Page 49 of Scorched Earth (Dark Shores #4)
“Irrelevant. Sit down.” While the two moved to take stools around the small table, Marcus went to the door to speak to Gibzen, who stood outside. “No interruptions. Short of this camp coming under attack, I don’t want to hear so much as a knock on the door. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Slamming the door shut, he strode to the table and flung himself on a stool. “I’ve a plan. A plan that must stay between the three of us, is that understood? Because all it will take is a whisper in the wrong ear, and it will fall apart.”
Felix’s brow furrowed, but he nodded along with Rastag.
“All right.” Smoothing the map, he tapped a finger atop the major crossing on the river Orinok. “Rastag, I need you to build me a bridge.”
“Not feasible,” his engineer snapped. “Truly, sir, it often feels you allow your imagination to take precedence over the realities of—”
Marcus held up a hand to cut him off. “Hear me out.”
They sat silently as he explained his plan, then leaned back. “Well? Can it be done?”
Rastag crossed his arms, scowling through his smudged spectacles. “I don’t like it.”
“I realize it lacks your usual elegance, but will it work ?”
The Thirty-Seventh’s engineer glared at the scratchwork of calculations in front of him. Then he looked to Felix. “As many men as I want?”
“Within reason.”
“Can we afford it?”
Marcus cleared his throat. “That’s my problem.”
Rastag’s sigh was long and dramatic. “It should work.”
Those words from anyone else would have filled Marcus with doubt, but from his engineer’s mouth, they amounted to absolute certainty. “Good. Get underway.”
Rastag saluted and left the room, leaving Marcus alone with Felix.
He waited in silence as his second-in-command examined the map, and then Felix finally said, “There is no room for error in this. It will require perfect execution for everything to go exactly as you planned, or it will explode in our faces.”
“But do you think it will work?”
“Yeah.” Felix shook his head, chuckling. “You haven’t proposed something this mad since we took Hydrilla.”
“I walked in Hydrilla’s shadow on my way to the Bardeen stem.
It still looks the same, though now it flies Cel banners.
” Marcus hesitated, his mind drifting back to a memory of a different time, when the defiance Amarin spoke of had burned strongly in his blood.
“Do you remember our goals during that siege?”
Felix nodded. “We were a different legion, then.”
They were harder now. Stronger. More skilled. Yet that wasn’t what Felix meant. “I think perhaps it’s time the Thirty-Seventh becomes that legion again.”
A slow smile formed on his friend’s face.
“Agreed. But it has to start with you.” He rose to his feet.
Reaching into his belt pouch, he extracted a heavy gold bracelet and set it in front of Marcus.
“I found this in the command room. I know Austornic has been meddling, but his intentions are in the right place.”
“I know.” Taking another drink of water, Marcus said, “Assemble the Thirty-Seventh outside of camp. I need to talk to them.”
After Felix left, Marcus picked up the gold bangle, turning it over in his hands.
There was nothing he could do that would ever make him worth Teriana.
Nothing that he could do that would ever outweigh what he’d done to Lydia, and even without the rules imposed on him by the Empire, no future possible while he held that secret from her.
He needed to stay away from her because he didn’t trust himself around her.
Yet that didn’t mean he needed to make her life worse.
Donning his armor and weapons, Marcus shoved the bangle into his belt pouch. Flinging open the door, he said to Gibzen, “Get Teriana and Quintus a room inside the fortress.”
The primus’s mouth twisted. “But you—”
“Do it. And someone get me my horse.”
Men hurried to obey as Marcus strode through the fortress, then out the doors.
His hangover reared its head as brilliant rays of sun stabbed him in the eyes, but Marcus ignored the pain and shoved his helmet on his head.
The camp was a flurry of activity as his men flowed out the gates, the men of the other legions watching with interest.
Descending the steps, Marcus found Servius standing at the base, holding the reins of a mare with a coat of an alarming shade of gold.
