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BOOK TWO
THE FIFTH CAMPAIGN

"Get your fuck —"

KA-BANG! rang Vibulenus' helmet under the impact of the crossbow bolt.

"—head down!" completed the new commander of the Third Century of the Tenth Cohort, Gnaeus, Clodius Afer, hunching along the rampart.

"Oh," he added as the tribune rolled out of the sprawl into which the bolt had knocked him, helmetless and recognizable. "Sorry, sir, but one a' those bastards has the communications ramp like he'd taped it."

Local auxiliaries, slightly-built bipeds like those who held the fortress with skill and tenacity, began banging shots over the rampart in what was obviously a pointless exercise. The light bolts sparked against the stone walls of the fortress or flew wildly over the crenellations.

It was notable that none of the auxiliaries raised their heads above the earthen rampart which protected them. Their right hands jerked the cocking levers of their repeating crossbows, while their left hands clamped the fore-ends to the fortification to roughly steady the weapons. As the archers' muscles worked feverishly, the dark green of their skin showed beneath ruffles in the short, almost translucent, gray fur that covered them.

A bolt slightly longer and heavier than those the auxiliaries were shooting — and much better aimed — grazed the timber parapet and thudded into the guard-walk so close to the tribune's boots that he jerked them closer to the wall. The auxiliaries ducked down again also. A film of greenish poison colored an inch or so of the shaft above the buried head.

"Sorry," muttered Vibulenus, snatching up his helmet which had been ringing softly on the guardwalk where it had fallen. Near the crestholder was a dent with a gouge and a smear of poison in the center of it. The bronze was already beginning to verdigris where the poison touched it. The tribune sucked in his lips and rubbed the metal clean against the turf. "I forgot how damn much that tower overlooks us since they burned us out last."

"This's the sharp end, right enough," the centurion agreed grimly. "We're supposed t' be issued some oxhides t' cover the guardwalk so at least they can't see us so easy from up there."

Vibulenus nodded upward in agreement, then donned his helmet again. The blow had not hurt him as much as it surprised him, but three inches to the side and the quarrel would have been through his forehead.

The tribune's sweat was as cold as the morning air. There were no small mistakes; only times you were luckier than you deserved to be.

There were times you weren't lucky as well, and in the air as a reminder hung hints of the charred ruin of the siege ramp which the present one replaced.

Twenty-seven legionaries had been caught in the conflagration which wrapped the first ramp in flames so hot that corpses could not be recovered, much less reanimated. Hundreds of the local auxiliaries — archers mostly, like these — had died at the same time . . . but that didn't matter, because they were bound to die some day, finally and irrevocably, unlike the members of the legion.

Unlike Gaius Vibulenus Caper, whose fingers traced the dent in his helmet as he thought and shuddered.

Clodius Afer was thinking along the same lines because the breeze carried a whiff of roast flesh on the cleaner odor of wood smoke. It was there if you knew to sniff for it . . . and that was as hard for a legionary here to avoid as it was to keep from picking a scab. "Looked so simple," said the centurion.

"This much timber around —" Afer continued as he nodded toward the hills sloping everywhere within his arc of vision, covered with the stumps that had provided material for the siege works "—wasn't even a risk, just hard work muscling the frames into place and backfilling with dirt."

A trio of ballistas fired from the battery a furlong behind the rampart on which Vibulenus now crouched. The artillery's arms slammed against the padded stops, lifting the rear mounts from the platform until gravity thudded them back.

Two of the missiles were head-sized stone balls which crashed into the battlements of the tower. One ball disintegrated while the other caromed off nearly whole, in a shower of fragments battered from the wall. It would be possible to breach the fortress with ballista stones, but it would take bloody forever . . . .

The third ballista sent a pot trailing smoke in a low arc over the wall of the fortress.

"Eat that, you bastards!" shouted a legionary farther down the guardwalk, but the sight did nothing to improve Vibulenus' state of mind.

The locals in this place, where the sun was too white and the days too long, brewed a liquid that burned like the air of the Jews' Gehennum. Pitch, sulphur, quicklime, bitumen, and saltpetre were dissolved in heated vats of naphtha, the foul-smelling fluid that pooled like water in many of the valleys hereabout. Shot over the walls in firepots like the one the ballista had just flung, it destroyed the defenders' housing, panicked their livestock and — who knew? — perhaps killed somebody.

But the same fluid, poured by the hundreds of gallons from the top of the tower, had devoured in flames the original siege ramp across which the legion had expected to storm to victory.

It wasn't that a flame attack had been unexpected. Galleries had protected the soldiers as they built the ramp closer to the walls. They were covered with raw hides over a layer of green vegetation that acted as a firebreak, as well as a cushion against heavy stones. The framing of the siege ramp was timber and theoretically flammable, but no one had believed that freshly-cut logs, none of them less than eighteen inches in diameter, were at any real risk.

The defenders had waited until the face of the ramp had advanced within ten feet of the fortress and the log-corduroyed upper surface of the Roman construction was nearly on a level with the battlements of the wall proper. Then, despite arrows showered by the trading guild's local auxiliaries, they had thrust spouts through the crenellations of the tower defending the vulnerable angle on which the Roman attack was centered.

From the spouts, dispersed and carried outward by gravity, came the fluid which clung and blazed and could not be extinguished. Water only spread the flames and made them burn the harder by igniting the quicklime. Even dirt and sand, shovelled desperately onto the fires by some of the quicker-thinking legionaries, rekindled only minutes later when the hell-brew soaked to the surface.

There was an hour of havoc and terror, men lost and equipment destroyed — tools, battering rams, and the galleries which were meant to protect them. But, as the defenders continued to spew fluid on the ramp from which every living thing had been driven, the framing timbers themselves caught fire. The flames continued to spread until the entire quarter-mile width of the siege ramp had become involved.

The flames rose higher than the granite tower which had spawned them, and the smoke lifted a thousand feet before spreading into a pall that hid the sun for three days and wrapped the corpse of the legion's expectations. Artillery on platforms a furlong back from the nearest flames was ignited by the radiant heat, and the ramp's filling of earth and rubble turned to coarse glass which crumbled and gouged when the legion finally began the task of rebuilding.

The defenders' artillery was light, catapults which shot arrows from ordinary bows instead of using the power of springs twisted from the neck sinews of oxen. As a result, they could not hurl firepots against their besiegers and spread their yellow flames along the teams of men and oxen dragging fresh material up the ramp. Few of the legionaries doubted, however, that this attempt would end in as complete a disaster as the first, once the siegeworks advanced to within ten or so feet of the tower's face.

"The trouble is," said Vibulenus, "these little furry wogs know what they're doing."

He was on a needless tour of the advanced works, to inspect them and report back to the Commander. The tribune could by now have figured within a foot how closely the ramp approached the fortress, calculating from the amount of material that had been carried forward since the most recent tour of inspection. Timber was the limiting factor since the nearer slopes had been denuded to form the initial works. The legionaries were stretching the available wood this time by using fascines of rolled wickerwork to bind each advance of the siege ramp; but even so, heavy logs were needed as pilings to anchor the fascines against the weight of the fill behind them.

The unsteady ruin of the former ramp was more detriment than gain as a foundation, and Vibulenus was not alone in dreading the way the wicker underpinning would burn, despite the layers of sod intended this time to cover the works on the final approach.

"Too right," Clodius agreed, giving the trembling arrow a nod which showed that he mistook the tribune's meaning. "I don't think much of their bows — they're quick, sure, but they're no problem with armor the way the Parthians, they shot us t' dogmeat. But some of 'em could shoot out a crow's eye, looks like."

"I mean . . . ," Vibulenus said, focusing on a great timber, an entire treetrunk over a hundred feet long, being dragged up the approach. The teamsters, locals driving the draft animals which looked very similar to the way the tribune remembered oxen looking, would halt out of arrow range until darkness.

"I mean," the younger man continued now that he thought he could phrase his statement so as not to seem to rebuke Clodius, "They're too good all over. Good with their bows —" one of the auxiliaries chose that moment to rise and pump three arrows smoothly toward the tower, ducking back before an answering shot "—good on their fortifications, good on everything. We've been fighting dumb barbs too long."

"They can't meet us in the field," said the centurion, more sharply than he would have spoken had not his pride been touched.

"We'd eat 'em for breakfast," Vibulenus agreed easily. He was watching now and thinking about the timber, suitable for a ship's keel, as it inched up the ram under the labor of forty yoke of oxen. "But we don't have anything like that fire of theirs, either."

"We don't need it," insisted Clodius Afer, misunderstanding again. "They've built with stone, and they got the height besides. We could pour the stuff down the face a' that wall all day and it wouldn't bring down the tower. Hercules, they nigh did that when they, you know . . . . The other ramp."

The works were lightly manned since the previous disaster. The Commander might not care about the legionaries as individuals, but he must have been telling the truth about their value to his precious guild. The irretrievable loss of twenty-seven men at a blow had shocked him as grievously as it had the survivors of the conflagration. He had agreed without hesitation when the tribunes and senior centurions insisted at the following staff meeting that it was better to risk a sally by the defenders than to risk the legion as a whole in a sudden firestorm.

From the Fourth Century, picketed to the immediate right of the section which Clodius' century held, a non-com was scrambling along the guardwalk toward Vibulenus. It might be Niger, promoted to watch clerk when Clodius took the neighboring century. That would be a pleasure, because there was very little fraternization across the ranks when the legion was in the field — and they had been in the field an unexpected three months already, with victory more distant every day that brought no beneficial change . . . .

"Maybe they'll run out of food," Vibulenus said glumly. He drew his sword and held it so that on the polished flat of the blade could be seen the reflected tower, blurred and less substantial than the reality that was worth a man's life to view from this close up. "Or water."

Three crossbow bolts spat down, thumping the bulwark, the guardwalk near the sword's shadow, and the communications ramp where the corduroy surface had been adzed smooth. "Or arrows, though there doesn't seem much risk of that."

Niger, who was proud of his new red-tufted crest but had better sense than to mark himself here with insignias of rank, squatted to a halt beside Vibulenus. "Third Century reports normal progress, sir. We have enough fascines filled to advance another row, as soon as it's dark enough to set the anchor posts."

Niger took a quick look over his shoulder, then rose on his haunches to be sure that no one save native auxiliaries were close enough to overhear anything he said to his immediate companions. "Hi, Gaius," the young legionary resumed. "Gnaeus. Not much happening, is there?"

"How's your mead coming, boy?" asked Clodius Afer in a tone so dry that the tribune was not sure whether the veteran was being sarcastic or just making conversation on a subject about which he was willing to be friendly.

The older veteran. Everyone in the legion had seen and survived at least five campaigns now.

"Well, you don't find bees in a pine forest, you know," Niger said, rightly doubtful as to whether Clodius did know what was to him obvious. "They nest in trees, but they need flowers to eat, and there wasn't anything open around here before we came."

Niger's eyes scanned the slopes behind them deeply gouged by run-off from the brief storms which added to the legion's misery — and replenished the defenders' water supply. "You know, sir," he went on, professionally respectful now that he was considering a professional problem, "I been thinking. If we build the ramp much nearer the walls, they're gonna burn us out same as before."

"You've got company in that opinion," Vibulenus said in something between agreement and sarcasm himself.

A ballista, reloaded more quickly than its fellows, banged. The crashing disintegration of its missile was followed, for a wonder, by the vertical collapse of part of the tower's facing. It left a patch of rock of a darker color across as great a width as a man could span with both arms. Perhaps in a hundred years. . . .

"So you see, sir," Niger went on with the enthusiasm of invention, "what we need to do is stop the ramp right where it is so they can't pour fire on it —"

"And see if the cursed place weathers to dust any time soon?" Clodius Afer interjected.

"No sir," the watch officer said in a tone of injured simplicity. "We can reach the wall from here with a ram or a drill, if it's long enough. If we use that tree —" he pointed at the long bole Vibulenus had already noted "—for instance."

"It'll —" said the centurion.

"And," Niger continued with uncharacteristic determination, "if we cover the outside with bronze sheeting so's they can't burn it up no matter whether they try all night."

"Hey," said Clodius Afer in surprise. "You know, sir, that just might. . . ?"

Vibulenus grimaced, wishing he could be more hopeful about what was, after all, a more imaginative notion than any the Commander had offered. "No," he said, "even if it doesn't sag too much over the distance —" Twenty unsupported feet; the tribune knew from the Greek architect superintending construction on his family's estate how much a beam would flex, and this one covered besides with a heavy layer of metal . . . "—then they'd snag it with ropes from the top of the wall, and we'd be too far away to save it."

"What we really need," said Clodius Afer with gloomy thoughtfulness, "is one a' them lasers the Commander's got. Suppose we could ask him just the once, to turn the trick?"

