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  Ranks of Bronze

  ( Эскалибур - 1 )

  David Weber

  David Weber

  Ranks of Bronze

  PROLOGUE

  On a farm in the Sabine hills of a planet call Earth, a poet takes a stylus from the fingers of a nude slave girl and writes, very quickly, And Crassus wretched soldier takes a barbarian wife from his captors and grows old waging war for them.

  The poet looked at the line with a pleased expression. "It needs polish, of course," he muttered. Then, more directly to the slave, he says, "You know, Leuconoe, there's more than inspiration to poetry, a thousand times more; but this came to me out of the air.

  Horace gestures with his stylus toward the glittering night sky. The girl smiles back at him.

  BOOK ONE

  THE FIRST CAMPAIGN

  Caius Vibulenus wore a white horsehair crest to mark him as a tribune. Fear turned the dew dribbling from that insignia into drops of acid on the back of his neck. Dawn was beginning to raise a bitterflavored mist from the valley before them, and the occasional serpentine trees seemed to writhe as they bathed in the thick air.

  The enemy was deploying from its camp in the shelter of great basalt pyramids that the sun revealed as a natural rock formation, not the godlike city which the young tribune had thought he saw against the night sky.

  "Mother Vesta," Vibulenus whispered as his fingers tightened on the bone hilt of the sword sheathed at his left side, "let me live to see my hearth again. Father Hercules, give me strength to endure this time of testing."

  A signal began to boom from the enemy camp. It sounded like thunder, a crash which built into a rumble and did not slacken though the whole valley began to echo with it.

  "Mother Vesta," the tribune repeated, "let me live to see my hearth."

  "… ten feet tall," a legionary was muttering to his fellow as the Tenth Cohort lurched towards its position on the left flank. "And they eat their enemies raw."

  "No talking in ranks!" snarled a non-commissioned officer-Gnaeus Clodius Afer, the file-closer who ranked second of the eighty-odd men in the cohort's Third Century. In barracks, Clodius would have carried a swagger stick, but here in the field he bore two javelins and a shield like any other line soldier. He rang the butt of the lighter javelin on the bronze helmet of the man who had spoken.

  The legionary yelped and stumbled. Dim light and the helmet's broad cheek pieces concealed the man's face, but the tribune recognized the voice as that of Publius Pompilius Rufus-one of the few legionaries he actually knew. Rufus and his first cousin, Publius Pompilius Niger, came from farms adjoining that of Vibulenus' own family, and the three boys had attended school together in Suessula.

  "Here, fellow," Vibulenus said in a squeak that was meant to be a growl of warning to the non-com. He put his arm around Rufus' shoulders and glared back at Clodius. "No need for brutality."

  "Sir, that's all right," the legionary whispered hastily, jumping sideways and hunching as if the tribune's arm were afire. Rufus collided with the trooper to whom he had been speaking-his cousin Niger, of course-in a clash of equipment much louder than that of the non-com's blow a moment before.

  "No need for little pricks too young to shave, neither," Clodius muttered, enough under his breath that Vibulenus could pretend the words were lost in the artificial thunder from across the valley.

  Vibulenus stepped back, rubbing the lip of his Greek-style helmet, more of an ornate bronze cap than functional protection like those of the line soldiers. With his hand raised that way, his forearm concealed the face which he was sure glowed with his embarrassment.

  Anyway, it wasn't true. He had shaved, and that first beard had been dedicated in a golden casket in the temple of Juno of Suessula which his father had refurbished for the occasion.

  And would that the gods had struck him down in that moment. Then his family could mourn the ashes of Gaius Vibulenus Caper, and he himself would be spared all this.

  Whatever this was.

  How could General Crassus have bungled so badly at the end of a brilliant career?

  Because of the noise around him, and even more because of the turgid echoes of his thoughts, Vibulenus did not hear the sound of the horse approaching until a legionary's curse was answered with, "Watch yourself, dog!" in the nasal bray of the rider, Rectinus Falco- another of the legion's six tribunes.

  Falco was the last person Gaius Vibulenus wanted to see right now, but even that had its advantages: Vibulenus' shoulders straightened, his face became a mask of cool disinterest; instead of roiling with fear and embarrassment, his mind focused on the fact that he did not have a horse and that bastard Falco did because of the way he had made up to the Commander.

  "Our commander sends me to check on the progress of the left wing," Falco said. His accent implied that he was born and bred in a townhouse in the wealthiest section of Rome. In fact, he was country gentry from Campania, just like Vibulenus himself; and the Vibuleni could have bought Falco's family three times over.

