And all hell breaks out.
Setting up the novel at the very beginning with action and anticipation . . . that's what I like to do. From out of chaos comes a deep mystery and even MORE chaos. For me, it's the perfect definition for a great story.
So here's the set up for this newest clipping of the novel I'm sharing with you today. Decimus, being the third in command of the legion, is the one man in charge of training the entire legion to function properly. A freshly organized legion of half raw recruits and half hardened veterans. Late at night, deep in enemy territory, Decimus decides to inspect the legion's outer perimeter. And that's when all Hell breaks loose.
Tell me what you think . . .
II
7 AD
Dalmatia
The Fires of Hades
Whatever it was
which made him pause and turn his head to look he would never be able to say. But he did.
And it possible saved his life. He came to a halt on a slight rise of
dirt, surrounded by his escorts, his mind intent on keeping his men ever alert.
The night was absolutely dark and oddly
silent to the ear. Not even a breath of
cool mountain air stirred in the thick blackness. In the darkness, just below the hill, the
ground opened up into a wide space of a flat valley floor. Meandering down the middle of the valley was
a road which ran from Narona on the coastline deep into the Dalmatian
interior. On both sides of the valley
were high, forest covered mountains.
Rugged forested mountains pockmarked with the burning pinpricks of
hundreds of campfires of the enemy.
Clearly
visible. A constellation of man-made
fireflies easily visible in the cloying darkness of the moonless night. Dalmatian rebels who, each one, had in their
chests a burning hatred for anything Roman.
To
his right the outer defenses of the legion’s camp, rows upon rows of wooden
stakes driven into the soft dirt of the small hill. Beyond the stakes, a deep
ditch with sloping sides encased the camp.
Work completed by every last member of the legion in a matter of a few
hours. Like all Roman camps, this one
was an almost perfect square precisely mapped out and plotted by the legion’s
attached engineers’ hours before the first of the legion’s cohorts came
marching up the road. All legionnaire
camps were the same. It didn’t matter if
you soldiered in Mauritania in far off Africa, or slogged away in a unit a
thousand leagues away in the cold and ice of distant Celtic Britain. A Roman army camp was the same. A legion would march for three-quarters of
the daylight hours in a precisely ordered marching formation, a concisely
ordered marching order all legions of
the army adhered to since the days of the legendary Scipio Africanus, the Roman
general who defeated Hannibal and ultimately destroyed Carthage almost four
hundred years earlier.
But, usually four
hours before sunset, the legion would come out of its marching formation and
build a fortified camp atop some piece of elevated terrain which gave the
legion an unhindered 360 degree of visibility of its immediate environs. It was the Roman way. It was inviolate Roman tradition. It was one of the many little pieces of the
puzzle which made Roman Army invincible.
Each marching
soldier not only carried his weapons with him, but a wooden stake, or a shovel,
or a pick, as well. Each man pitched in
to build the camp. It took about four
hours to complete. But by time it was
done, every soldier in the camp knew exactly where his cohort resided and where
his tent would be found. And it was
Decimus’ job to make sure the legion preformed to exact standards without
exception.
But on this night
he paused atop a small mound of freshly discarded dirt and turned to his left
to look up the hill toward the legate’s tent.
The darkness in the direction toward the legate’s was not quite as dense
thanks to the burning torches and campfires which littered the camp’s
interior. It was not a high hill the legion
resided on. Its slopes relatively gentle
to traverse. Decimus noticed the
legate’s large tent on the summit of the hill, surrounded by soldiers from the
general’s personal praetorian guards.
Rising above the general’s tent was the masthead which, atop it,
displayed the legion’s cherished eagle, along with the many pennants of the
legion itself and its eight cohorts underneath.
In the semi-darkness of the camp’s burning campfires he saw the main
flap of the general’s tent open and a group of men exit the tent’s interior in
mass. In the twilight it looked like
five army officers surrounding a large figure wearing a dark cape which covered
his entire frame. Light reflected off
the polished armor of the Romans as they gathered around the dark figure for a
moment or two before disappearing behind the legate’s large tent.
Decimus
frowned. From this distance, and with so
little light illuminating the night it was hard to see the faces of the Roman
officers. But he was sure he had never
seen any of the men before. As to the
heavy looking man in his black hooded cloak, his face never revealed
itself. But he moved like a
soldier. A hand lifted up to pull the
hood of his cape around his face as he turned to walk away. An act of deception, the Prefect thought to himself.
An act of intrigue. But there was
a confidence, almost an arrogance, in the way he straightened himself up and
moved out of view surrounded by the five Roman officers.
An unexpected
chill ran down the Prefect’s
spine. Half turning, his brown eyes fell
onto the balding, white haired little man who was his servant, a sour faced old
man who had served for years with him in one legion or another, and leaned
closer to the older man to speak quietly into the man’s ear.
“Find out who
those men were and when they arrived in camp.”
The small man with
the balding head and darkly tanned face nodded in silence and turned to
leave. He moved through the small
entourage of armor clad legionnaires who surrounded the Prefect, and then started up the incline of the hill toward the
legate’s tent.
He took no more
than ten steps before the explosion ripped through the night. A roaring crescendo which shook the ground
violently underneath his sandaled feet and lit up the night with the hellish
light of a nightmare. A blast of hot,
foul smelling air threw Decimus, and everyone else standing at their posts,
through the air as if he was nothing more than a child’s rag doll. The roar of the explosion droned on and on
even, as large chunks of soil and rock began raining out of the semi-lit skies. Massive chunks of soil and rock hitting the
ground with a thudding jolt, guaranteeing death and severe pain if some hapless
legionnaire stood or laid splayed out on the ground underneath the raining
fury.