The short answer to that was no, you cursed fool — the Commander's guild wouldn't have bothered to buy them from the Parthians, buy Romans who knew how to lock shields and use a short sword, if there'd been a chance of using the guild's own weapons. But Vibulenus would not have said that to a friend; and anyway, the implications of the question showed that the non-com had an idea that was still unclear to the tribune.

"Do you think the lasers could tear a hole in those stones?" Vibulenus said doubtfully. "I didn't think it was that. . .." His voice trailed off as he tried to remember what the shield looked like after the bolt had struck it. That hadn't been so very long ago, except that . . . everything got mixed up between, between battles. They fought, they regrouped on the ship after the guild traders landed in their even larger vessel. And then the legion drank and slept and played in the amphitheater with whatever fantasy struggle was going on there now. Injuries that the Medic had repaired aged to true healing, sometimes with traces of scar tissue: the tribune's left biceps still had a twinge from the stab wound he couldn't remember getting in his first melee.

And then, when the deep red dye had faded from the flesh of even those who had been most seriously wounded — those who had been killed, and whose eyes never lost that awareness — everybody woke up in the morning, and the Commander was briefing them for another battle, at another place where the air was wrong and the sun was wrong . . . and nobody was sure any longer what was right.

"Right" was not getting your skull smashed by a ton of rock, and not being engulfed in a fire so hot it burned your bones to a pinch of lime.

"Gee, d'ye think so, sir?" Clodius Afer said, breaking in on the tribune's memory of flames shooting higher than the screams of the men they encircled. The centurion's brow furrowed as he made his own attempt to visualize the laser demonstration. It kept getting mixed up in his mind with what had happened to a kid in his century, Publius Pompilius Rufus, scarcely even blooded. . . .

"No!" snapped Afer, crushing that train of thought with his vision of the present situation. "No," less forcefully but still firmly enough to surprise the men beside him; "what I mean is, they couldn't pour their fire on us if we had that laser. And peckin' through the wall, then — Pollux, that's no problem. The mortar they're set with at the base, that's been burned to Hades. The stone're big enough but that just means you've got a hole you kin crawl through first time you get one clear."

"Yeah," agreed Niger while Vibulenus was still grappling with the unstated part of the equation. "Hot as everybody is after the first time, I betcha four men with picks'd have a block out in a couple minutes easy. Then she's kitty bar the door."

"Mustn't forget there's gonna be another layer behind the facing blocks," Clodius cautioned the junior non-com, professionally analytical now that he had begged the initial question of the laser. "Maybe fill, too, but that'll be rubble, and anyway, we tear a hole big enough and the fuckin' tower falls in, makes us a better ramp right damn through their wall than anything we're gonna build from the outside. Baby! Then we gottem."

To Vibulenus, it was all a variant of the discussion that began. "If that camel-fucker Crassus had had sense enough to march us along the river instead of trying to cut across the fucking desert. . . ." Hindsight was a useless waste of breath, and preplanning that started off with an impossibility was worse. That wasted not only time, the one commodity besides frustration which the legion had in great plenty just now; it wasted thought which might otherwise have been put to useful purposes.

But he still didn't see. . . .

"Gnaeus," said the tribune, interrupting Clodius Afer's description to his admiring junior of the way the legionaries should deploy after they had breached the wall, "how would the lasers keep them from pouring down fire? When they stick their spouts through the embrasures, they're still under cover behind the stone. Lasers wouldn't do any more than the archers did. Unless maybe they curve, do you —"

"No, no," the centurion said, harsher than he would have chosen because his dream was being assaulted from false grounds. Clodius had already convinced himself, at least for this moment with friends, that a deputation from the legion would convince the Commander to break the rules — in a way that would mean his death and the immediate dissolution of his trading guild by investigators of the Federation. "Sir, you see, the stuff burns, right?"

Vibulenus started to lift his jaw in agreement with the rhetorical question, but the centurion was already hastening on to cover his lapse of respect by saying, "And they've got, who knows, hundreds of gallons of the stuff up there —" he cocked his eyebrows to the breastwork beside him and the lordly tower beyond "—maybe thousands.

"Now," his voice sank with the beauty of the thought it was about to express, "what if all that fire-piss was to light up on top the tower instead of when they pour it down on us? How'd you like to see that, Gaius, see all them bastards jumpin' every whichaway and burnin' like fuckin' night games at the Circus?"

"I'd like that a lot," said Vibulenus slowly. Indeed, he could imagine it even as he spoke: the bolt of sudden light ripping apart the spout, scattering blazing fluid among the defenders and the open vats which they prepared to pour down on the legion. The fire would go where arrows could not — nor the laser beam itself, directly. That was very good thinking.

"But," Vibulenus went on, "there's no way we'll get a laser. The Commander himself doesn't dare carry one when he's out of the ship. You know that."

"Maybe," said Niger, hopeful even though both his superiors had lapsed into glum silence, "we could get the artillery to do it? You know, shoot a firepot into the battlements?"

As if supporting the suggestion, a pair of ballistas slammed missiles leaving smoke trails toward the fortress. One pot sailed into the hidden courtyard. The other splashed its contents in a great oval of flame onto the wall it had failed to clear. The blaze was lambent anger against the black stone, streaking and then shrinking into a score of orange hotspots that continued to sizzle around unusually large globs of pitch.

"Naw, not accurate enough," explained the centurion, thumbing in the direction of the fortress as if he or his companions could see it. Their ears and past experience told them as surely as direct sight could have done what had been the result of the ballista shots. "Especially with firepots, since they're lighter 'n stone and they wobble when the fluid shifts."

His listeners lifted their eyebrows in agreement. The smoke trails from the weapons that had fired held their corkscrew shape even as they drifted downwind, dispersing.

Niger's lips pursed, however, as he followed his own line of thought even while ceding the truth of what Clodius Afer had just said. "Well," he offered hesitantly, "if they don't hit it the first time, sir — and I don't guess they would neither — what's to stop they keep trying until they do?"

For a moment, it looked as if the senior non-com were about to snarl an angry put-down instead of giving the suggestion a proper reply. Perhaps if Vibulenus had not been present, that would have happened, but the tribune's expression of something between agreement and expectancy calmed Clodius Afer.

With a smile instead of a bark of haughty dismissal, he said, "If I can see the chance, lad, you can bet your hopes of a woman that this lot we're gettin' wiped by'll see it if we draw a line to it, plinkin' away with firepots. Mayhap they do already and they store the shit down a floor with a layer a' stone between the tubs and anything we could touch with the splash if we did hit."

"All right, I see," said Vibulenus who at last did understand what had been so obvious to the centurion that it took him this long to realize what he had to explain to his juniors.

The tribune was smarter than the older man — either of them would say — and was certainly better educated. But Clodius Afer had the habit of looking at military problems and military solutions, putting himself in the other man's boots. At one time or another he'd been on the other side of most problems during service in Lusitania and Gaul, besides the catastrophic last thrust into the Parthian domains.

For some problems, there is no satisfactory substitute for experience. Learning that had been a valuable piece of experience for Gaius Vibulenus.

"Now, I don't think they're worried about that yet," the centurion continued, glowing now from the approval of his social and military superior. "The way they poured the stuff down the first time, they weren't takin' time to haul it up any distance — and why would they bother? They're no more used to our artillery than we are to their cursed fire! But I guess they're smart enough to learn."

Niger spat angrily beyond the edge of the guardwalk. "Learn quicker 'n some folks does, I reckon. Or else we wouldn't be buildin' right up t' the wall for another bath any time they get good and ready t' offer it."

Bows snapped faintly from the top of the tower. The missiles, moving in several flights as the archers pumped their cocking levers, quivered in the sunlight as they arched upward. When they dropped at last, it was almost vertically. They had been aimed at the teams laboring forward, dragging the hundred-foot timber that had been brought so far with such effort — and would blaze with empty magnificence in a few days or weeks, along with the remaining material of the rebuilt siege-works.

Even with their height advantage, the defending archers were unable to get much more than a furlong's range from their bows. The breeze scattered the light missiles terribly, so that only a few of the dozen or more launched even landed on the track smoothed onto the surface of the ramp for transport.

Though the wood was soft, one of the bolts flopped back after it struck point-first, lacking the slight momentum that would have enabled it to stick. With poison, of course, it could have left a dangerous wound on bare flesh or — possibly — the tougher hide of one of the draft animals. There was little chance of that, since the drivers had already halted fifty feet back of the zone of danger.

"Sure wisht we could borrow that laser," said Clodius Afer with a sigh.

"We won't get that," said the tribune, his voice calm but his mind dancing with a sudden thought as blazingly splendid as the flames which had destroyed the siege works and twenty-seven men.

"Not that," he repeated, "but by all the gods, we will get something as good."

And before either of the non-coms realized his intent, Gaius Vibulenus had ducked down the steps to the gallery which led to the rear — and to the means of putting his idea, all their idea, into effect.

The shimmering surface of the Commander's face flowed and distorted as he drank something that was not ration wine from his goblet. "I don't see how this could possibly work," he said with less than his usual detachment. "Is this something you've used on your own planet?"

Vibulenus was familiar with the word "planet" from the astronomical poetry of Aratus, which had formed part of his education. It was nonsensical in this context, so he ignored it and said, conscious that not even the friendly eyes around the circle held belief, "Sir, this is not a familiar technique for us —" He glanced to his side and got shocked disavowal from Pacuvius Semo, the tribune nearest to him, in place of the smile of solidarity for which he had been fishing.

They were all in this together, thought Gaius Vibulenus with an icy memory of spears — fantasy and real melded together — swishing toward his brain. Whatever others wanted to tell themselves.

Loudly, coldly, certainly, the tribune who was no longer as young as he looked continued, "Nor is the problem a familiar one. However, anyone who has seen a smithy in operation will know that the apparatus will work. Common sense indicates that the result will be what we desire. What you desire, sir."

"Nonsense," said Rectinus Falco forcefully, and the chances were better than half that he was right. Hades, that he was right on either assumption, the mechanics or the result of their successful use. But nobody was going to guess that by looking at Vibulenus' boyish, supercilious expression.

There were fifteen Romans in the command group, the five surviving tribunes and the senior centurion from each cohort. The legion's first centurion, a balding, glowering veteran named Marcus Julius Rusticanus, had held his post throughout the period of service beneath the Commander. Several of the other cohort leaders were recent promotions, since their rank and the deference afforded them were owed to courage in battle — which came with a price, even when the Commander's vast, turtle-shaped recovery vehicle roamed the field after victory had been won.

The Commander was the same man or not-man who had mustered them when they awakened aboard the ship which became their home. The Medic since the third campaign had been a turnip-shaped creature, shorter than the smallest legionary, with broad hands and fingertips that spread like those of a tree frog.

But they saw the Medic only at the end of a campaign, unless they were so badly wounded that their fellows bundled them on wagons or stretchers to the vessel. Nothing, including the recovery vehicle, left the ship between the time the legion disembarked and the victory they were landed to secure.

The Commander shared the legion's exile from the ship during a campaign, but he could not be said to share any unnecessary danger. The Commander lived a fall half-mile back from the fortification, in a dry-stone blockhouse which had been erected before work on the first siege ramp even began.

The command group met in the courtyard of the blockhouse, rank with the smell of the lionlike mounts which were stabled there every night. While the Romans squatted supporting their backs with the stone walls, the Commander sat primly upright on a stool. Two of his bodyguards stood to either side of him, and a farther pair glowered beneath raised visors from behind the stool.

Falco began to rise to take the floor, half way around the circle, but Vibulenus did not relinquish his position. The meeting was one he had called — requested, at any rate. Begged, if you will, of the Commander who, like any reasonable slaveowner, made an effort to accommodate the wishes of his chattels when that did not require unreasonable effort.

"Sir," Vibulenus continued. His voice cut the air like a swordblade while his own imagination told him that the wind blowing across the wall's jagged top was robbing his words of all life, all power. "The technique will succeed. Whether or not it does, the cost of the attempt is negligible. There —"

"The beam that our colleague proposes using," cut in Rectinus Falco, holding himself erect with his chin and chest outthrust in a posture as much theatrical as rhetorical, "is one of the few decent timbers remaining to us. The bronze that he would have us use —"

"Is available," said Vibulenus, and no one in the courtyard, even the speaker, could doubt the power of his voice. "And timber will be in much shorter supply the third time we build the siege works, a certain result if we proceed in the current manner for the next week or even days. Therefore, if your worship will —"

"You are —" interrupted Falco, twisted by anger from the Commander to speak directly toward his rival instead.

"If your worship will give the order," Vibulenus continued in a snarl as piercing as the sound of the Commander's laser cycling, "I will carry out the necessary arrangements so that the fortress can be stormed after the wall is breached."

