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

or another, but he was always fair. He set standards and expected them to be kept and we knew it.
    With Lupus, I found what it was to live under a man who changed his mind with the wind, so that it was possible I could be thrashed for not holding my breath the day after he had left me vomiting in the dirt for holding it.
    I breathed in. The night was cold. I felt the air chill my forehead, felt my lungs bunch against it. I saw Lupus on the edge of my vision.
    In six months, I had learned the skill of seeing sideways while looking forward. His orderly held his torch for him, a stooped man from Emona named Minicius. By its light I studied his dry-parchment face – and learned nothing. He could hold an expression of weary distaste through his own crucifixion, I thought, it was so moulded to his form.
    He was nearly past when his eyes caught mine. Only for a fraction of a heartbeat, and I am sure without his intending it, but it was there, that human touch that lets soul meet soul, from which no man can hide.
    And what I saw was more terrifying than anything I had yet seen: worse by far than his particular loathing of me, or his counterfeit rage; worse even than the moment of cold calculation before he changed his mind again so that what was right yesterday was wrong today. I knew all of those, and how he showed them, and none was present now: what I read in his eyes was terror.
    Lupus was deeply afraid.
    Knowing that, my own fear threatened to suck me away. I felt Syrion’s shoulder forced against mine, as if by power of will and the friction of his tunic he could keep me standing. ‘Careful …’ He eased the word out under his breath, taking a risk even with that.
    I leaned my own weight back against him by way of thanks, and the moment passed, but not my fright. I breathed in the cold night and in the time it took I saw us decimated, even Lupus drawing lots from the bag, fearing to pick the one black stone in every ten and the death by attrition that must follow. Or being marched to the sea and made to swim until we drowned; I had a particular fear of deep water that my journeys had never undone. Or …
    The horn sounded a single note, high and long, the song of the moon. It caught my thoughts and carried them out into the black sky. Careful not to make a sound, I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. Beside me, I felt Syrion do the same.
    Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard his voice every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry.
    ‘Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles.’ Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent.
    ‘If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead.’
    His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual.
    His voice rocked us. ‘To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa.
    ‘Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other