“Your old horse is lame,” his friend said. “So I bought you a new one. Isn’t she a beauty? They breed them in Gamdesh.”
Marcus stared at the tall mare. Her coat was so shiny she reflected the sunlight as though she were made of metal in truth. “Interesting choice.”
The horse stomped her feet and squealed, then tried to bite Servius’s arm. He only laughed. “She’s got good spirit, and she’ll make you look good.”
What she looked like was a mount that was likely to toss him into the mud at her earliest convenience. “Maybe—”
Servius leaned closer. “What I’m told is that there’s something special about this breed. They don’t make people sneeze.”
That was an enticing attribute. Marcus frowned at the horse, wondering if not sneezing after every ride was worth the target such a mount would paint on his back. Taking the reins, he said to her, “You cause me trouble and horse meat will be on the menu.”
She pinned her ears and tried to bite him, Servius laughing as Marcus scrambled into the saddle.
He ignored the wave of dizziness that came over him, and urged the mare into a trot toward the gates, his bodyguard formed up around him.
Felix was waiting, his friend reining his own mount between Marcus and Gibzen. “Nice horse.”
“Servius’s choice.”
Felix laughed, then heeled his mount through camp.
From the back of the tall mare, Marcus saw Teriana’s familiar form.
She held a gladius in one hand, and Quintus was gesturing wildly as he explained something to her.
Though she no doubt had seen the party, her eyes remained fixed on Quintus, chin bobbing up and down as she listened to his instructions.
“You know who she reminds me of?” Felix asked, and Marcus winced internally that he’d been so obvious.
“No.”
“Agrippa’s girl. The laundress. She used to watch us train for hours on end. I always figured she had a thing for legion boys, so I never did anything about it. You remember her name?”
Marcus blinked, seeing the pretty Bardenese girl in his mind, her eyes wide with fear because she’d just dumped a bucket of water on his feet.
“Silvara,” Gibzen said from where he rode next to them. “We used to see the little chit mimicking us in the woods when she thought no one was watching. Agrippa even let her play dress-up in his gear one time; I heard Yaro and Quintus talking about it.”
To do so was against legion law, so Felix surprised Marcus by snapping, “You’re awfully well informed of other people’s business, Primus. Move off—this conversation doesn’t involve you.”
Gibzen’s glare was murderous, but he moved back a few paces.
Only then did Felix retrieve a page from his belt pouch.
“I bring it up because more supplies arrived via the Bardeen stem, including an update on the security at Hydrilla. The rebels have been increasing their attacks on supply caravans, which is why we only received half of what we should’ve.
They’re led by a young woman who fights with a Thirty-Seventh gladius, and you’ll never guess what her name is. ”
“You aren’t serious?” Marcus snatched the page, scanning the report, none of the decidedly bad news resonating as his eyes stalled on the description of the rebel leader. Prisoners were given over to questioners, who discovered the rebel leader goes by the name Silvara.
“Do you think Agrippa is helping them?”
Marcus reread the page, then shook his head. “No… No, they’d know these supplies were for us, and while it’s one thing for Agrippa to have deserted, it’s another thing for him to willfully attack the Thirty-Seventh’s supply lines. That’s no better than sticking knives into our backs.”
“So you think he’s dead?”
Marcus glanced at Gibzen, remembering the moment he’d delivered Marcus the news of Agrippa’s desertion. “Yes. There’s not a girl on Reath he’d be willing to raise arms against us for. Servius, update the books.”
“That he’s dead doesn’t change that he left us for her.”
A prickle of gooseflesh broke over Marcus’s skin, and he looked to the skyline above Aracam, the black tower looming. “Change the books.”
“Will do,” Servius replied. “But on a more pressing note, what’s this gathering about?”
“Unity.” Marcus nudged his horse into a canter in the direction of the orderly ranks of the Thirty-Seventh forming up on the planes before Aracam.