"How droll," said the Commander, sipping again from a goblet that shone as if studded with a thousand jewels. The liquid within was visible, rolling sluggishly; its color changing from blue through amber, depending on how the light struck it. "This isn't really covered, but I don't see how the Federation could object to it."

Ballistas loosed against the distant stronghold. The sound of their discharge was barely a whisper on the breeze, but the sharper crack of balls demolishing themselves on stone was clearly audible.

"All right, Tribune Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the Commander said, stilling with his words the remark that Falco, still standing, was about to interject. "The estimates of success through starving out the garrison have been revised downward again, and at this particular stage in my career I cannot afford. . . ."

His voice paused. He might have gone on, but Falco, driven by anger to a courage equal to anything his rival had displayed on the battlefield, burst out, "Your worship, there is a cost which our colleague is — passing over. I will not say —" but with venom in his tone he said it "—choosing to obfuscate." He glanced from the Commander to Vibulenus.

"Go on," said both together, the blue-garbed Commander interested; the taller tribune puzzled. If there were a point Vibulenus had missed in the triumphant structuring of his notion, then he deserved whatever punishment he received for wasting the Commander's time on a — nearly — disrespectfully determined presentation.

"He is neglecting the assault on the walls," Falco continued smoothly. "'Under cover of my new device,' says our friend, 'so new indeed that even you cannot imagine it, your worship —" Falco smirked.

The goblet which the Commander had been swiveling gently, froze although the fluid continued its slow motion within.

Falco was terrified. He of all the Romans was most conscious of the blue figure's power over them and most concerned that the Commander was truly inscrutable, his face and gestures not those of a man — though they might be. Falco was too experienced to intellectually believe his rival was cool and collected, but his gut accepted Vibulenus' appearance as his reality — tall, calm, a hero in battle while Falco could claim only the Commander's ear in a place of safety.

Well then, this was his field. "My colleague proposes," continued the shorter tribune as his mind cut away the rhetorical flowers which he suddenly feared would bring his end, "that a party attack the walls with picks, drawing the attention of the defenders on the tower who will then be dispatched by his wonderful device. It is patent to all of us who were near the walls during the previous attack —" Falco had been well back, as always, but the chaos forebade certainty; and in any case, stating a "fact" loudly was most of the way to being believed. "—that this attention, if drawn, means the immolation of the attacking force."

The speaker paused. All around the circle, Romans frowned and pursed their lips as they considered the words and agreed with them. Neither the officers nor centurions who had cut their way to command through heroism were willing to damn the plan at once for its danger, but. . . .

"You have already lost twenty-seven valuable men to no effect," continued Falco, whose sole audience was the figure in blue who was more powerful than all the consuls and legions of Rome. "You must not throw away more on my colleague's hare-brained scheme."

"Must," realized everybody in the courtyard as the gerundive construction rolled off Falco's tongue, had been the wrong thing to say.

Vibulenus held silent with his tongue poised, letting the Commander break the hush by saying, "Starvation is still certain enough, I suppose. Eventually. But go ahead, Gaius Vibulenus, put your plan in effect, only —"

"Yes, your worship?" said the lips of the tall tribune while his mind watched and listened to his body appreciatively from a distance. He wondered if he were going to faint.

"Only don't spend more than twenty men on the feint, will you?" the Commander continued before he took another sip. "Perhaps you can get the locals to do it instead of your own people. Certainly we pay that lot enough. Or at least their chiefs."

"I. . . ." said Falco as he tried to clear himself. The argument was lost, that was certain. "I —"

The Commander's head turned. Falco could not meet the eyes which would not, in any case, have told him anything. He collapsed to a sitting position, wishing the sun were not so bright . . . wishing everyone else in the courtyard were frozen and he could hack through their throats with impunity, including the Commander and most especially Gaius Vibulenus Caper. . . .

"The attack will be real, your worship," said Vibulenus as he alone remained standing. His viewpoint had drifted back within his body as soon as Falco sank away, but knew his heart was beating abominably fast and he was sure he was going to lose control of his tongue before he could make the necessary explanations.

Plowing on regardless like a runner who knows his legs will give way if he slackens in the least, Vibulenus said, "We need to breach the wall as quickly as possible so that the defenders can't come up with another means of thwarting us —"

"Yes, I understand, Gaius Vibulenus Caper," said the Commander, rising in dismissal. One of the armored toads behind him snapped the folding stool closed with enough force to threaten the frame. "Your preparations will take some time, I'm sure, so you'd best get on with them if you're to be any use at all."

He waved a slender, blue, deformed-looking hand. Non-coms began lurching to their feet while the tribunes tried to rise with greater delicacy.

"Sir," said Vibulenus in a voice of such penetrating clarity that everyone paused and even Falco looked at the still face of his rival. "I'll be leading the assault myself, sir. I think we can make the attack in safety."

The Commander made a corkscrew motion with his free hand. "Whatever you choose, Tribune," he said. "Just no more than twenty men. And —" he was walking daintily toward the gate of the living quarters within the blockhouse, but he paused for a moment "—see that there's a follow-up squad at a comfortable distance. In case you're wrong about the safety."

The blue figure disappeared indoors. In the milling confusion of the courtyard, filled with glances and whispers, Gaius Vibulenus wondered what he did choose.

And why.

"You shouldn't be here, sir," said Pompilius Niger, and the flight of arrows which punctuated the statement thudded into the roof of the mobile gallery above them like rain on thatch.

"I ought to be in Baiae," Vibulenus replied. Floating in a one-man skiff in the middle of the Bay of Naples. Surrounded by the prismatic beauty of thousands of dancing waves and covered by an open sky colored the rich blue of indigo-dyed leather.

"Watch it!" called a soldier beyond the gallery. No way of telling what he was warning about. A thud shook the footing of the men preparing to lift the heavy roof covering them, but it could have been an accident to the Roman preparations as easily as a missile flung some distance by the defenders.

The impact brought Vibulenus quivering back to the fear and near darkness within the mobile gallery, however. "You do your job, Niger," he added harshly, "and let me do mine!"

"Sir," said the senior centurion of the Tenth Cohort, his voice deadened and attenuated because he was speaking from outside the protective walls. "We're about to lower the walkway. Wait the signal so's we get it straight before you step off."

Vibulenus nodded agreement, then realized that the centurion couldn't see him through the layered mud and wicker that shielded the assault party — for a time. "Fine," he said, "fine. Get on with it."

Bows nearby popped, though the hissing thunk of quarrels striking showed that the auxiliary archers were only responding to the defenders. There was a crash, loud for all its distance. Seconds later, the gallery and its surroundings were pelted by shards of a ballista ball which had disintegrated against the tower close above them.

The cohort leader shouted an order. Wood squealed, and a section of men grunted together as they shifted a heavy weight.

"What he means," said Gnaeus Clodius Afer, "is you understand that business best, so it's you needs to be out there running it. We can handle this shit."

The twenty men under the heavy gallery were all volunteers and all from the Third and Fourth Centuries — paired according to a practice more ancient than any history that was not myth. Presumably they all knew how risky it was, since they'd also seen the first ramp destroyed.

Vibulenus doubted that any of them save Clodius and Niger had a real grasp of the plan, although he'd tried to explain it to them. The volunteers didn't much care — a normal attitude for soldiers, and one which the tribune was better able to appreciate now that he had become a soldier himself.

Siege work was boring and, in this case, apparently pointless. The Commander believed the works should be continued to put pressure on the defenders, but the legionaries were running lotteries as to what time the enemy would destroy this "threat" with the same offhand precision as before.

An assault on the walls was something different, and a chance to come to grips with opponents who were invisible — unless you wanted an arrow through the eye you were looking with. One of the tribunes said it'd work, that he had some screwy contrivance that'd keep the wogs in the tower from frying the attacking party alive . . . but nobody really expects to die, coldly assesses the likelihood of that. And the near-magic available through the Medic and the recovery vehicle didn't much affect the equation.

Gaius Vibulenus Caper knew very well that he could die. In fact, he had no difficulty in intellectually convincing himself that he would die . . . but his gut didn't believe it any more than did the guts of the troops around him. That was a blessing and no small one, since it permitted him to function in this tight enclosure, already hot with the warmth of sweating bodies.

Functioning meant speaking in a normal voice to the men who shared the danger, convincing them by calm example that they were part of a military endeavor rather than a method of suicide by fire. "No, centurion," Vibulenus said in what he hoped were tones of composure. "The work outside is a matter of timing and military judgment. The leading centurions in charge of it are much better suited to the task than I am."

That the tribune's gut didn't believe, not for an instant; but his intellect did, and he had no choice anyway. He had to be part of the assault he had planned. Vibulenus was young enough to know that he could not otherwise live with himself if the result turned out as badly as it might.

The first centurion, Julius Rusticanus, shouted, "Forward!" Then: "Put your backs in it, you pussies!"

Rusticanus had the scars that had promoted him through the lower ranks, but he had also the exempla that fitted him for his current position. He could handle returns of the legion's equipment and personnel, duties that frightened many men who were willing to charge spears stark naked. Beyond that, he had the carrying voice and absolutely precise enunciation which would have suited him for a life on stage — if he had not been built more like an ape than a Ganymede. He was as likely as any Roman present to be able to understand the complex operation outside the tower, and by far the most likely to have his orders obeyed.

While Rusticanus had overall charge of the operation in lieu of the Commander (whose bodyguard would not protect him from fire), the Tenth Cohort's senior centurion had been delegated tasks involving the assault proper. That meant building a gangway of solid timbers and organizing teams of men to slide it into position when required.

Which was now. Without the gangway, Vibulenus' party and their mobile gallery could not have climbed down the fascine-bulging front of their own siege works. As it was, the descent would be a steep one for men so awkwardly burdened.

The cohort leader gave another muffled command, and the guardwalk shook with the pace of over a hundred men. The gangway was of four-inch planks, planed smooth on their upper surface so that no one would stumble in the quickmarch down from the siegeworks. The stringers were halved logs; and the whole contrivance, carried upside down, weighed the better part of a ton.

The important responses by the defenders were hidden thus far behind the tower's crenellations, but a storm of crossbow bolts was as obvious as it was expected. The siegeworks themselves could not cover the teams moving the gangway; even the light breastwork which shielded the guardwalk had to be thrown down so that the gangway could pivot into position.

Instead, other legionaries attempted to cover their fellows with a tortoise of shields locked overhead and to the sides. Between that formation and the gangway itself which acted as a roof, the legionaries were as safe as reason expected in the heat of battle.

The defenders snapped their volleys down as quickly as they could work the levers of their bows. Each time an archer pulled his cocking handle, a claw drew back the bowstring and the wedge which retained bolts in the magazine slid out far enough to drop the lowest missile. A sear released the string automatically when the bow reached its full draw — and the archer pumped his lever to repeat the cycle.

Bolts that hit the gangway pattered. Those which struck shields thudded on plywood or rang peevishly if they glanced from a metal boss. A scream pierced the confusion of shouts and shuffling hobnails, but the advance did not pause for one casualty running to the rear with a bolt in his shoulder and the pain of poison blazing in his imagination.

"Down front!" ordered Rusticanus in a voice like a scythe. The log surface of the rampart quivered on its base of earth and wicker as soldiers butted the forward end of the gangway in the pits provided for that purpose.

"Now push, curse you!" the centurion shouted. There was a lull in the volleys of missiles from the top and arrow slits farther down the tower face: most of the defending archers had exhausted their magazines and were ripping open fresh bundles of quarrels to shake into the feed lips of their weapons. Through the snap and patter of the occasional shot came a mechanical screech and the collective wheeze of scores of men as they lifted the far end of the gangway against the fulcrum provided by its stringers bedded at the edge of the rampart.

As the gangway lifted, legionaries waiting with stout poles ran up to continue the momentum of the end which hands could no longer reach unaided. The arrow storm broke again with a viciousness that equaled its first intensity. The gangway lifted to its zenith like a wall, but it was too narrow to provide full protection. Bolts clicked against armor, and less fortunate soldiers cursed or bawled according to their temperament as points gouged their flesh.

But the gangway continued to swing upward until it paused trembling, just short of vertical. "Push!" roared Rusticanus. He reached over the back of a legionary to add the thrust of one hand while his other braced a shield studded with half a dozen quarrels already.

The unlubricated stringers rotating in adze-cut pits shrieked louder than the triumphant legionaries as the gangway crashed over the edge of the siege ramp.

Released from duty at the same instant as their major protection toppled away, soldiers ran to the rear in a diminishing shower of bolts as archers emptied their magazines again.

Rusticanus and some of the lesser non-coms stepped deliberately to cover behind their shields. As was usually the case, it was much safer to face danger steadfastly than to flee it; but the experience that allowed a soldier to stand when he could flee was hard-bought and a long time coming.

