Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

Dwyrin started whistling a tune. By his estimation, if they made their way to this Aelia Capitolina, they would be only a week's ride from Damascus. He guessed that Zoe would wind up there if it was true that her city was destroyed. She would need supplies and food and water-what better place to get them?

– |"You're the First Century, Ninth Cohort, Sixth Ferrata?" Nicholas unfolded the briefing sheet and turned it over so he could read the names. "Gnaeus Parsos commanding?"

He looked up, his eyes running over the crowd of men that had risen from their bunks when he had rapped on the door to the barracks building. By his count there were nearly the hundred the Magister Militatum's Office had promised, which surprised him. The Ferrata had just been posted back to Judea from the war against Persia and would not have had time to replace any men lost or invalided out of service. He was perplexed by the men he saw-they were all dark-haired and Latin looking, with hardly a blond or redhead among them. Not the usual run of Eastern troops. True, they seemed stout fellows with muscular frames and thick wrists, but in the brief moment he had been in the doorway he had seen a marked lack of scars, missing ears, broken noses, or any of the other impedimenta that Legion soldiers tended to acquire. They weren't even particularly tan and he expected that veterans of the Ferrata, which had been garrisoning the Judean frontier for almost four hundred years, would have caught a little sun.

One of the soldiers looked around quizzically and then stepped forward. He was a balding fellow with sleepy-looking eyes, week-old sunburn, and a neck like a tree trunk. Nicholas squinted at his rank insignia. It didn't look quite right, being formed of a circular wheel with some kind of a triangle within it. The man coughed and said something that Nicholas did not quite catch.

"Sorry," Nicholas said, speaking slowly, "Latin is not my best tongue."

The man nodded and then, with the air of someone dredging his memory for words, said, "Centurion, we're not from the Sixth Ferrata. And there's just no Gnaeus Parsos here."

Nicholas was taken aback and looked over to Vladimir and Dwyrin who were lounging against the doorposts sharing a bread roll with cheese and salami that they'd gotten from a caupona on the way to the barracks. Vladimir, his mouth filled with flatbread and cheese, shook his head in amusement. He was no help.

"All righ!" Nicholas gestured at the men standing around. "You're the First of the Ninth of the Sixth by this mustering order! You're assigned to me for the duration of this mission. Everyone should bunk out their kit so that I can inspect it."

The man with the funny-looking insignia shook his head. "But sir, we're not them! This is the Fourth Engineer's cohort of the First Minerva! I'm Sextus Verus, lead surveyor. Are you Nicholas of Roskilde?"

Nicholas frowned, thinking of delightful torments to apply to the clerks at the Office of Barbarians.

"Yes," he allowed grudgingly, "I am."

"Oh good! We've been waiting weeks for you to show up." Sextus dug into a wallet he had hung from his shoulder on a stout leather strap. It was filled with folded sheets of paper, unsharpened quills, and a stoppered bottle of blue ink. Dwyrin peered into it with interest-there were all sorts of odd pieces of metal and string in the wallet. Sextus closed it with a snap and a frown and Dwyrin stepped back, grinning in apology. The surveyor handed a sheet of parchment over to Nicholas.

It was an order writ, signed by the tribune in charge of military assignments at Antioch. Nicholas read it with a face that grew longer and longer. His century of canny grizzled veterans was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he had been assigned a gang of mathematicians and hydrologists.

"What do you do?" Nicholas put the writ away and looked around, a perplexed look on his face. "You're all listed by these Latin technical terms, which I, for one, do not know!"

"Oh," said Sextus, brightening. He had lost one of his teeth in the front. "These are the lads-normally, you know, we're attached to the Minerva, building bridges and aqueducts and the like-Batavia is a messy country for water…" He waved a hand at the men standing around.

"Batavia?" Nicholas snapped in irritation. "That's a humid, low-lying, half-inundated, gnat-infested Western Empire province." He looked at his order sheet again. "You're supposed to be veterans of the Judean frontier, and Eastern troops to boot!"

"Oh no," said Sextus sadly, shaking his head. Some of the other men shook their heads in disgust. Most had returned to their bunks to play draughts or cards or sleep. If there was some cock-up with the orders, the centurions could sort it out. "We're Western troops all right. Stuck here on the edge of nowhere… You know, there's not a good aqueduct in this whole province? Everything is wells and these underground channels! What good is that? There's hardly any gravity feed on an underground channel…"

"Stop." Nicholas frowned his best Centurion-in-a-bad-mood frown. "What happened to the men from the Ferrata?"

"They bunkered off," interjected a thin-looking man with a squint. He had lank dark hair cropped close above his eyes and chipped fingernails. "I heard it from the optio when we were back in Damascus. That lot had been thrown in the lock up for breaking up a taverna." The man punctuated each word with a nod as he spoke. Nicholas glared but the man blithely ignored him.

"From who?" Sextus did not believe it. "From that fat bastard Crassus?"

"No," said the thin man, making a waving motion with his hands. Nicholas saw that they were stained with ink. "From Martus-we had a drink right before we got our orders. We were talking about the public sewer and the pooling problem in the east quarter. You know, the one where the temple foundation had settled and tipped the conduit…"

"Enough!" Nicholas moved physically between the two men, his hand over Sextus' mouth before he could reply. "You-squinty-what's your name?"

"Julius Frontius Alba, sir, begging your pardon."

Nicholas leaned close to Frontius and smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. "You'll get no pardon from me, squinty, if you don't keep on the road with your story. What happened to the men from the Ferrata?"

Frontius squeaked a little and backed up, his hands fluttering in front of him. "They got sent off on some bandit-chasing expedition, sir! Really, it's true!"

"Settling foundations!" Sextus was ready to spit nails. "Why didn't you tell me that then? Now we're three provinces away from our real posting and you…" He jabbed a finger at Frontius, "knew why the whole time!"

"I did not," Frontius said, leaning around Nicholas to wag a finger at the surveyor. "No one knew that the Ferrata First and Ninth was supposed to come down here!"

Nicholas clapped a hand over Frontius' mouth and silenced the man with a steely glare.

"You, Sextus, what was your assigned posting before you were sent here?"

"Ah, Centurion!" Sextus grinned wistfully. He put his hand over his heart. "That would have been a bonny job! We'd been left off by Emperor Galen as loaners to the Eastern wigs to take care of infrastructure shortfall and the legate-before he left us for home-said we'd drawn the ticket for Mesopotamia."

"Mesopotamia?" Nicholas made a face. He had heard tales of the land between the two rivers from soldiers returned with the Imperial Army. An endless bog of mud, flies, bad water, rivers too wide to see across, a vast and hostile native population, and truly pitiful wine. "What's so great about Mesopotamia?"

Both Sextus and Frontius sighed, shaking their heads and sharing a long-suffering glance. Who knew where the Empire got these officers?

"Bridges by the hundred," said Sextus brightly.

"Canals by the mile," put in Frontius. "And dams and dikes and water mills bigger than the Saepta Julia!"