David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

"Hold it, sir," interrupted the file-closer, taking the first of the tunics that dropped from the wall and handing the next, with its narrow border, to Vibulenus.

"He's got the Commander's ear," the tribune resumed, the first words muffled as he pulled the garment over his head, "and he's using it to-"

"How do you know?" Clodius asked bluntly.

"Where are we going?" Vibulenus said, looking up the hall and back behind him. There was no particular difference: featureless walls and soldiers, most of them going to or from the baths.

"To the Recreation Room, whatever in Hades that may be," said the non-com. "How do you know Rectinus has any control over the Commander?"

"He-" Vibulenus began, and stopped before he gave credence to what at any other time he would have deemed nonsense. "Oh. Sure. Falco could say the sun rises in the east, and I still ought to check it if it matters, right?"

"I thought something like that, yessir," Clodius Afer agreed. "And I guess-"

"This is your destination," interrupted the ship's voice, the Commander's voice. "The bead will go no farther with you."

Vibulenus had expected a sports ground like Rome's Campus Martius, but perhaps safe javelin and discus courses were too large for even the volume of this monstrous vessel. Was there swimming, at least, available? He regretted not having been able to swim a few laps in the baths, where he had hoped there would be a pool.

The Recreation Room was circular again, sloping down from the rim to the center like a double theatre- amphitheater-designed for gladiatorial events. Instead of narrow stone benches for seating, there were couches set radially to the circle. Vibulenus found inexpressibly alien the notion of a couch tilted so that you looked down over your feet instead of reclining on one arm and facing the side.

"This place…" said Clodius Afer. "Look, it must be over the baths. Or under them. The hall wasn't long enough for two rooms this big to be side by side."

"I don't see what they're doing," Vibulenus said. "There's nothing here."

The room was at least as large in diameter as the baths-surely the hall hadn't curved either up or down? But Clodius was right about its distance. This room was high from the center to the ceiling because of the way the ranks of couches sloped downward. There were six or eight doorways around the circumference, which made the room's alignment in the vessel even more confusing. Some hundreds of the thousand or more couches were occupied by legionaries focusing intently on the center of the room Which was empty. The rows of couches continued downward until the lowest row filled all but a ten-foot circle, where there was not so much as a pylon standing.

"Maybe if we ask-" Vibulenus began, looking upward though he did not think the voice really came from the ceiling. He was afraid of asking the-the vessel itself-for information in front of the file-closer, though he could not have explained what reaction he feared or why.

In any case, Clodius Afer responded to the problem in his own direct fashion by stepping down to the nearest occupied couch and shaking the man in it to full attention. "Hey!" the file-closer demanded. "What in Hades-oh. Hi, Epidius. Sorry, sir, but what in fucking Hades goes on here?"

The First Cohort centurion that Clodius had aroused grimaced angrily at the junior non-com, but he blanked his face instantly when he saw the tribune, as well, hanging on his answer. "Ah," grunted Epidius. "Well, it's the Battle of the Frogs and the Mice. Just-well, if you lay down on a couch, you'll see. And you sir-" nodding to Vibulenus "-if you please."

The nearest pair of unoccupied couches were some way down the aisle. "That horse's ass," the file-closer muttered to his companion. "What's he think his rank really counts for any more?"

"It's all we have left," replied Vibulenus in a flash of awareness spoken before he fully comprehended it. "It's got to count."

The tribune sat on the center of the couch and began to lower himself carefully into a reclining position. Even before his head had touched the cushion, he was seeing a battlefield in place of the amphitheater he knew was really there. Vibulenus thought he heard the file-closer say something, but he continued to lean back into a medley of clashing weapons and raucous challenges shouted in Latin.

The combatants were not Romans and not humans. Epidius was quite right: the tribune was now watching- had nearly become a part of-a battle of frogs and mice. His viewpoint swooped down the line of frogs… or almost frogs. The beasts stood upright and their legs were straight instead of splaying outward at the knees the way those of true frogs did.

The scene was without scale. Certainly there was nothing to prove that the facing armies were made up of minute individuals rather than things the size of men. The ground was very marshy, and the broad webbed feet of the frogs were an obvious advantage to them.

Their equipment was crude, however, and it seemed to have been adapted from local vegetation rather than being created by art. Their shields were of pale, heavily-veined leaves whose edges were wrapped but not smoothed to a regular outline. They wore breastplates of darker material which also seemed to be individual leaves; their helmets looked like Phrygian caps but on closer examination-the viewpoint froze even as Vibulenus considered the question-were seashells bound on with grass ropes.

Unlike their feet, the hands of the frogs were not webbed-though they looked strange enough, having only three digits to grip their shields and the long stone-pointed spears with which each warrior threatened the enemy.

That enemy was as surely an army of mice-and not mice-as they were frogs. In contrast to the smooth, mottled-green hide of the latter, the mice toward whom Vibulenus' unvoiced question slid his viewpoint were covered in brown fur. Their bellies were the same color as their backs and limbs, but the multiple dugs of many of the warriors were so full that they must be females.

The panoply of the mice showed greater artifice, though not necessarily greater efficiency, than that of their opponents. Vibulenus could not tell for sure the material of the spears and shields the mice carried, but they seemed to be ceramic-glazed at the spearpoints and, in a variety of grotesque designs, on the facings of the shields.

The mouse breastplates were of painted leather, framed and cushioned by wickerwork and bound to them with leather thongs. At first glance, their helmets were of leather also, fur side out-but the close inspection which the tribune's wonder granted him showed that the helms were gigantic nut-shells with the shaggy husks still clinging to them.

Neither army carried edged weapons; and, unless Vibulenus were wrong about the spears of the mice, neither army had any metal even as items of adornment.

The tribune's point of view swooped up to a godlike perspective from which the armies, beginning to flow together, were blurred into two unities: the individual warriors shrank from man-size to mere colors, a green jelly and a brown jelly, sliding toward one another across a pan of neutral gray.

"Gaius Vibulenus Caper," said the voice, "you have received the challenge of Lucius Rectinus Falco. Do you accept?"

"What?" blurted the tribune. Below-directly below, not "down" in sense that one looked down from the bleachers onto a gladiatorial combat-the field rang with the cries of the combatants, individually audible when the voice was not speaking in his ears.

"You must accept or not accept," the voice said tartly. "Do you accept?"

"Yes, damn you, but what-"

And Vibulenus spiraled vertiginously down to the marshy battlefield.

He was no longer watching the battle as he lay on a couch which he felt even if he did not see. The shield on his left side was supported by a strap of woven grass over his right shoulder and across his back. It weighed more than even a full-sized legionary's shield, and the leaf from which it had been formed was cured to the density of half an inch of oxhide. More awkward still was the breastplate, a harder, thinner leaf whose serrations prodded the skin of his belly when he strode forward.