The mobile gallery had no front or rear wall, but the roof overhung by three feet on either end to block plunging missiles. There was little to be seen, even for Clodius Afer and the other three soldiers in the front rank. Vibulenus, in the row behind them, was lighted dimly by what sunlight seeped past the heads and armored shoulders of the leading rank; and the twelve men arrayed behind the tribune might as well have been in a sealed tunnel for any view they had of what was about to happen.

Vibulenus felt a sudden urge to scream, hurl the gallery away from him, and rush toward the wall which loomed unseen somewhere before him. He couldn't have budged the cover of mud and timber, couldn't rush anywhere while the rest of the assault force packed him tightly . . . and he probably couldn't even scream through a throat which had gone as dry as old bone. He was shaking all over, and he had a terrible need to urinate.

That could wait until they started moving and the act became less obvious. Vibulenus relaxed, feeling enormously pleased that he had just demonstrated intellectual control over one of the few factors within his capacity to change.

A single trumpet signalled them.

"On the count, boys," said Clodius Afer over his shoulder as his own muscles bunched on the crossbar.

There were five transverse poles, as thick and sturdy as a quinquireme's oars. They would make it hard to move forward and back in the gallery, to exchange workers — or flee — but they had to be solid to accept the strain of moving so heavy a structure. Most of the men in the assault force would be unable to help prise apart the tower wall. They were present simply to add their strength in shifting the gallery.

And to swell the butcher's bill in event of disaster, but that was a purpose only for the gods — should they will it. Let the thought not be an omen.

". . . two," said Clodius, "three!" and the gallery lifted with a slight sway to the left as if the structure were a turtle just sober enough to walk.

"Pace!" the centurion ordered. "Pace. Pace. Swing right, boys, just a cunt hair — pace, that's the way, pace —"

Vibulenus heaved at his bar with a sidewall to his left and a legionary he didn't know grunting to his right. He was lifting with all his strength, but that strength was nothing in comparison to the mass of the gallery. He could feel it shift above him, and his instinctive attempt to counterbalance that thrust was as vain as trying to bail Ocean dry.

Guided and controlled by Clodius Afer, who at least sounded as calm as the stone wall, the assault party staggered onward. Bolts spat into the wet mud with which the gallery was covered, audible but unfelt as the protective roof swayed step by step across the guardwalk.

"Watch it here, now," the centurion called, as the motion threatened to become uncontrolled. Where the gangway met the surface of the rampart, there was a lip and a gap of several inches. The leading rank tried to hop the irregularity, but the gallery was too massive for that to be possible. Divided among twenty men, the weight was acceptable, but no individual had the strength alone to make the structure so much as quiver.

As the assault party jerked their loads high again, a poisoned quarrel flicked past the roof gable and thumped the guardwalk between Vibulenus' boots.

"Pace, curse ye!" shouted the centurion.

The quarrel that Vibulenus snapped off beneath his hobnails as his foot shuffled forward must have kissed Clodius' thigh on the way past. Perhaps the poisoned head had not broken the skin; probably the centurion had not received a lethal dose — and very likely they were all dead in the next few minutes anyway.

The gallery tilted down as rank by rank the men supporting it found footing on the slanted gangway. Vibulenus was straining so hard at his burden that fear of stumbling drove out his fear of what would happen if they reached their goal.

Behind them and to one side, centurions shouted hoarsely as their squads began to raise and swing the hollowed timber on which rested all hopes of success. The trunk that had given Vibulenus the idea, a hundred and twenty feet long and straight as a die, had been chosen to execute the plan as well. Legionaries had sawed the trunk in half lengthwise and hollowed it with adzes so quickly that the tribune himself marveled.

On the estate of the Vibuleni, such labor would have been performed by slaves — less well, and taking three or four times as long to accomplish. They were slaves, every man in the legion, and at some level they all knew it; but they didn't think like slaves. There were citizens of Rome and the best soldiers in the world, despite the vagaries of a consul who should have stuck to politics and similar forms of extortion.

"Pace, boys, don't let the bitch slide," Clodius ordered, his voice showing the strain of physical effort if not of fear. The gangway was narrow. If they let gravity carry a corner of the gallery over the side, they were well and truly fucked. The crossbows that sank bolts vainly in the mud roof would turn the force into a score of shrieking pincushions before any of them could be untangled from the overturned gallery.

Behind them, present only in their prayers, the log weapon was being swung into position. Like the gangway, it pivoted in a socket dug into the ramp, but the teams which lifted it did so through hawsers attached to a pair of shear legs. The hundreds of men hauling back on each hawser were covered by equal numbers of legionaries with raised shields, adequate protection for targets near the extreme range of the defenders' bows.

Nobody knew it all, thought Vibulenus as the archers in the tower shifted their aim from the gallery to the teams of men swinging the hollow log. The army Crassus marched into Parthia thought it had all the answers to war, but the squadrons of horse archers supplied with camel-loads of arrows had battered the legions the way the waves defeated a cliff.

But the furred, quick-handed autochthones of this place did not have all the answers either, despite their ability to spew flame as a fountain spurts water. Their missile weapons depended on the tension of bent wood. Real artillery powered by torqued skeins of ox sinew would have slaughtered the lightly-protected lifting teams faster than they could be replaced.

As the shear legs straightened toward vertical, the forward end of the log angled upward to the height of the tower's battlements. A third crew, protected by the rampart, marched along the guardwalk hauling a chain that drew the end of the device sideways. The log now formed the hypoteneuse of a right triangle whose straight sides were the platform of the siege works and the face of the tower.

The defenders must have expected the log to be used as a ram. Even now, as it lifted to an unexpected angle which displayed the hollow interior lined with bronze sheet, it looked more like a ram than it did anything else in their experience — or in the experience of the Romans who had built and were about to use the device.

At the base of the pivoting log was a high screen of wicker and leather. It covered a final crew of legionaries, leavened this time with a few local auxiliaries, and the great bellows made from whole oxhides. One of the auxiliaries gave a high-pitched order as the log steadied into position. The men on the arms of the bellows poised, but only when the centurion relayed the command in a parade-ground bark did a pair of legionaries grip the handles of a pottery jar and lift it toward the broad funnel mounted on the base of the log.

Liquid spouted from the top of the tower. It had began to burn halfway along its course toward the mobile gallery.

Vibulenus and his fellows had staggered off the lower end of the gangway, to the glassy remnants of the original siege ramp. At the tribune's first step, his leg crunched through what had seemed to be firm ground. It was like walking through a crusted snowdrift, except that the edges drew blood as they scraped Vibulenus' calf.

The gallery dipped forward as other Romans broke through as well. The fire had consumed everything flammable in the siegeworks; but wherever there was enough silica in the earth to vitrify, glass had kept the fill from setting under its own weight and the heavy rains. The sprawled remnants were not impassible, but they provided a barrier of hidden pits covering half of the last twenty feet between the new ramp and the base of the tower.

And that saved the lives of the men in the gallery.

The defenders were expert in their use of flame, so expert that the first gout of blazing fluid travelled from the spout with the conflicting pulls of gravity and outward inertia in an arc calculated to splash it under the roof of the gallery. The autochthones knew that by flooding the area when the assault force was directly beneath, they could destroy the legionaries as completely as they had the first siege ramp — but there was no need to runnel flame over the refractory roof of the gallery if the clinging, erosive liquid could be splashed onto the legs of the men inside.

The gallery wobbled to a halt three feet short of where the defenders expected it when they started their flame on its long fall.

Vibulenus' calves itched in a way that was more intrusive than any pain could be. Sweat that raced down his thighs paused and burned when it reached the grit and abrasions on his lower legs. He could not take a hand from the bar he carried to scratch the affected area. His palms were hot and the skin of them, though calloused by swordhilt and shield strap, slipped over the muscle and bone beneath. The unusual stress of carrying the gallery was reducing his hands to puffy, bleeding blisters.

The tribune could see only dimly. The assault force was in an artificial valley between the siege ramp and the sheer wall of the tower. Most of what sunlight did scatter through was blocked by the sheltering roof, and even the remainder was blurred by the sweat and tears which Vibulenus could not wipe away. The tumbling flame, striking and splashing before the gallery, instantly returned light and color to a microcosm of gray pain.

"Mother!" screamed Clodius, loud enough for the tribune to hear him and be surprised. Everybody was shouting, though, and the flames roared as they splattered and eroded the earth. The fire was deep red, with flecks of quicklime as white as rage and a shroud of ragged smoke that was visible only at a distance from the bubbling flame.

The gallery grounded before anyone had the presence of mind to order it down. Hands dropped the bars in panic as the men of the assault force tried to jump back. They tangled themselves with the structure and the men behind them.

A legionary in the fifth row did manage to leap out the rear of the shelter. Sunlight and the imprisoning hugeness of the structures before and behind drove the man back under the roof of a moment later. He brushed off his helmet on the eaves. As it rolled on the blackened rubble, a dozen quarrels snapped toward and clangingly against it.

"All right," ordered Gaius Vibulenus. His voice was as cool as the core of him which shock had disconnected from the sweating, punished body he wore. Clodius Afer and the other men in the front rank were being burned by the pool of fire which closed their end of the gallery, and the tribune's own shins were scorching. "We're going to side-step left, now. Take your bars and lift!"

He should have worn his greaves . . . and he was so disoriented that he almost failed to obey the orders he had given the men who were suddenly under his actual control.

The gallery bucked convulsively and grounded again as the sideways shift tripped several legionaries over the outstretched legs of their fellows. All the horns and trumpets in the legion brayed simultaneously while the shelter lurched another step away from the flames.

The ground shook as a huge fireball ignited on the roof of the tower. It was so bright that it shadowed the receding pool of flame near the assault force.

Ever since the gallery began its tortoiselike advance, the tribune had been too caught up in his immediate surroundings to think about the larger aspects of his plan. The professionals of the legion, rank and file as well as the centurions, had done their job with the stolid excellence of a grist mill grinding away its allotted task.

When Rusticanus gave the signal, two soldiers poured their jug of enhanced naphtha into the breech of the log. The local officer who advised on the process had suggested igniting it with water to spark on the quicklime. The legionaries had chosen to risk an open flame instead, something they understood as they did not understand starting fires with water.

The centurion in charge stepped to the log when the legionaries jumped back. He thrust a torch into the funnel glistening with the residue of thickened fluid. Fire bloomed from the touchhole.

"Bellows!" ordered Rusticanus.

Horns and trumpets cried out in a cacaphony intended to terrify the enemy rather than communicate orders. As the sky echoed, the twenty strong men on each lever of the bellows began to stride forward, ramming the air in the oxhide chamber into the base of the hollow log and the fire already blazing there.

Flame spurted twenty feet in the air from the touch-hole before a pair of soldiers clamped a bronze plug down on it. The air surging from the bellows mixed with the fluid and rammed it toward the open end of the tube over a hundred feet in the air. When oxygen bubbled into and through the burning liquid, the combination puffed explosively up the hollow trunk — and out, in an orange-red flash, across the defenders on the top of the tower.

The spurt was of superheated gas, not fluid that clung with the tackiness of pitch and molten sulphur, but it crinkled the bowstaves, armor, and faces of those archers it enfolded as they crouched at embrasures. The two defenders pouring liquid through a spout wailed and dropped their open vat as flame burst from it to meet the puff expanding from the hollow log.

There were several hundred additional gallons of fluid on the tower in closed containers which shattered when spreading fire wrapped them. When half the jars had ignited in a matter of seconds, the remainder exploded simultaneously. Part of the crenellations, fragments of equipment, and the bodies of defenders too fiercely ablaze to be recognized as living things rained in all directions from the top of the tower.

The flare mounted in a hemisphere, like the cap of a mushroom thrusting itself through the loam, until it broke free of the stone and wrapped in upon itself to climb still higher on the reflected heat of its own combustion. The platform from which it had lifted was bare of any form of life save the few defenders who still thrashed in the blazing sheet which had devoured their eyes and lungs already.

Vibulenus knew his weapon had been successful when an object slammed the sloping roof of the gallery and bounced, then fell again to the ground before the assault force. It could have been a burning missile, heavy enough that its shock grounded the shelter again. What sprawled in a smokey wrapper of flames was not a timber, however, but a corpse that had been a crossbowman before his flesh melted and heat cracked the phial in which he dipped his quarrels. The resinous poison burned blue.

"All right!" ordered Clodius Afer in a voice burned skeletal by emotion and flame-dried air. "Left on the count, boys, and put your backs —"

"Out the front with your tools, men," said Vibulenus, speaking from a mind where everything had a place, like the markers of a board game awaiting the next shake of the dice cup.

It did not occur to him that he was countermanding the centurion. He was placing his game pieces in the illuminated security of his imagination. The dark and bloody reality — of which his body was a part — did not impinge on what was right from a standpoint of command.