  Not that questions of birth affected where the two tribunes stood, right now and for the foreseeable future.

  "Not the level of progress one might have expected," the horseman went on, raising himself a trifle in the saddle by pressing his hands against the double front pommels.

  "Tell the Commander that he needn't concern himself with this flank," Vibulenus replied in a tone of vibrant haughtiness that surprised him and would have surprised his declamation instructor in Capua even more. He had never shown signs of oratorical power. This was a hell of a place for it to turn out that he had talents in that direction after all. "Though I would have expected more cavalry to support us."

  In all truth, this was a Hell of a place.

  "Vibulenus, you'll go further if you learn to tend to your own affairs," Falco snapped angrily. He raised his torso higher with his hands and clamped his knees near the top of the saddle to peer at the cohort from a slightly better perspective. No doubt about it, the man was a natural horseman. "Which," he went on in his nasal sneer, "you seem to be doing a very bad job of, as ragged as these lines look."

  "Then if you'll get yourself and your animal out of the deployment area," Vibulenus responded with ringing clarity, "we'll proceed with our business."

  Falco might have continued the wrangle-which was not about war but rather status, and therefore of much greater importance to him. One of the line soldiers- was it Clodius Afer again, watching the ranks quick-step past-muttered, "Wonder how he'll ride with a spear up his bum?"

  The horseman dropped back into a full seat with an alacrity that proved he considered the threat from the ranks more than rhetorical. The sun had risen high enough to clearly limn the anger on Falco's face as he tugged at the bridle and spurred his mount's right flank to twist it into a tight pivot. He continued to kick the horse as he rode back toward the command group at a twitchy canter.

  Vibulenus drew a deep breath, obscurely thankful to Falco. Nothing like anger to drive out… weaker emotions. And he'd been worse places, they all had- trapped without water and without shade, facing Parthian arrows that could punch through shield and breastplate alike if a man's luck were out. Abandoned by their allies, abandoned by Rome, and utterly abandoned by hope.

  Though it was doubtful that any of the three elements were closer to them now than they had been that terrible day in Mesopotamia.

  The tribune had a better view of the enemy across the valley than he did of his own men; but the enemy was not his job, not yet, and he determinedly concentrated on the deployment of the legion's left flank.

  The legion had only a hundred and fifty attached cavalry at the moment, and horses were in even shorter supply than trained riders. There was a tiny squadron of blue-plumed
helmets bobbing in the sunlight ahead of the deploying infantry. Weeks before, or what seemed like only weeks, Gaius Vibulenus would have been too ignorant to be bothered by the lack of cavalry. Nobody who had survived the disastrous advance from Carrhae could ever again be complacent about unsupported infantry. The tribune froze as his mind flashed a memory of Parthians riding out of the dust, the sun glinting like lightning on the steel heads of their arrows…

  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.

  A warrior in the back of either cart was banging a mallet against a sheet of bronze slung from a pole. The rumble of changing harmonics explained the greater thunder emanating from the enemy camp.

  "Ware!" called Clodius, and the tribune skipped aside as the legion rejoined him at the rate of two paces per second.

  There was a slight gap in the frontage between the Third and Fourth Centuries-inevitable because the units dressed ranks within themselves, and useful because it provided a narrow aisle in which the non-coms could scurry between the six ranks for which they were responsible. Vibulenus fell into step between the Third Century file-closer and the centurion of the Fourth, a dull-faced veteran named Vacula whom the tribune had never heard speak a word which was not an order or the response to an order.

  "How many do you think there are?" Clodius asked. "Sir?"

  Vibulenus was trying to position his round shield. It was lighter and easier to carry than the big oval scutum of the line troops, but a similar piece of equipment had seemed horribly inadequate against the sleet of Parthian arrows. Startled by the question, but openly delighted that someone was treating him as if he had some purpose, he squinted across the valley at the army toward which they strode.

  It was like trying to guess how many roses bloomed in the fields beneath Vesuvius, and an honest guess would have been in horrifying contrast to the five thousand, more or less, legionaries bearing down on those opponents.

  So instead of blurting, "Thirty thousand, maybe as many as fifty"-the figures that clicked through his mind-the tribune said, "They look like they're all naked, and only the ones in the chariots have shields."

  They also looked like they were ten feet tall, just like Rufus had said. Well, maybe eight feet tall.

  "Yeah, well…" said the file-closer. "At any rate, they aren't shootin' arrows over their backs as they ride away, this lot."