Arinoquian civilians outside the walls watched nervously, many of them hurrying inside the city, but Marcus paid them no mind as he glanced to the ridge where Titus’s pyre had stood, the young legatus now nothing more than an urn of ashes to be delivered to Celendrial.
Yet in his mind’s eye, Marcus could see the black plume of smoke that had stained the air, smell the stink of burning flesh, and feel the pain of knowing he’d failed Titus as thoroughly as Titus had failed him.
He’d not make that mistake again.
The Thirty-Seventh was watching him as his attention turned once more to their ranks, and he called out, “At ease.”
Men glanced between each other, but then relaxed their stances, watching him with curiosity.
Heeling his horse, he rode slowly between them, feeling his cloak billow out behind him as the wind rose.
“The Senate has tasked us with a campaign far beyond the scope of anything we’ve undertaken before!
” he shouted, allowing the wind to carry his voice.
“We face an adversary of a strength Celendor has not faced since the dawn of the Empire. Never have we needed fortitude more than we do now, and yet the only reinforcement the Senate has sent us is the greenest legion in the Empire.”
The men shifted restlessly, none of this having been lost on them.
“Thirteen years old,” he said. “They’ve never seen real combat.
Everything they know about battle is theoretical.
Skirmishes fought on the plains before Lescendor with dulled blades and catapults filled with paint.
Children who have only played at war, and yet here they are in the midst of the biggest campaign of the Empire’s history. ”
He wove through the ranks, watching their faces, feeling the tension rise, then he shouted, “Little boys stand at our backs, my brothers! Soldiers whose faces won’t need a razor for years to come. Soldiers whose faces never fucking will unless we teach them right.”
The legion collectively stiffened, his words not what they’d expected.
“We are the Thirty-Seventh!” His voice carried over their heads.
“Undefeated champions of the Empire, and if we fell today, oh what glorious speeches would be given about all the things that we have done. Of the endless foes who have fallen beneath our feet, banners flapping and horns blaring triumphantly. Of how we never once fell back.” He took a breath, watching them watch him.
“But it was not the men we are now who were cast into battle and blood, told to fight or die. It was little boys who’d only fought with dull blades and paint, who’d only played at war. ”
Passing Servius, he took the Thirty-Seventh’s standard from his friend, hooking the base of it into his stirrup. Sunlight glinted off the gold, sending little beams of light bouncing off the armor of his men.
“You all know I’ve been in Celendrial,” he said. “Meeting with the Commandant. The Senate. The Consul. What you don’t know is that while there I encountered some old friends of ours. The Twenty-Ninth.”
Faces soured, dozens of men spitting into the dirt at the mention of the legion that had been supposed to finish their training. The legion that had been the architects of the Thirty-Seventh’s misery for years.
“Do you remember life under Hostus’s command?
Do you remember being tethered to them with apron strings of razor wire?
What it was like to fear the teacher more than the enemy?
Many would say that it was because of their methods that we are who we are, but I ask, how many of our brothers would stand among us today if not for the lessons of the Twenty-Ninth? ”
“Yaro!” someone shouted, but the dead legionnaire’s name was only the first, dozens more filling the air as the Thirty-Seventh screamed the names of those who’d died because of the older legion, every man present remembering their own personal suffering beneath the Twenty-Ninth’s fists.
“Our blood is on their hands!” he roared over their voices. “Will the Fifty-First’s be on ours?”
“No!” they screamed back at him, ranks abandoned as the men pressed around his horse. The animal’s eyes rolled in panic, but Marcus only checked the reins. “Who are we?”
“The Thirty-Seventh!”
The noise was deafening, his horse twisting in circles as he lifted the standard into the air. The dragon was the symbol of the empire they served, but the 37 it clutched in its talons? That number was theirs .
Urging the horse forward, he led his legion back to their camp, his friends falling in alongside him.
“Well,” Servius said. “It’s been an age since you gave a speech that pretty. What was that all about?”
Marcus glanced back at the ridge, seeing imagined smoke rising black as night. “A different kind of legacy.”