"We're safe close by the wall if we move fast," the tribune shouted. When his words had no effect for a further long moment save to turn heads toward him, he added, "Move!" and prodded the ribs of Clodius and Niger.

"Come on, soldiers!" roared the centurion, ducking under the crossbar with the jerky certainty of a boulder rolling downhill — after the tribune pushed it. "Let's take this fucker down!"

No one else in the mobile gallery could get out the front until the leading row clambered free. Those men wouldn't have been in the front rank unless they were willing to leave cover. They scrambled from under the shelter, and Vibulenus followed them in the irrational certainty that the remainder of the assault force was coming also. He was playing a complex game of Bandits, and they were the carved-stone counters on the board moving as he willed.

For that matter, they did follow him — every man of the assault force, because they were Romans . . . and they were soldiers . . . and they were, by all the gods, being led.

The tower was a sullen candle with a pillar of flame above the streaks of blazing fluid crawling through the stonework and arrow-slits of the upper stories. The lowest twenty feet of the wall had been built without openings, and even above that level many of the embrasures had been bricked up against side effects of the defenders' own flame weapons. With the top of the tower a dripping inferno, the ground near the base of the structure was a dead zone which none of the weapons in the fortress could reach.

The outer world swept back over Vibulenus as he squirmed out of the gallery's dark and stinking cover. Heat had sources again instead of being a dull ambiance. The gout that had splashed before the gallery was now shrunken to a handful of sulphurous pools to the right side, and the body of the archer — also shrunken — lay for the tribune to leap as the quickest way to the wall and greater safety.

The hollow treetrunk was a slash against the sky, its muzzle-end rimmed with tiny flames. Vibulenus hoped they would not pour another jar of fluid into its breech in order to repeat the process. At the time he planned the attack, multiple spurts of flame had seemed both necessary and reasonably safe. He had not fully appreciated the way the fire clung like a solid thing wherever the fluid had ignited. The interior of the great tube must contain thousands of hot spots which would turn a fresh draft of fluid into a fireball at the breech end this time.

But that was the concern of others, while the wall was a matter for Vibulenus and the nineteen men with him.

The lower rows of that wall were blocks two feet high and three across. Their thickness was concealed until the first one was prised out, and Clodius Afer was already organizing that. The centurion wedged the thicker edge of his pick-mattock into one vertical crack while Niger and another legionary ran their crescent-bladed turf-cutters over the upper and lower surfaces of the block against which he was prying.

Vibulenus chopped the mattock blade of his own tool against the remaining edge of the block so that he and Clodius could thrust against one another. They all carried ordinary pieces of entrenching equipment, though some of the soldiers began using their swords because the blades reached deeper into the interstices of the wall. The blocks themselves were of fine-grained stone which showed no tendency to split or shatter, but the mortar in which they were laid had burned to powder.

Clodius gave a shout and leaned sideways against the head of his tool, levering that end of the block three inches from the line of the wall in a shower of gritty mortar. The tribune shouted also in unconscious imitation and thrust back, using the greater leverage of the helve. Blood and pus from his blistered palms gleamed on the hickory shaft, but Vibulenus did not notice it. The stone, already loosened and held by decreasing friction as more of it was tugged clear of its fellows, shifted even farther than it had at the centurion's thrust.

Archers on the wings of the fortress flanking the tower were shooting furiously. Some of the bolts struck the rear of the abandoned gallery, but Vibulenus and his men were protected by the wall they were assaulting. For all that, bits fell from higher up the tower as its structure warped under stress of the flames. They were not missiles as such, but a fire-wrapped scrap of battlement landed close enough to the tribune to scorch his calves, and another chunk flattened a file-closer as it rang from his helmet.

There was too much noise for the assault to be truly coordinated, but the veteran soldiers knew their jobs well enough to work without direction. Clodius and Vibulenus each levered again in quick opposition, between them prying the stone far enough for the two legionaries to drop their turf cutters and grip the block directly. Tendons stood out at the inside of Niger's elbows as the tribune stepped out of his way.

"There, by Hercules!" the legionary shouted while the block, as thick as it was high, slid out of place and crashed to the ground. It tilted as if contemplating a roll that would have put everyone nearby at risk, but it settled back with a second thud.

The legionaries had broken into rough teams, not because they were organized that way but simply because men in a tight spot look instinctively for the support of a few fellows. Another block pitched to the ground moments behind the one Clodius had attacked, though it was ten feet to the side and only incrementally helpful in weakening the structure. Aided by their initial gap, the tribune and the three men with him began to worry loose a block offset in the next layer above.

The horns and trumpets again blew the general call that would normally signal a charge. Apparently that was what Rusticanus — or the Commander? — had in mind. Legionaries protected by no more than their shields and armor began to pour over the face of the siege works fronting the tower.

Archers shot at them, but the auxilliary crossbowmen made good practice against the defenders. Without the lowering threat of the tower, archers employed by the trading guild could sweep the battlements of opponents concentrating on Roman infantry.

Vibulenus stuck his pickhead into a crevice and braced his free palm against the wall for leverage. He felt the violent shock before he heard it, fire-gnawed beams in the tower collapsing under the weight of the flagstoned top floor. Flame shot skyward in a giant version of the bellows-driven puff from the tube which had started the conflagration. Rising, wholly separated from the structure from which it sprang, a fireball expanded while its color changed from incandescent white to red as dull as that of iron quenching in blood.

"Watch it!" ordered Clodius Afer. A second stone tumbled from the wall, cracked against the first, split, and rolled to either side. Niger already had his turf cutter inserted beside the next block over and was prying so hard the thick shaft bowed.

The core of the wall was rubble, compacted between the stone facings and to an extent cemented together by time. It was not true concrete, however, and seeping rainwater had leached pockets from the material. Vibulenus chopped at it with his pick. The iron sparked but bit deep enough to crumble out a headsized chunk. Niger continued tilting his block with the help of another legionary.

Hundreds of men were joining the assault force, elbowing one another in their haste to attack the wall with their weapons. Few of them had proper tools for the job, but they did carry their shields. Lifted overhead by the latecomers, these provided real protection against the increasing rain of fragments as well as psychological benefit to the men concentrating on their work of destruction.

Clodius Afer was standing on stones piled at the base of the wall in order to hook out another with his pick while Niger balanced him. Every time they removed a block, the next one came easier. The crumbled mortar would have made a ram's job more difficult, because individual blocks had enough play to absorb shock without cracking or shaking the whole wall down.

Against the legionaries with picks, the structure had no protection save the weight of individual blocks. Those were no match for men with the strength and boarhound determination of Clodius Afer and his fellow volunteers. Including Gaius Vibulenus, who —

"Watch it!" ordered the centurion, jumping down and back as the block he was dragging teetered on one corner.

Vibulenus stepped clear and glanced around. To the left of his own little group, a thirty-foot length of facing shuddered down and outward, battering and pinning a number of the legionaries whose individual efforts had combined to something unexpectedly great. The gap rose jaggedly to a peak twenty feet up the surface, a corbelled arch sealed by the wall's rubble core.

The tremors and release from that slippage sent down not only the block Clodius was removing but three of those above it as well. "Come on, back," the tribune shouted. He bumped into a soldier who was trying to cover them both with a shield.

Feeling sudden panic at being trapped between moving rock and immobile bronze, Vibulenus slapped the legionary in the middle of the breastplate and screamed, "Back, curse you! Back!"

The shadow slicing across the ruddy inferno above them snapped the tribune's eyes upward.

The teams had released the ropes which held the hollow log poised just short of the tower battlements. That effort was unnecessary now, especially since the defenders were beginning to desert the remaining walls of the fortress in despair. A collapse of the enemy's will to fight was more devastating than a breach in his walls — but it had to be exploited immediately, and a few hundred additional legionaries boosting and dragging one another up temporarily undefended fortifications could be worth a week's grueling siege work after the defenders regained their courage.

The log struck the tower just beneath the flame-wrapped battlements and clung there. Heat threw ripples in the air and made it seem that the whole tower shook. Or else —

"Retreat!" the tribune said, his voice raised but his tone again that of emotionless command as his mind distanced itself from everything physically immediate.

Niger, braced by the centurion, was clambering up the pile of tumbled stone to pry loose another series of blocks. The soldier, still looking younger than the eighteen he had been when captured by the Parthians, had lost his helmet, but sweat plastered his hair to his scalp in a black cap.

Vibulenus gripped Clodius and Niger, each by an elbow. The tribune's thinking processes were too orderly and multiplex at the moment for him to be surprised that he held two strong men without strain. "The wall's about to collapse, I think," he said into the rage-distorted face of the centurion. Clodius was drunk with haste to accomplish his business, and that monomania turned to fury at anything which attempted to frustrate it.

"Get them moving," the tribune continued coolly, unconcerned that reflex had lifted the pick in Clodius' hand for a stroke to clear his arm, "Just away from the tower — don't try to climb back up the ramp. You too, Niger. Get on with it, boys."

The tone or the look in Vibulenus' eyes penetrated Clodius' mind before he recognized the tribune as a friend. He looked up, swore, and dragged the willing Niger with him toward the troops milling to the left of the gap he himself had torn.

"Get moving, ye meal-brained fuckers!" roared the centurion. "This fucker's about t' fall on our fuckin' heads!" Using his pickhandle as a cross-staff and his bellowed certainty as a goad, the squat non-com set up a motion in the troops like that of a wave sucking back from the shore over which it has swept.

Bricks blew out of embrasures midway up the face of the tower. Another floor had collapsed onto a further store of flammable liquids.

Vibulenus turned toward the right flank as Niger and the centurion bullied men to safety in the other direction. He saw no one he knew by name, though soot, helmets and emotion were effective masks. "Run for it, boys!' he called in cool arrogance, gripping a pair of the nearest men by the shoulder. One of them wore a centurion's red cross-plume on his helmet. "Get 'em moving before the wall comes down!"

Fragments of adobe brick and headsized chunks of the stone battlements tumbled with as much as seventy feet in which to accumulate momentum. Legionaries raised shields if they had warning, but this was little protection against the heaviest pieces. One legionary bounced to the ground screaming, his left forearm broken in a dozen places and the thick plywood of his shield in splinters held together only by its felt backing.

For all the injuries, at least one of them fatal, the scatter of debris was probably the best thing that could have happened to the men at the base of the tower.

Nothing the tribune could have said — no command, even if all the signallers in the legion had delivered it — could have so effectively gotten the attention of those most at risk.

In the pause that followed the crashing impacts, Vibulenus shouted, "Run or you'll die, boys! Run!" He thrust the men he held in the direction he wanted the whole force to go.

That pair moved, the centurion first glancing upward and then braying, "Mithras save us, she's comin' over!"

A full-sized block, tumbling and as big as any in the lower part of the wall, plunged down with just enough outward momentum to keep it clear of the tower's batter. It struck a pile of stones dragged from the base of the tower with a crash like the world splitting. Neither the block which fell nor the one it hit broke up to absorb the impact.

The block sprang outward in an elastic rebound that gave it virtually the same velocity it had at the climax of its seventy foot drop. It caromed through the legs of the centurion with the energy of a builder's dray, scarcely slowing in its crazy, corner-bobbling course into the fascines of the siege ramp which caught it harmlessly.

The man turned a truncated cartwheel, his arms flung wide by the weight of shield and spear. The stubs of his legs, both amputated at midthigh, spurted arcs of arterial blood as they described their own courses around the center of motion. When the centurion crumpled in a pile, his helmet fell off as if in benediction.

The upper face of the tower swayed like a curtain in a breeze, rippling toward either edge from where the hollow log leaned against it. More bits fell from the top, tiny until their velocity swelled then into blocks as big as a man and heavier than a dozen men.

Whether by instinct or from the tribune's warning, legionaries had already abandoned the ground on which the missiles were falling. Many of the troops were trying to climb back the way they had come, up the face of the siege ramp. They were safe enough from plunging debris, but the whole artificial valley would be covered by rubble from the total collapse of the tower. The men who had sense enough to throw down their shields and equipment would probably be able to scramble clear that way, but the others were seriously at risk.

As was Gaius Vibulenus himself. His job was done and he was a human being again with no duty except his own salvation.

There was a cataclysmic tearing sound from within the tower, shaking the ground and sending up sparks in dazzling traceries rather than balls of flame as before. The inner stonework of the wall was collapsing and dragging with it the upper portion of the rubble core. The facing was still momentarily in place despite the way the legionaries had weakened the base of it, but that could not last much longer.

"Help me," moaned the legless centurion.

The mangled soldier's eyes were staring in the direction of Vibulenus, but his words seemed instinctive rather than voiced in hope of a response. The eyes did not focus. The mind behind them was as droolingly slack as the lips.

