Free Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth by M. C. Scott

and ran on the edge of the others; six men I knew now as well as I had ever known my brothers. We sprinted to catch up. ‘Syrion … I owe you.’ I clapped his arm. ‘Lupus would—’
    ‘He might still. He’s at the gate. Move!’
    In the throng of an entire legion, amidst shouting, swearing, hammering men, we streamed out on to the hard-beaten earth beyond the gates. By instinct more than memory, we found the place where we had practised our defence against cavalry that one time with Cadus and set to hammering our sharpened stakes into the ground.
    I was paired with Syrion: he held his stake, I pounded it with the butt end of my javelin, praying that I wouldn’t miss and smash his fingers; we had already seen one man out of our century injured that way in daylight when last we did this.
    As then, we were hammering into the parade ground which had been marched on by five thousand men daily for more years than I cared to count. It was set like concrete. I raised and smashed, raised and smashed. My fingers ached from the concussion. I felt the wood give a little, and again.
    ‘Will it hold at that?’ Syrion asked. ‘If he kicks it?’
    Lupus would kick it; even if we were attacked, he’d test it to see if he could find a reason to beat us. I felt the stake wobble.
    ‘It might hold to a kick,’ I said. ‘But if the cataphracts come, they’ll ride it down.’
    I had seen Vologases’ armoured cavalry. This fact alone had raised my standing in the unit; they trusted my judgement and I, in turn, found some respect for them if for nobody else. Syrion nodded. I pounded again. The javelin slipped in the sweat of my hands. I jerked it aside. Syrion swore, viciously.
    ‘Your hand?’ I asked.
    ‘Missed.’ Amidst the din I heard him swallow. ‘Try again.’
    I tried again. And again. And again until I felt it inch away from me, into the ground.
    ‘Enough. It’ll hold. Now yours.’
    Another stake. Another frantic pounding, but this time I held it and Syrion battered it with his pilum. I braced my feet and held my arms rigid and prayed the same prayers for the safety of my fingers. Broken bones used to excuse a man from duties in this place; not now.
    It had been different, we were told, before we came. Our arrival, with our wealth, or our obvious loathing of the legion, or the fact that Cadus had dropped from the heavens into such a senior position and might rob the other centurions of their easy promotions … whatever the reason, the XIIth had never worked so hard in living memory as they had these past six months. Only my unit did not hate me for it. Perhaps they could not afford to.
    ‘Done.’
    I stepped back. Syrion gave the stake one last, baleful smack. We stood in front of it, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield. I felt Proclion press in on my left. He was largest of all of us, a bear of a man, from the south toe of Italy, where they have been Roman citizens for a dozen generations yet still speak Greek to spite their Latin masters.
    Horgias fitted in to his left as his shield-man, then Rufus was left of him, and after him Polydeuces and then Sarapammon. Syrion held the century’s standard, which had the open hand of a god (some said it was the emperor, but I chose to think of it as Helios) at the top, and the badges of valour underneath. We had few of those, and none won since Caesar’s death.
    Torches flared about us, bringing light to our hellish dark. Leontius, the aquilifer, who bore the legion’s Eagle, brought it now to the fore and stood beneath it in such a way that the shadow of the bird fell on to the front ranks. He wore a wolfskin as his bearer’s pride where others of his sort wore leopard or lion; that was done, we were all sure, to placate Lupus, for his name meant ‘wolf’ in Latin, although everyone on the camp spoke Greek unless forced to do otherwise by their officers, who themselves only did so to prove a point. A hundred paces to our left, the Eagle of the IVth Scythians caught