your
ala
, I will leave you in that position, but you are to ride with them only for parade until I instruct otherwise. A combat command is entirely too dignified and serious for you at the moment, and Lovernius is perfectly capable of handling them in the meantime. That will be all, Decius. Report to the arms instructor. One of the legionary trainers, not just a sword instructor. I want you to regain your feel for the
pilum
and the
scutum
.”

I winced, knowing what I was in for. “As you command.” I saluted, whirled on my heel, and marched away. I was quite unsatisfied, but that was no concern of his. I wanted to talk to him about Vinius’s actions and my reservations about the man himself, but Caesar was clearly not interested. It struck me that Vinius had distracted attention from his questionable behavior by making this a personal clash of wills between him and myself. I knew then that I had made a far more dangerous enemy than I had supposed. I had thought that I was past underestimating men because of their low breeding and boorish attitudes, but I have frequently been wrong about myself.

Hermes was surprised to see me show up at the training compound between the legionary camp and that of the auxilia.
He was even more surprised when I submitted myself for arms training. The young recruits paused to gape at the unexpected sight until their instructors barked at them to resume their monotonous exercises. The repetitious
clunk
of practice swords against shields resumed.

“You’ve done this before, Captain,” the spear instructor said, “so you know the drill. You can warm up for a while with the javelins, then you start in with the
pilum
. The shields are over there.”

My shoulder twinged with anticipation, knowing what was to come. Javelin throwing is an agreeable enough sport, one at which I excelled. Of course, there is a major difference between tossing the things out on the Campus Martius, without a shield and dressed in a tunic, and going through the same exercise wearing armor with a legionary’s
scutum
on your left arm.

The
scutum
is nothing like the light, flat, narrow cavalry shield, which is called a
clipeus
. The
scutum
covers a man from chin to ankles and is as thick as a man’s palm. It is oval in shape, made of three layers of thin wood, steamed and glued so that it curves around the body, giving protection to the sides and improving the balance. It is backed with thick felt and surfaced with bullhide, and completely rimmed with bronze. The long, spindle-shaped boss makes a spine down the center, its widened middle section hollowed out to accommodate the hand. The boss is sheathed with bronze: this tremendous contraption has to be managed with a single, horizontal hand-grip in its center, behind the boss.

In truth, the
scutum
is not so much a shield as a portable wall, turning a line of legionaries into an advancing fortress. In the famous “tortoise” formation a unit of cohort size can advance
with
scuta
overlapped in front, back, sides, and overhead like roof tiles, invulnerable to anything smaller than a boulder hurled by a catapult.

In ordinary use, the
scutum
doesn’t have to be maneuvered much, because it leaves so little uncovered to begin with. In a stand-up, toe-to-toe fight, it need only be raised a few inches from time to time to ward off a thrust to the face. But when hurling the javelin, it has to be raised high for balance, placing great stress on the left wrist and shoulder. That will only happen a few times in the course of a battle, but in practice it just goes on over and over—and so it was that morning.

Javelins are about four feet long, lightweight weapons to soften up the enemy before the battle lines clash. The
pilum
is another matter entirely. It is man-height, made of ash or other dense wood, and as thick as your wrist up to the balance point, where it flares to form an area as long and as thick as a forearm. The rest of its length is an iron shank terminating in a small, barbed head. Compared to a javelin, it has all the flight characteristics of a pointed log.

Military tinkerers are always coming up with ways to improve the
pilum
, the idea being to make it difficult for an enemy to throw it back at you, always a hazard with missile weapons. Marius slotted the iron head into the wooden shaft, fixing it with one rivet made of iron and another made of wood. The idea was that, upon impact, the wooden peg would break and the shank would then rotate on the iron one, rendering it useless for throwing. Caesar’s innovation was to temper only the point, allowing the relatively soft shank portion to bend. This must have made him popular with the armorers, who had to straighten them out after the battle.

Of course, the
pila
employed for training were of a more
permanent nature. The target was a man-sized straw bale fifty feet away. The
pilum
is never thrown farther than that. This is primarily because there is hardly a man alive who
can
throw one farther than that. Most centurions instruct their men to get within ten feet before hurling the
pilum
. That way you can scarcely miss and the effect is devastating.