Moments before, while the tribune was an intellect dissociated from every factor save the pieces he moved on the game board, he would have seen the sprawling amputee as a factor interchangeable with fifty-nine others in the legion. Now he had returned to being Gaius Vibulenus Caper, who had been a boy of eighteen and who recognized the centurion as the grizzled man who had punched him in the Main Gallery of the vessel that brought them — here.

Vibulenus turned and ran two leggy strides in the direction Clodius and Niger had chivvied other legionaries clear. The face of the tower would buckle outward any instant like a butterfly unfolding a broad stone wing, and anyone caught in the path of that cataclysm would be pulverized beyond the magical skill of the Medic to help.

There were legionaries on top of the wall flanking the crumbling tower. The defenders' resistance had collapsed so thoroughly that the soldiers leading the scrambling assault were able to turn and help their fellows onto the battlements instead of struggling to survive on their dangerous perch. Horns and trumpets sounded in the chaos, but Vibulenus could not tell whether they were giving orders or simply reacting to the general enthusiasm.

Metal gleamed at the edge of the siegeworks, where the palisade had been thrown down by soldiers surging toward the fortress. The sun winked on polished bright-work, the mace-studs and hackamore bosals that left the jaws of the carnivorous mounts free to raven and tear. The smokey glare of the tower stained the iron plates of the bodyguard the color at the heart of a forge, the color of the blood leaking from the stumps of the centurion.

Now that it was safe, the Commander had come to view his victory.

"Fucking bastards!" screamed Gaius Vibulenus, and he ran back to the dying man.

Dead, the tribune thought as he slid his hands under the hooped corselet that gave rigidity like an insect's shell to a body that was flaccid within. When he shifted the armor for a grip, the mouth gave a great sigh though the eyes did not blink.

The centurion was a heavy man, even without the weight of his lower legs, and when Vibulenus had raised him waist high he found that the man's shield was still strapped to his left arm. To clear it would require dropping the centurion and starting again the awkward business of lifting a dead weight . . . or throwing the bastard down and running from Hades gaping behind him.

Fuck it all, he'd finish what he'd started. He twisted a fraction so that the dragging shield did not foul his boots and began striding forward again.

Vibulenus had not realized how done-in he was until he started to carry the dying man. The pains that had been covered by rushing adrenalin earlier in the assault were present in full fury, and the detachment of moments before no longer operated to free his mind from the needs of his body.

All that was bearable because it had to be borne, but the weakness in the tribune's muscles was catastrophic and the final catastrophe. He was too young and too healthy ever to have had doubts about his body. There were limits to his strength: he knew that Clodius Afer was stronger than he, and that others might be quicker or faster as well.

But Vibulenus had not realized in his heart of hearts that there would be a time when a task that was within his normal capacity would find him incapable because of exhaustion. He had expected — not planned, but expected — to run with the centurion in his arms, praying to Hercules that he would be fast enough to get clear of the tower's collapse.

Now that he was committed, he found that he was able to grip his burden only because his knuckles were locked. Vibulenus' lungs burned so that every breath flashed him an image of the flickering inferno above, and his legs were bladders of thin gelatine which were hard put to support their load — much less drive it at a run beyond the zone of destruction.

All sounds paused, as if the world were drawing in its breath.

Vibulenus did not have to look up to know what was happening, but he could no more forebear to do so than a falling man could fail to scream. The facing of the tower was coming down like a backdrop of painted fabric. The log whose weight had propped the stone curtain was tearing through, causing the halves of the wall to twist outward from the slow rending trajectories which their scale made seem lazy.

How did a vole feel when the shadow of a stooping hawk grayed the sunlight?

Human feelings had brought Vibulenus to the gates of the Underworld. There they abandoned him to die or be saved by the chill intellect of command which spared no more emotion for the body it wore than for any other.

The tribune's muscles worked to thrust him across the gameboard. The sound of moving air and rock grinding lazily against rock seemed only a distant whisper, but it covered all other noise completely as the wall prepared to bury the ground at its foot.

Striding like a distance runner, the body in his arms as disregarded as was his own, the tribune raced toward the mobile gallery. The body of the defender who had bounced off the roof — the only enemy whom Vibulenus had seen within spearlength in all the months of campaign — lay smoldering in his path. He tripped over the corpse and plunged into the open end of the shelter, scarcely aware that he was no longer upright nor that the first crossbar stripped the centurion from his arms with a smashing blow.

Boiling like the surf, stone tumbled across the mobile gallery.

The first impact was from the front, a block ricocheting up from the dead archer whom it had crushed and blended into the soil beneath. The end of the structure lifted as if it had not been a massive burden for twenty strong men some minutes before. As the gallery poised, the remainder of the man-made rockslide worried it like a shark with a gobbet of flesh too large to bolt entire.

Had the gallery been in vertical line with the collapsing wall, the sturdy shelter would have been ground to splinters indistinguishable from the remains of anyone who had chanced to be inside it. Because the thrust of the hollow log kept the wall from tilting outward, the stone fabric crumpled from the bottom when it lost integrity and only then sprang out to cover the ground.

The upper reaches of the wall slipped downward smoothly, even fluidly, while the layers at their base exploded into a fury like that of a waterfall but fed with the inertia of stone. The mobile gallery rushed backwards on the wave front, disintegrating as if its beams were not of four-inch hardwood.

The roof of mud and wicker slid into the siege ramp, compressed the fascines momentarily, then flexed a few feet up the face of the stabilized earthwork. The stones driving the gallery thundered above and across it. A few of them jounced over the lip of the Roman works and careened angrily down the corduroy surface, spreading panic among noncombatants and those legionaries who thought they had gained a place of safety.

Though the stone was dark, the dust into which the great blocks ground themselves rose in a pall as white as wheat flour. It drifted instead of rising on a column of heated air the way the smoke had done as flame gutted the tower.

Beneath that choking, settling shroud of rock died Gaius Vibulenus Caper, military tribune and one-time Roman citizen.

The first thing he remembered was fire.

Not the tower, destroyed by its own defenses — though after a moment he recalled that too, standing like a bloody sacrifice against the pale blue sky.

But all his mind had room for at first was the way his body burned as it was squeezed and rubbed to bits. There had been no sound — or rather, the cosmos had been entirely of sound and the false lights flashing in his brain but not his eyes, so that he could not hear his bones breaking in sequence. He had felt the fractures, though, the momentary slippages and loosenings as one part after another gave up the struggle with inexorable forces.

There had been no pain, then: only fire in every cell.

His name was Vibulenus. He was a soldier, and he was dead.

Everything was muted gray, an ambiance rather than a light. It could have been part of the dream Vibulenus was having since there were no lines or junctions, but he could see his own limbs. Half afraid of even the attempt, he decided to wiggle his toes — and those appendages, deep scarlet like every part of his body that he could see, moved normally.

The motion did not even make the pain worse, but the pain was already fiercer than the tribune could have imagined at any time before this awakening.

There was something beneath him, a bench or a floor, but he could not tell where it joined the walls that must surround him. He tried to roll to his feet, screaming and scratching at himself in a fury of frustrated disbelief. He had been somewhere just before he became here, and he could remember nothing of that other place except that he wished he were back in it.

Heat spread over the surface of Vibulenus' body and, like a blanket on a fire, suffocated the pain. His skin rippled as tremors pulsed through the muscles beneath, but that feeling — though disconcerting — was in no way kin to the agony of moments before.

The tribune did not even realize that he had flopped back on the floor — there was no furniture in what must be the room — until he started to get up again. The tension that his muscles had released by trembling left them feeling normal, though extremely weak. The sensation of heat vanished as suddenly as it had come on, and the pain did not return. He stood cautiously.

Instead of a door opening, the wall in front of Vibulenus dissolved completely. The room had shape and dimensions; it was a paraboloid little more than the man's height and twice that on the longer horizontal axis. One end was now open, like an egg topped by a knife, and a man — well, a figure in a blue skinsuit who was not the Commander or the Medic — lounged there with an expression of mild interest.

"C'mon, walk," the figure said, making walking motions with two of the three fingers of either hand. "Do they work or don't they? Let's see 'em move, cargo."

"Where am I?" Vibulenus demanded, walking toward his questioner. He had heard the question clearly — the words were in the flawless Latin spoken by everyone on the vessel except the legionaries themselves. Many of the line soldiers were of Oscan or Marsian origin and had learned Latin as a second language. The tribune's nurse had been a Marsian, and he still framed some thoughts in that ancient Italian language himself. . . .

He was alive, and he was the man he had always been. All he needed to know now was where, in the name of all the gods, Gaius Vibulenus was standing at the moment.

"Where am I?" the tribune repeated at barracks-square volume, striding out of the egg-shaped room in which he had awakened. The room beyond was the yellow-orange of clean flames, a circular hall into whose sidewall bulged eleven man-high convexities — the twelfth was the opening through which Vibulenus stepped.

"Hey, hey there!" yelped the other, skipping back from the tribune. "That's no way to treat the fella who's saved your life, now. Look at yourself and think what ye were before I put the new tissue on ye."

Vibulenus had not been angry, only disoriented — and perhaps as dangerous as the figure in blue seemed to think he was. That thought gave him pause. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, grimacing away the brief mixture of emotions he felt when he saw the whole limb was stained a red which only time would fade.

"Look," the Roman said, feeling for the first time that he dominated a guild employee because of his greater size, "I'm not angry with you, my man, but I need to know where I am. Are you the new Medic?"

A tunic with a narrow red border flopped from the ceiling, making both parties jump and then relaxing the atmosphere.

"Naw, I'm the Pilot," said the blue figure, bending to pick up the tunic and toss it to Vibulenus. It was not an act of friendship, exactly, but at least a form of accommodation. "He gets the walk-ins, I drive the meatwagon and fetch home the ones like you."

He looked at the tribune and sucked in his lips to express wonderment. "Don't believe I ever brought in anybody like you exactly, though. Just look at yourself."

"You guide the blue turtle that chooses the dead?" Vibulenus asked. All his muscles were drawn tight as he pretended to concentrate on dressing. At least the linen garment would cover some of the terrible stain on his new flesh.

"Sure," said the Pilot. "The recovery vehicle, the meatwagon. This your first time back in it, fella?"

"I suppose so," Vibulenus said. That was as close as he could come at this moment to acknowledging what had just happened to him.

He shook himself and straightened, back proud and jaw thrust out. He was Gaius Vibulenus Caper, notwithstanding anything that might have happened to him in the immediate past. "These others, then," he said with an imperious sweep toward the convexities in the wall. The opening through which he had stepped was now a sideways dome, though there had been no sound or motion behind him. "They're more of us — soldiers — being, that is . . . cured?"

"Would be if you hadn't been the last," the Pilot agreed. "Depends some on just what we're talkin' about, you know — clean cut or a smash, how many wounds and how long before pickup. With you —" he paused and sucked in his lips again. "Well, you know, fella, you were pretty near the bottom of the prognosis list on all counts. Took damn near a day to dig you out after the wagon located you. Bloody lucky, you are."

"Yes, I see," said Vibulenus' mouth alone, because his mind was busy filing data without looking at it. Not just now.

"All right, fella," said the Pilot. "We're gonna be in normal space till who knows when, given how you and the others got torn up. But there's some new twists in entertainment this run, so go on and get started."

A section of floor rotated a quarter turn and opened onto a helical ramp downward. The ramp's slope looked too steep for a walking man, but Vibulenus had learned long since that angles and dimensions on the vessel were not always what they seemed.

"You must be very skillful," said the tribune as his foot poised above the ramp.

The Pilot met his eyes for a moment. Then they slipped away. Without any further attempt to retrieve the facade of superiority, the blue figure said, "Skill? Are you kidding? I can juggle five balls in the air, d'ye know? That takes a lot more skill than watching a console to see that the hardware's doing its job."

"Which," he concluded bitterly, "it always is."

"But. . . ." Vibulenus said. The questions in his mind were too confused to articulate, but by drawing his right index finger the length of his left arm — hairless and colored Pompeian red — he communicated everything he needed to get out.

"Look, fella," the Pilot said with a sneer intended more generally than for the Roman who was its immediate target, "you couldn't whack off somebody's head with your bare hand, but you use a sword and it's no sweat, right?"

Vibulenus lifted an eyebrow in agreement, though his arm ached with the remembered effort of swinging his sword. Heads didn't just fall off, and an armored enemy was no mere log to be hacked at until he fell. "Go on," he said, waiting for understanding to come.

"Well," the Pilot continued, "live cargo like you could never handle it, but just about anybody from a Class One planet — anybody who could feed himself — can run the medical repair station, or the ship. Blazes, me'n the Medic 'r crosstrained so if I croak in the middle of a Transit, that don't matter shit t' the guild except they don't worry about a pension. We don't get longevity treatments like you valuable cargo do."

