David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

"Maybe they've got a faster Medic," Niger suggested without particular interest. "Or maybe, you know, more booths." He touched his lips with a finger, this time as a delicate probe of his own injury.

"Maybe," said Vibulenus as he led the way down the aisle. His body was mottled with blood and bruises now that his clothes and armor no longer hid the price he had paid for the knob of high ground. "And maybe things have dome a little unravelled, what with the Commander down. He was brand new, so I don't guess the guild has a replacement ready."

There were three bodyguards at the head of the moving column. Their armor was stained with gray dust pounded from the gravelly soil, and the calf and knee of one suit had bright scars showing that warriors had hacked at it.

The iron-clad toads were no less stolid than before… but the tribune could not look at them without remembering their fellows crumpled with feather-pointed native spears catching sun at each interstice of the armor. He smiled, though part of him objected that the toads were only dumb animals, not humans whose self-satisfied arrogance would have been worthy of his anger.

'Didn't really mind seein' 'em croak," said Clodius Afer, echoing the thought from a half step behind Vibulenus. "That's what frogs're supposed to do, right?"

Both centurions laughed, and Vibulenus joined them.

"Move on through," said the Medic. "No, not the booth, cargo-" a legionary had started to tramp from habit into a cubicle "-straight on to the gal-"

The alarm chimed.

One of the toad-things blocked the side passage with his mace. The studded head of the weapon had been used in earnest recently enough that not all the residues had dried.

"Pollux!" shouted a soldier with no tunic but a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms. "This isn't-"

One of his companions pulled him back and pointed to his feet. In the legionary's haste and disorientation, he had forgotten to take off his boots with their S-pattern of iron hobnails. That-and that sort of confused error- explained why the alarm kept ringing.

"There's a special address by the Commander," said the Medic by rote. His face, his tone did not seem bored. Rather, the blue-suited guild employee was abstracted and very possibly frightened. "Move on through, straight into the gallery."

"Well, if that isn't…" Niger muttered angrily. "Don't mind tellin' you, I was lookin' forward't' something being done for this lip."

The three men stepped around the legionary stripping off his boots while his friend held the bundled loot. Vibulenus and his companions had left all their garments at the other end of the hall, but Clodius held his bull-roarer and his fellow carried the knapsack of-be generous: honey-by its straps.

The centurions intended to leave the objects near the cubicles and carry them into the ship when they were through with the Sick Bay. Now, brazenly, they carried their gleanings past the bodyguards who did not know to care, and the Medic who knew not to speak.

"I wouldn't have thought they could fix him up so quickly," Vibulenus muttered to himself, "the Commander. Not that the wounds were so extensive…"

But it took a long time to come to terms with the fact you've been killed. Maybe it took more time than even the gods had.

The scene in the Main Gallery was chaotic but chaotically cheerful. Legionaries, a number of them still wearing tunics among their naked fellows, milled and boasted and compared their loot. Almost all the men had at least superficial wounds, but slashes and bruised muscles were too much a part of normal affairs to dampen spirits significantly.

The change in routine put life in the air the way fair day made a country hamlet sparkle. The legion had just turned near disaster into a victory as stunning and sudcjen as defeat had promised to be. With that behind them, nobody seemed to think that this "special assembly" could be any form of bad news.

Nobody except Gaius Vibulenus, who had been studying the guild with the mind of a man whose family owed much of its wealth to land bought from neighbors whom Sulla had executed…

Soldiers have nothing to teach a good businessman about ruthlessness.

"Sir," said a heavily-cheerful voice. "You'll know, won't you? What've they got going on?"

Vibulenus turned to see that it was the first centurion, Julius Rusticanus, who was hailing him.

It was surprising that Rusticanus was no worse mauled than seemed to be the case-scores of cuts on his limbs and several on his face, but able to talk and move with only the half-hidden twinges that might result from wounds received before the guild bought the legionaries from their Parthian captors. The point of the right flank, where the first centurion stood in battle, would have been enveloped instantly by the native army and cleared last of all by the Tenth Cohort's counterthrust.

A tough man, Julius Rusticanus. But then, they all were by now. Even the tribune who looked like a youth with more lineage than strength of character.

"You're looking all right for somebody at the sharp end, First," Vibulenus said in real approval. Nobody was indispensable, but the first centurion's combination of education and battle-bred experience could not have been equalled in the legion. "But Hades, no-I don't know, I'm not sure anybody does, in a blue suit or not. They're stirred up over losing the Commander, that's sure enough."

"He got chopped?" said Rusticanus. His face went neutral; then, as he judged his audience, broadened into a smile. "Well, that's a terrible thing to happen, isn't it?"

He saluted and stepped back into the crowd, bending some of his particular cronies close to hear the news. Men on the right flank would have had no way to learn of the command group's massacre. For that matter, only a few hundred of the nearest legionaries would have been close enough to see the incident or its aftermath.

"You forget," Vibulenus said as he and his two companions drifted by habit toward the front of the gallery, "that other people don't know things just because you do."

"What do I know?" asiced Niger, misunderstanding the tribune's mumbled statement.

"You know," said Vibulenus instead of correcting the error, "how to make mead." He patted the knapsack, finding the leather surface squishy but not, thank Fortune, stickily permeated with that awful juice. "Among other things."

There was a sudden commotion from the rear of the big room, catcalls. The tribune turned and caught the flash of a yellow bodysuit beyond a sudden motion of Romans toward them.

"Hey, what ye got there?" somebody cried distinctly. The edge of hectoring command in the voice would have been familiar enough to civilians in barracks town, meeting a squad of legionaries recently spilled from a bar.

"Come on," the tribune ordered curtly, shouldering his way toward the trouble. This could get out of hand real fast-maybe already had. Why had the cursed fool decided to walk a gauntlet of killers loosened by fatigue and victory? And where were the guards who always accompanied guild employees in the presence of soldiers.

That was easy to answer: dead on the field, enough of them, and this fellow with his yellow suit and apparatus floating before him ignorant of what a bad pair of mistakes he had just made at his life's risk.

"Get the fuck outa the way!" snarled Clodius Afer, clubbing soldiers to either side with the staff of his bull-roarer. Niger used the side of his fist to equal effect-neither centurion needed to be told what happened to legionaries who angered the trading guild.

The tribune and his companions were not alone. Non-coms including Julius Rusticanus converged from all sides on the guild employee, forming a shoulder-to-shoulder wall facing out against the gibes and half-meant threats. It wasn't that the centurions and file-closers were less ragged than the legionaries they backed off, or that the jostling, cat-calling mob did not understand that they were playing a dangerous game.