David Weber: Ranks of Bronze

A trumpet blew three short blasts, answered almost immediately by three thinner, piercing notes from a curved horn. The sound recalled Vibulenus to a present which, bad as it might be, was better than that past in Mesopotamia. The right-hand pair of the cohort's six centuries had reached their proper spacing, and their centurions had signalled a halt.

Like a bullwhip, the tip continued to move for some moments after portions further back had stopped. Vibulenus heard the centurion of the Fourth Century give an order to his trumpeter, followed at once by a two-note call and shortly later by the whine from the Third Century's horn. The legionaries closest to the tribune, three ranks ahead of him and as many behind, clanked and rattled to a halt.

Without a horse, the young tribune couldn't see a thing, not a damned thing, of the legion except the mail-armored torsos of the nearest soldiers. He strode between files, the alignment perpendicular to the legion's front, pausing as each man of the century dressed ranks by rotating one of his javelins sideways and horizontal. "Hey!" snarled a trooper whom Vibulenus jostled with his round shield in brushing past, but the man recognized him as an officer and blurted an apology even as the tribune stepped beyond the ranks and became, for a moment, the Roman closest to the enemy.

"Sir?" said someone in a concerned voice.

Vibulenus turned and saw, to his surprise, that Clodius Afer had spoken. They were all nervous. Perhaps the file-closer was as embarrassed at clubbing a man with his spear as the tribune was at butting into cohort discipline for purely personal reasons.

"It's all right," Vibulenus explained, "I'm-" To his amazement, he then said what he suddenly realized: "I'm less afraid out here. I think it's because-the arrows you know? We were all packed together, and the arrows kept falling. So in ranks, I expect the arrows."

Clodius blinked in total non-comprehension. Several of the front-rank legionaries looked at one another with expressions which were too clear to permit doubt as to what they were thinking.

"Carry on," the tribune said sharply, flushed again with anger at everything but himself and the tongue that kept blurting things it should not. "I'm attending to the dress of this flank."

Well, that was the conscious reason he'd had for stepping out of ranks.

The legion was in fully-extended order, all sixty centuries in line with nothing held back for support or reserve. That gave them a frontage of almost a mile, a considerable advantage in keeping the enemy from swarming around both flanks-but it provided no margin for error, either on the flanks or in case an attack penetrated the thin six ranks into which the troops were stretched.

Perhaps the new commander knew what he was doing. Marcus Crassus had not. That was a certainty to the gods and to everyone who had served under that hapless general in Mesopotamia.

For all that, the ranks of bronze and iron and leather-faced wood had a look of terrible power. They made Vibulenus shiver with joy that he was on this side of the valley and not the other where the enemy fell to with the disorder of grubs spilled from rotting wood.

The ranks twisted like serpents crawling, for the slope across which the legion deployed was too irregular to accept the straight lines of the parade ground. These even curves had the sinuous power of a living thing, however, and within them the five-foot spacing between individual troopers looked flawless to Vibulenus despite the searing curses of non-coms who felt it could be improved. The First and Second Centuries locked into alignment with a final shudder, trumpet calling to horn. The sun behind threw the legion's long, spiky shadow across the grass toward the enemy.

A legionary-it should have been a mounted man- jogged across the front. He was coming from the pilus prior, the cohort's senior centurion. "Ready as ordered, sir," the man muttered as he passed Vibulenus, but he was on his way to the Commander waiting among his terrible body-guards behind the center of the legion.

The tribune nodded and tugged at one end of his sash, a token of rank like his trailing horsehair crest. Empty rank. He didn't command anything. It required a minimum of ten years' bloody service to become senior centurion of a cohort, and at least that-plus family and connections-to become the legate in charge of a legion.

When his newly-formed legion had marched away from Capua with its standards sparkling, the horns and trumpets calling triumphantly, Vibulenus had believed that he was part of Rome's splendid conquest of barbarians. Mesopotamia and the gilded armor of the Parthian cataphract horsemen had cured him of that mental posturing; and disaster had left nothing behind but his youth, and the empty "oversight" of the left flank which his breeding gained him.

He could probably manage to die heroically, but it was clear that the new commander would care even less about such a death than Crassus would have.

Three cavalrymen trotted from the left flank, their shields slung and their reins spread wide in both hands against the chance of horses slipping and throwing them down between the lines. Vibulenus stamped his right boot to test the footing himself. The hobnails grated a little, but the grass rooted the surface into sod and there was no evidence of shingle to make a horse or armored soldier skid.

But the riders were scouts, not fighters, and they were understandably skittish about the potential problems which they were sent to search out. In battle mode, these men would gallop across the same terrain with shrieking abandon, each of them trying to be the first to come to grips with the enemy. They and their fellows had done just that under the leadership of Crassus' son disappearing in pursuit of Parthian horsemen who fled until the Roman squadrons were out of touch and support of the infantry.

It was so easy to blame others for the fact that Gaius Vibulenus Caper was here. And it did so little good.

There was a series of horn and trumpet signals from the right flank, distorted by distance and possibly multiplied by echoes. The thunder from the hostile encampment continued, but it was supplemented by deep-throated shouting.

A pair of vehicles drove from the mass of the enemy. With two axles apiece and a flat bed laden with warriors, the vehicles looked like wagons, but their drivers lashed them on like racing chariots. They were drawn by teams of six beasts which looked more like rangy oxen than like anything else in Vibulenus' experience, two pair pulling in yokes, and a beast attached only by hames to either side of the yoked leaders. They made for the scouting horsemen with the singleminded determination of gadflies seeking blood.

Mingled horns and trumpets from the command group called the advance. The signallers of the individual centuries picked up the concentus, until the massed call had spread past Vibulenus to the horn of the cohort's First Century.

"Cohort-" called the senior centurion, his voice audible because he had raised it more than an octave to pierce the bleating signals.

"Century-" the other centurions echoed with greater or lesser audibility, depending on their experience with getting real power behind a shout that was above their normal range.

"Advance!"

Raggedly, because some men did not hear the command and responded to their comrades' motion, the legion began to stride forward. Most of the men gave a shout, and a few clashed the javelin in their right hand against their shield boss.

The three horsemen were cantering back to their fellows, the task of scouting the intermediate ground accomplished by the enemy. The war carts bounded over irregularities, hurling the half-dozen warriors in the back of each into contortions as they clung to ropes looped around frame members. The vehicles lurched awkwardly where the opposing slopes met at the valley bottom, but there was no gully there and not enough of a bog or watercourse to affect the advance of the legion.