"I see," said Vibulenus, who was beginning to do just that. "As you say, I'd best be getting back to my fellows."

He had been correct about the ramp. It felt like a level surface as he walked down it, though he slitted his eyes to avoid disorientation from the room he was leaving.

When Gaius Vibulenus stepped out of wall into the corridor beside the baths, there were over twenty soldiers nearby. He knew most of them at least by sight, now, and Decimus Pacuvius Semo — another tribune — almost walked into him.

"Gaius —"Semo began as both men threw their hands up a fraction of a second after they had stopped short of one another.

Semo's tunic bore the broad stripe of a senatorial family. He had been the legion's ranking tribune in Parthia, and in a way he still was — though here it only meant that he and Falco were the Romans usually in the Commander's entourage rather than roving among the line troops.

For all his heredity, Semo remained a plump, pleasant fellow who looked and acted more like a well-bred freedman than a mover and shaker of the Empire. The two men had always gotten along well together; it was without hesitation that Vibulenus said, "Decimus, do you chance to know where the centurion I was, you know, in the gallery with —"

"I have to. . . ."the other tribune blurted. He turned on his heel and strode away from Vibulenus with his legs moving more crisply than they had ever managed during training.

Vibulenus blinked, looking at the man almost running from him. Then he noticed his own hands, stained, and raised them to touch his face. The skin everywhere he touched himself had the tenderness of having been scraped too hard in the baths.

Everyone knew he was dead; they could not look at him and doubt it. Men were shying from him with the wordless distaste with which they would have stepped around a pile of feces in the roadway.

Vibulenus swayed for a moment. Physically, he was as weak as if he were between bouts of relapsing fever. The mental control that kept him upright lapsed. If he looked around him, he saw the faces of those who refused to see him; if he closed his eyes, he would fall as he might fall in any event.

On the corridor ceiling ambled beads of light, cool and pure and non-judgmental as they guided Romans. "Direct me to the centurion Gnaeus Clodius Afer," the tribune demanded so loudly that several men glanced at him in surprise.

"He is in the Recreation Room," said the ship in the Commander's voice — or perhaps the Commander spoke only through the vessel. "Please follow the —" a pause "—yellow dot," which popped into existence so sharply demarcated that the tribune's ears supplied an accompanying chime which did not really occur.

Head high, back straight, Gaius Vibulenus strode off to find the man he hoped was still his friend.

The chance that brought Clodius out the portal of the Recreation Room was so unexpected that he recognized Vibulenus instead of the other way around. Of course, the tribune had been walking in open-eyed blankness in order not to take any details of expression on the faces of those with whom he shared the corridors.

The centurion was in animated conversation with two of the legionaries who had been in the assault force, Pompilius Niger and a file-closer named Helvius. He raised both his hands in a gesture, looked past them, and said, "W — Gaius! By Castor, you did fuckin' make it!"

The cry shocked Vibulenus and the two other legionaries. Helvius looked up and muttered a curse, while Niger only froze.

"I was. . . ." said Vibulenus.

Clodius caught his companions, one in either hand, and rasped in an undertone through his broad grin, "He saved your butts, boys." He stepped toward the tribune. When Helvius tried to resist the pull, his biceps went white at the fringes of the centurion's ferocious grip on his arm.

"Hello, sir," said Niger with the hopeful stiffness of a pupil who fears his response may have been the wrong one and thus bring him a beating.

"I was hoping I'd be able to find you —" said Vibulenus.

A large party of soldiers jostled their way down the corridor. They pushed past the tribune without remark or reaction because he was part of a group instead of a lone outsider.

"Hoped you'd catch me up on things," Vibulenus concluded.

Clodius released his companions, took a step closer, and threw his arms around Vibulenus. The centurion's ox-like strength was all, despite his good intentions, that kept him from springing away from the tribune at the instant of contact.

The younger man became light-headed as the breath was crushed out of his lungs. His knees, already quivering, gave way and he could scarcely clasp his hands behind the centurion's broad back.

He felt better than he had ever felt before. He was not just alive, he was a member of the human race.

"Man, you had me worried, sir," said Clodius as he stepped away but kept his palms on Vibulenus' back to steady him. "You weren't hardly breathing when we got all that rock clear and handed you up to the turtle."

He looked back over his shoulder. "That's true, ain't it, boys? He wasn't hardly breathing?"

Both of the other soldiers raised their eyebrows in cautious, silent agreement. Niger's expression became even more fixed.

Sometimes the best thing was for all parties to tell a lie and stick to it, thought the tribune — and bless a man like Clodius Afer who had enough experience to know what those times were. He slapped the older man's shoulder in camaraderie but also as a signal that he could stand unaided again.

"Yeah, Gnaeus," he agreed loudly, "it hurt like blazes when you were picking me up. I tried to swear at you but the words wouldn't come out right. Guess that's a good thing, since you were doing the best anybody could already."

"But I thought —" said Helvius. He rubbed his balding scalp with a hand whose back curled with hair.

"Say," said Vibulenus, only partly so that he could silence the puzzled legionary. "There was another fellow in the gallery with me, a centurion. I wonder if he made it?"

"That's how," Niger said, suddenly animated. "He was in the gallery, Gnaeus. That's why we were able to, you know, find him."

The centurion nodded in distracted agreement, but his lips were pursed to form an answer to Vibulenus' question. "Well you see, sir," he explained, "the shed was broken up so bad I don't guess anybody thought of it being there to begin with. So long as it lasted long enough to give you the edge, that's fine . . . but there wasn't anybody else down there the turtle thought we need bother diggin' out, you know?"

"A friend of yours?" Niger asked, and he reached out to grip Vibulenus forearm to forearm.

"Don't even know his name," the tribune said. The corridor and his companions withdrew as his mind superimposed the face of the grizzled veteran as he had first and last seen it.

"Just a soldier doing his job," Vibulenus' lips said. "Just like the rest of us."

"Well, you know," said the centurion, gesturing up the corridor in the direction the three non-coms had been headed when Vibulenus met them, "not everybody makes it, sir. That sure hasn't changed."

"No, I guess it hasn't. . . ," the tribune agreed while he remembered the blue figure in his bodyguard of living iron, prancing daintily toward victory as men were crushed beyond locating on the ground before him.

"Say, but in there," said Helvius with a nod to indicate the recreation room from which they were all walking, "they've got bears and dogs fighting with spiked gloves on. I like it a lot better than the one they had last, the crabs and jellyfish."

"I didn't have gloves," said Niger. Both he and the file-closer were glad to skirt the subject of which they would be reminded until the stain faded from Vibulenus' flesh. "I had a little short sword and a buckler. I think it's only the bears have gloves."

"Glad you're back, sir," Clodius Afer murmured from close to the tribune's ear. In a normal voice, he continued, "You know, draggin' those rocks outa the wall I thought was the hardest work I ever did, but —"

He paused, because as he spoke the words he realized they were false. He had been so directed on the task that he hadn't been conscious of how hard the job was.

"Well, anyway," the centurion concluded lamely, "that wasn't a patch on gettin' them cursed blocks off you. Don't know what we'd have done if it weren't the shear legs was right there from slewing the log on target."

"All personnel will gather in the Main Gallery for an address by the Commander," said the voice of the ship. Up and down the corridor, soldiers started and missed a step or jerked their heads around in a reflexive search for the speaker. "Follow the red dot."

All the other guide beads blinked out, including the mauve one that Vibulenus assumed they were following according to a request made before he met the non-coms. The ceiling began to stream with red dots, moving at a comfortable pace in the opposite direction.

"Oh, bugger it all," snapped Clodius Afer, but he turned around in the middle of a stride because the habit of discipline was so strong.

"Couldn't we. . . ?" suggested Helvius, gesturing in the direction they had been going. He was a bigger and possibly stronger man than the centurion, but his deference was as much a matter of relative personality as rank.

"Come on," Clodius ordered, not harshly but with no sign that he was interested in a discussion. His stride swung his three companions into the broken, ground-covering pace of a route march. "We'll do their business and then we'll take care of ours. This is the army, after all."

The tribune opened his mouth to ask what "our business" was.

Before he could get the question out, Niger laughed and said, "Well, guess the edge's off now, but yesterday the first time, it didn't take longer 'n to walk in the room and walk back. I'd figure the Commander could wait that long."

"Yeah," said Helvius, "but yesterday was the first time in a long time any of us had a woman. Today I want it to be worth waiting for."

Vibulenus tried again to speak. No sound came out. Although he continued to stride along with the others, his body had become as hot and weak as it had been in the first moments after his awakening.

The Main Gallery was familiar because the legion mustered in it before every battle. This was only the second time they had gathered for an address by the Commander, though, and recollections of that first assembly vibrated at the back of the tribune's mind. He was afraid to look at Pompilius Niger squarely in case that surfaced memories which the other, judging from his continued banter, had suppressed.

There had been losses. Vibulenus surveyed the room from where he stood at the front, just short of the stolid bodyguards and the deadline which they marked.

It was less evident during pre-battle musters when the room shook with the clash of men moving into ranks to don the equipment they had just been issued from otherwise featureless walls. You couldn't even estimate numbers under those conditions. Besides, the glitter and sway of equipment bulked out the sparseness of the troops wearing it.

Vibulenus had seen the returns. The legion had lost eighty-three men before the start of its operations against the fortress, and the fortress had not come cheap. His fingers kneaded the muscles over his ribs, whole to the touch . . . but he could not bring himself to look down and see the stain which only natural healing would leach from his flesh.

Lights glittered in the bulkhead behind the guards. The forward door, unlocked by its spinning hexagon, drifted open and the Commander minced through with steps as precise as the tailoring of his suit.

"Why," said Clodius Afer, "d'ye suppose that one —" he gestured, and for a moment Vibulenus misunderstood his subject as the Commander, not the door "—moves, and the rest, they just, you know, melt away and melt back in the wall?"

None of them had an answer. Before somebody decided to fill the gap with empty speech, the rear of the Main Gallery began to tilt up unannounced.

There was commotion this time, but no panic. Not only were the legionaries used to the rising floor from pre-battle musters, they also were familiar enough with the ways of the vessel in general that moving walls did not suggest to the crowd that it was about to be swallowed.

"Fellow warriors," said the Commander in his voice that everyone heard with a clarity equal to the polish of its Latin diction, "this is both a joyful and a sad occasion for me."

A door dissolved open in the left sidewall, so close to the tribune that he could have touched the pair of mace-bearing toads who clanked through it at the head of a short procession.

Helvius was startled into a blink. Niger froze and the centurion, with a curse of real fury, leaped backward and knocked down two other soldiers in his haste to put them between him and the bodyguards.

Vibulenus stepped in front of Niger and squared his shoulders against the grip of the creatures in articulated iron. He had no idea of what he thought he was accomplishing, and his muscles seemed to have the pellucid weakness of clear spring water.

The guards ignored him, save for the one who stepped fractionally to the side in order to avoid the tribune.

Behind the first two pairs of them, four other bipeds walked. Their lack of unison and crispness was disturbing to eyes that had for a long time seen only soldiers moving in the unconscious rhythm with which soldiers walk.

All four wore the blue bodysuits of guild employees, but none of them had familiar faces. That too was disturbing, at least to Vibulenus, who wondered how many others there were whose presence aboard the vessel he had not suspected.

Three of the newcomers were frail, of races similar to those of the Commander or Pilot. The fourth was a shambling, stooped figure as tall as the spearmen the legion had met in its first battle for the trading guild. He did not push a floating cart in front of him the way the others did, and his face had the same sheen that marked the Commander — but not the Medic or Pilot.

"Your skill under my direction has been noted with approval at the highest levels of my guild," continued the Commander as the procession, closed by another quartet of guards, moved toward him. One of the figures angled off to slide his cart against the corner of the side and end walls. The barrier did not react to the inanimate object, but the figure was keeping his hands carefully out of the invisible demarcator.

"In your case," said the Commander, "the guild has responded by providing you with females expensively modified to best suit your own physiology. I believe many of you have already sampled this reward."

The slight figure beamed coldly toward his audience, who cheered and howled furiously . . . though there were a few catcalls as well. Not everyone had found the lack of females to be a hardship.

The tall, stooped figure halted beside and slightly in front of the Commander, who went on, "My reward has been promotion into the merchant service much earlier than would have been the case if my record as your commander had not been so exceptional. I will transfer to the trading vessel which has joined this one, and which has brought with it my successor in your command."

He gestured toward the tall figure. The wrongness of the Commander's hands was a shock even after it had become familiar. The new commander at least had the normal complement of fingers.

The remaining blue-clad employees — flunkies, slaves — had pushed their carts against the rear wall, in the center and at either corner. All three turned, watching the Commander. The line of guards remained as stolid as the bulkhead behind them.