The hot, multi-colored
flames shooting up from the top of the hill roared and exploded like the
hissing fury of a metal smith’s forge. A
forge only conceivable by the gods themselves.
Decimus, stunned and in pain, lifted himself up from the ground and
staggered to one side as he faced the billowing inferno above him and stared at
it in awe. As he watched he sat the
flames weakening, the roar of its fury lessening perceptibly, and then, with
the blinking of an eye, suddenly ceasing altogether. One moment Hades’s fires burned and screamed
in its fury. The next gone altogether,
the night’s darkness suddenly enveloping one and all, the sudden silence
slapping everyone across the cheek with a startling clarity almost as
overwhelming as the explosion itself.
Reality flooded
into Decimus’ mind as he turned and began bellowing out names with the
hammer-like staccato force of only someone with twenty-four years of soldiering
could possibly do.
“Menelaus!
Romulus! Cassus! Brutus! All centurions
. . . to me! To me! The rest of you
bastards . . . off your asses, NOW! Up!
Up! Get on your feet, or by the sweet
graces of all that is holy, I’ll personally peel the hides off each and
everyone one of you with a cat o’nine tales in the morning!”
Decimus roared. He
strode from one point to the next on the outer perimeter cajoling, barking,
kicking men up and off their ground and throwing them physically back to their
assigned positions. He organized small
gathering of legionnaires to fight and subdue the innumerable small fires which
had sprung up with the camp. As he
roared and terrified one and all, burly men dressed in the armor of centurions
staggered or ran to join him. In the
eyes of each Decimus saw disbelief and terror filling their souls. But he knew.
Knew this was no time for either emotion.
A catastrophe of
Olympian proportions had struck the IXth
Brundisi. But an even larger, more deadly, catastrophe was about to happen
when dawn soon arrived if the legion was not prepared for it.
“Gnaeus!” the Prefect yelled over the shouting of his
centurions taking over at last and rousing the men out of their stunned
silence, “survey the camp. Assess the
damages and loss of men and report back to me as soon as possible.”
Decimus turned and
stared up at where once the top of the hill had been. Where the legate’s massive tent, the holy
shrines of the legion’s namesakes, where the several tents of the officer’s
would be found, all gone. Not just
destroyed. But . . . gone!
Nothing remained. Not a shred
of cloth, or a piece of armor, or even a body part of one of the dead
remained. Now only a gaping hole twenty
meters deep and ten meters in diameter, with an eye-watering aroma of bad eggs
drifting up and out of the cavity and blowing gently away with the wind.
It did not take a
genius to realize the harsh truth. All
of the legion’s officers, except for him, and most of what had been the 1st
cohort, the legion’s most experienced troops, no longer existed. The anger of an unknown god came down from
Olympus and had destroyed one and all.
And in the process, possibly assuring the complete and total destruction
of everyone who, at the moment, still lived on this cursed hill. Dawn was but only two hours away, and with
the first light of a new day, the hills above their position infested with
Rome’s enemies would look down upon the middle of the valley and see what had
been wrought in the middle of the night.
The enemy would
come howling and screaming at them with blood lust in their eyes and the smell
of victory upon them. Thousands of
them. All sensing a great victory at
hand if they but struck with overwhelming force before the sun lifted much
higher than dawn’s light in the morning sky.
If the IXth was not prepared,
if not their position was compressed and strengthened somehow, if the men were
not ready to fight, all would be
lost. By noon every living soul on this
hill would be dead. Consigned to the
eight levels of Hades for the rest of eternity.
A situation Decimus was grimly aware of, but determined to contest the
issue to his last breath.
The thin, hardened
old veteran of a dozen battles, turned to face the many faces of his junior
officers staring up at him and hungrily waiting for orders, and began talking
in a commanding, but calm, voice.
“I want the second
cohort, Brutus, to take up position on the northern flank of the hill. Pull back from your original position and
deploy half way up the hillside and dig in.
Cassus, take the forth cohort, and deploy directly behind the first. Draco, your sixth cohort will take the eastern
slope. The seventh will deploy directly
behind you. The west slope . . .”
A calm voice. An assured, experienced commander. And a plan.
A plan delivered concisely, with little fanfare, and direct. Decimus’ gray eyes did not waver as he looked
into the faces of each of his centurions.
Orders were given. From an old
soldier who had seen it all. The Prefect in his quiet calm simply
radiated self-confidence out to his men like some mystical lantern held up in
the dead of night to light the way. No
one knew if the Prefect’s plan would
work. In some respects, most of the
centurions didn’t care. There was a
plan. There were orders given and
expected to be carried out to the letter.
Someone was in charge. Someone
they knew and respected.
What more could a
soldier ask for or expect?
Only the gods knew what would happen once dawn filled the sky with light.
Only the gods knew what would happen once dawn filled the sky with light.
What remained of
the night was filled with the movements of legionnaires repositioning
themselves on the hill first, followed by the sounds of men digging into the
soil, and hammers thumping loudly onto stout wooden stakes as they tore down
the wooden stakes set earlier in the day and repositioned in their new
defensive stance.
Decimus, with the
silent Gnaeus beside him, kept moving around the hill directing men here and
there. Even pitching in when a set of
extra hands were needed to drive stakes into the ground or to throw up
additional barricades of dirt in front of their positions. No one complained. No one slacked off. Not with the Prefect beside them in the dirt and grime working as hard as they
were.
And when the first
gray shades of predawn began to lessen the darkness around them, everyone
knew. They were ready. Ready for whatever might come.