The employee at the central cart spoke to the Commander. That is, his lips moved though no words could be heard.

The Commander straightened in obvious anger with his ears twitching, but he edged forward another six inches instead of blasting the underling with a response. He paused there, his eye on the employee. Only when that person gave an abrupt handsignal did the Commander continue, "Give your new commander and his successors the same skill and courage which you have displayed for me, fellow warriors. Then you will know that my guild will continue to make every effort for your comfort and security, no matter what the expense."

There was a hum in both the ship's structure and the — voice: the mechanism, whatever it was that carried words directly to the ears of each listener at whatever distance. Both the blue-clad officers turned with settled anger behind the sheen of their faces.

Before they spoke to the nearest flunkie, the hum scaled up through bat-high frequencies into inaudibility and the barrier began to glow.

Vibulenus had been mentally alone ever since he slid between Niger and an unmeant threat. The barrier's amber radiance brought the tribune back from that internal world in which he had been staying because much of him did not believe that he was really alive. The barrier was always a presence in the memory of the legionaries, but the only previous time that it was visible was when it snarled and converted Rufus into smeared color.

This soft light was monochrome and not immediately threatening — though, like a sleeping lion, it did not seem harmless either. The flunkies and the two officers were outside the amber curtain, but the score of bodyguards with their backs against the wall appeared to have been washed with bronze.

"I will now hand you over to my successor for a few words," said the Commander, returning to his audience with the false pleasantry — not so much oily as adamantine, unscarred by any vestige of real emotion — that always marked his contacts with the Romans he commanded. Had commanded.

The tall officer's head hung forward on his neck like that of a horse. He was not an ugly man. He was not a man at all, any more than the bodyguards were men, but it was in the voice of the Commander that he said, "Fellow warriors, I was pleased to be appointed to the direction of as exceptional a group as you. I will continue to follow the example of my able predecessor."

He nodded sideward at the smaller officer. The gesture was unexpectedly quick for a skull so large; it increased his resemblance to a horse.

But he was now the Commander.

The color of the barrier had shifted imperceptibly to a soft green, an ugly color that reminded Vibulenus of scum on the pond that caught the runoff from the sheep byres at home . . . at home.

"Now that the key to the barrier has been changed," the voice said as the tall officer's lips moved in a different rhythm, "we are free to depart on our next assignment. Because some of you sustained severe injuries during the course of the assignment just completed, we will remain in normal space longer than usual to ensure proper healing. This is only one more sign of the care which my guild shows for you."

There was a tiny pop in the ears of the assembly. The barrier faded the way iron loses its color as it cools — swiftly and without perceptible stages. The flunkies relaxed and began to slide their paraphernalia away from the bulkhead.

"That means," the tall officer concluded, "that you have all the more time to enjoy the comforts provided for you, including the females. You are therefore dismissed to your pleasures. I look forward to our association."

He stepped backward, through the barrier. Lights twinkled as the bulkhead door opened behind him.

To Vibulenus' surprise, the flunkies and the old commander did not exit through the barrier. Instead, they fell in behind pairs of shambling guards to return through the door that formed itself in the side of the gallery. The rear doors were already open and streaming with soldiers, more than willing to obey an order to enjoy themselves.

"They really changed the lock," said Clodius Afer, who had moved up to the tribune's side unnoticed at some point during the address. "He couldn't go through it himself now."

The old commander was noticeably careful to keep the armored bulk of a guard between him and even sight of the men who had been under his direction. When Vibulenus caught his eye, the slim figure ducked his head to ignore the contact. They were no more than a pace apart when the blue-clad officer skipped out of the room. The guard who had shielded him followed impassively.

"Bet his bosses don't need a sponge to wipe their ass so long as he's around," Clodius muttered.

"What do ye figure we do now, boss?" Helvius asked the centurion. The four of them were almost alone now at the front of the Main Gallery while the remainder of the legion shuffled out the rear.

"Now," said Vibulenus clearly, "we go see the women."

He wondered how badly the lower part of his abdomen had been injured, but nothing in the world would have caused him to lift the hem of his tunic now and see what was dyed red.

"Bad as when they first announced it," grumbled Clodius. "Line'd slimmed down by yesterday, and we'd be fine now 'cept for them making such a point in the assembly."

"Well, it moves real quick, the line does," said Niger.

That was true, for they had continued to advance at a walking pace even after they reached the end of the line of soldiers intent on using the women.

"How —" Vibulenus began. He meant to add, '— much farther are the rooms?' because the corridor curved and it was impossible to see the front of the line. But there were no landmarks on the vessel and possibly no fixed locations, so his companions could have no better idea than he as to how far they had yet to go.

Instead, the tribune said, "How many of the girls are there, then?"

The non-coms looked at one another with an unexpected furtiveness. "Sir," said the centurion with his eyes fixed on a point on the wall, "I couldn't rightly say, but it's a good number. Thing is, I like t' keep the lights down, you know, and — and anyway, it's the part of a woman that's the same that's important, not whatever little ways they may be different."

"That's so," said Helvius with a ponderous lift of his eyebrows. "By Apis and Osiris, that's just so."

"Look, just what —" Vibulenus said, falling into his tone of command without precisely intending to do so.

Clodius interrupted him, or at least thundered on when they began to speak together, with: "There, all right, there's the door."

The speed troubled Vibulenus. The line was moving as fast as men could pass two at a time through the open portal at the end of this corridor. Sure, horny soldiers . . . but not that horny by now, the men who had been alert for the three days he had spent in the egg-shaped room unconscious.

Unalive.

Thinking about that took the tribune's mind off immediate questions. His companions seemed happy enough to leave him in bleak silence, though Niger muttered something uncomfortably to the centurion.

The legionary directly ahead of Vibulenus stepped into a cubicle the size of those in the Sick Bay. Instead of a door closing, the opening dimmed as if curtained with silken gauze. The soldier did not move, but either the floor or the whole cubicle shifted to the left with him. Simultaneously, the identical unit in front of Clodius Afer slid to the right and the diffraction smoothed from the air. The cubicles were empty.

"Go ahead, sir," said Clodius Afer. He paused, then stepped off a half beat behind the tribune.

Vibulenus was familiar enough with the ways of the vessel that he did not expect to feel concern now, even though it was not the crib that he had expected. The cubicles' similarity to the Medic's array, and the baggage that memory brought with it, froze him into quiescence. Without the centurion's request, he might not have moved at all, though it was without fear that he obeyed what his mind took to be an order.

The screen that appeared behind the tribune did not affect the muted lighting he perceived within the cubicle. Instead of a feeling of motion sideways, the wall in front of him seemed to slide upward. He stepped into the room beyond, small but not the closet he had more or less expected. Military brothels were no more spacious than barracks accommodations.

The room was lighted by what was little more than a red dot in one of the upper corners, but it was enough to show that the woman reclining on her left arm was full formed and had hair long enough to spill over the edge of the couch. "Hello," she said in a throaty, feminine voice. "You must be one of the tribunes, huh? I'm Quartilla."

"I —" said Vibulenus. He glanced down at the striped hem of his garment, almost black in this light. It was a sign of social rather than military rank, but no member of the equestrian order would be serving as a common soldier. She was sharp, which made the business all the more confusing, and her Latin was far too good for anyone but a true Roman.

"You can come sit down with me if you like," Quartilla offered. She sat upright with a seemingly effortless sway that brought her knees around and lifted magnificent breasts while her dark hair swirled behind her. She patted the couch.

In a — business — like this one, serving the needs of men whose lust would turn to fury if frustrated by delay, there couldn't be leisure. There should have been a pimp outside the entrance of the crib, itself doorless to hasten the operation. Here of course there was no need to collect the money, a sesterce or two, in advance, but one of the toadfaced bodyguards should have hulked at the entrance to prevent jostling and to jerk out of the crib any soldier who made excessive demands on the whore or her time.

There was no jostling because there was no significant delay. And there was clearly no concern about time. . . .

"How can they do this?" Vibulenus asked as he seated himself gingerly beside the woman. His intellectual curiosity was competing with his body's requirements. His full erection proved that he need have no concern about that aspect of the repairs made to his body, and the dim, colored light hid the stain on his flesh.

"Are there so many of you?" he continued, reaching around the woman's shoulders. He was sure that if he touched her breast as he first intended he would lose at least his ability to hear her answer. She was wearing a garment after all, a hard fabric that fit like a second skin but which had enough irregularity to whisper when the tribune stroked her hair against it.

"Time passes more quickly in these rooms," Quartilla said, running a chubby hand over the skin of Vibulenus' throat and the neck of his tunic. "Aging too, of course, but that doesn't matter to you. Don't worry, we won't be disturbed."

She kissed the tribune's mouth while her gentle hand drew him to her. He cupped her breast — full, of course, but not as heavy as expected — and wondered whether he could get out of his tunic.

The breast was covered by minute hard nodules.

"W — ," Vibulenus said. He fumbled for her other hand, the one that was reaching under the hem of his tunic. "Wait."

He took a deep breath — it had no effect on his sudden dizziness — and asked, "Quartilla. What are you wearing?" With difficulty he raised his eyes to meet hers.

"Nothing at all, sir," the woman said, smiling as she moved her body again with amazing fluidity. Her knees spread wide and she rocked back on the base of her spine to lift her vulva. "What would you like me to wear? Anything can be provided."

The light was faint, but it was so close to being a point source that it threw a reticulated pattern across the female's skin when she moved. That net of shadows was caused by the tiny roughness the tribune had felt. Now that his eyes were adapting, he could see that Quartilla was covered by —

Vibulenus leaped to his feet, instinctively ready to strike the female if she tried to hold him. "Light!" he shouted. "Give me light, curse you!"

The walls glowed white, relegating the red bead to merely a decoration in the corner. The lighting was normal and thus dazzling to the tribune at this moment, but he had no difficulty in seeing that Quartilla was covered with translucent scales.

The underlying color of her flesh was pale green. The scales gave it a metallic luster.

"You're. . . ," Vibulenus said. "You aren't. . . ."He didn't really have the words to complete either attempt.

"I'm not of your race, no," said Quartilla, tucking her feet beneath her fleshy buttocks. The movement was utilitarian, not seductive, but it seduced the tribune despite himself because it was made with perfect economy and physical control.

She looked down at herself with dispassionate appraisal. "But I look a lot like I ought to, don't I? I didn't used to, you know. . . ."

"I thought you were a woman," Vibulenus whispered. The light he had demanded was a pressure squeezing him and turning each pulse into a hammer blow in his temples.

"Oh, I'm much better than that," said the female simply as she met his gaze again. Her eyes in the bright illumination were a little too large, a little too round — or were men's eyes different from women's, so that he was mistaking as racial details which were only a matter of sex? How long had it been since he had seen a woman?

"I can give you a good time, tribune," Quartilla went on, not boastfully but with the flat assuredness of Clodius Afer discussing his century. "You and any number of your friends, in ways that no one of your own race could manage."

She shrugged. The gestures lifted her breasts in brief arcs that damped themselves quickly. Her nipples were small and erect even now. "They aren't real," Quartilla said, touching one breast as she gave it a critical glance. "Weren't — what I was born with, you understand."

She met Vibulenus' eyes again, and added with a fierceness she had not before displayed, "A lot of this body's like that, different, and I know that they — that I don't think the way I remember I used to. But they started with good material, tribune, and I don't care — the Ssrange eat their prisoners, except us they sold to the trading guild. I don't care!"

"Yes, they bought us too," said Vibulenus, his mouth making conversation while in his mind memories of lust wrestled with awareness of the scaled monster before him. Neither image was a reality, but reality has no emotional weight.

"I think I'd better go now," he said, and part of him did indeed think that.

Quartilla shrugged sadly and said, "I understand," as if she possibly did. "The men," she added, stretching out one plump leg and staring at the toes as she wiggled them, "usually keep the lights down, you know?"

She looked up with as much hope as she was willing to chance having disappointed. "It could be really nice, you know? I'm here to make it really nice."

"Get me out!" shouted the tribune in desperation, clamping his balled fists against his eyes.

"If —" said Quartilla.

"Out!" Vibulenus screamed. He turned and tried to batter at the door through which he had entered. It was already open, and his fury carried him into a corridor.

He sprawled there, weeping, for some minutes. He was trying to remember home, but the closest he could come to that was yellow-gray dust blowing across the plains of Mesopotamia and within it the deadly shadows of Parthian archers.

Even that memory was better than the ones which crowded it: the tower collapsing with so loud a roar that the sound bludgeoned a man groggy before the stones ground the flesh from his bones; and a green thing with scales and a sad smile, which brought Vibulenus to full sexual arousal as he lay screaming in the corridor, avoided by the soldiers who hurried past on their own errands.

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