Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion (43 page)

The legionnaire shook his head as he translated.  “He keeps repeating that we attacked his tribe first, Legate, but there is an undertone of vengeance in what he’s saying.  He seems to think that we did something horrible to his people.”

I nodded slowly and straightened to loom over the captured individuals.  I glanced behind me to see Santino carefully sifting through the snow, collecting the pieces of my broken rifle.  During my
quick look, I noticed Archer moving to help.  I shook my head and returned my attention to the legionnaire.

“Kill them,” I ordered evenly.  “Leave this guy for last.”

“Legate?”  He asked.

“Do it,” I snapped.

Before the words were even out of my mouth, I heard the sound of cold steel piercing flesh followed by the piercing shriek of a woman too surprised to really feel the true effect of pain.  Within seconds the scream subsided into silence but not before a handful of others had joined it only to die out in turn.  I’d already turned away and started walking from the scene when I heard the last man cry out, his lingering far longer than the others.

We’d already wasted too much time here.

***

Nothing seemed to
change in this wintery shithole that was Ancient Britain, just an endless ocean of empty, eerie trees and narrow passageways between them.  The sea was still somewhere off to our left and countless miles of land to our right.  Wildlife continued to elude us and though the legionnaires preferred a wholly vegetarian diet while on the march to keep them energized and light on their feet, the occasional reward of spit-fired meat had escaped them for far too long, which combined with continued forced marches allowed poor morale to fester.  My centurions were working extra hard keeping them in line, but I didn’t have time to worry about a rebellion, because we were almost there. 

I could feel it.

I felt a lot of things these days.  Some bad, some good, others exhilarating, most unexplainable.  My mind worked in overdrive as thoughts came and went, flying through my consciousness at a rate I could barely process.  Thoughts darted in and out so quickly that at times I’d find myself staring at nothing in particular for minutes on end with no recollection of the passage of time.  Yesterday, Boudicca had found me slumped in my saddle in a position she said I’d held for over an hour.  She said she’d thought me to be meditating, but I hadn’t remembered a second of it had I been.

Other times I would mumble to myself endlessly to the poin
t where my mouth would grow completely parched.  Felix especially got most of my attention as I found myself talking to him more and more, and I was growing more comfortable with the fact that he seemed to reply, although we hadn’t done much talking lately.

It was too damn cold for talking.

The temperature had dropped precipitously in the past few days to hover well below freezing, and I had been forced to supplement my warmest cold weather gear with a blanket just to keep myself from freezing to death.  Felix, too, was bundled up like an Eskimo, and we rode in plodding silence, but as a strong gust of wind whistled through the tree branches above me, I snapped my head up and around at the sound, grimacing in pain at the movement.  It must have been hours since I’d last moved my head, and the sudden twisting of my neck combined with the cold left it feeling like I’d just attempted to tear it from my shoulders.

I groaned as the action of returning my head to its forward facing position felt no better.  Once I was settled again
, I began a series of exercises of rolling my head around in a circle and tilting it against each shoulder, stretching out its kinks and warming it up, and I decided it would be a good time to flex my toes within my booted feet as well.  Each foot may have been covered in three socks surrounded by a heavy duty boot, but my socks weren’t much better off than my boxer shorts these days, and I wasn’t sure I had any left that didn’t have at least one hole in it.  It was an odd issue to have, made worse by the fact that I couldn’t buy anymore socks, and I was certain I’d cut off both my feet for a fucking Target and its endless supplies of them right about now.

Without socks, would I be forced to wrap my feet in
the linens worn by the legionnaires to keep my feet warm?  Would my feet even fit in my boots anymore?  How much longer did my boots even have?

I jerked my legs angrily like a toddler stamping his feet at not getting his way, and Felix
dropped his head back in preparation for an increase in speed.  I reached out quickly to pat his neck, pulling back on the reins with the other.

“Don’t bother, Felix,” I whispered close to his ear.  “
We’ll be there soon enough.”

Felix answered with another of his all-to
o-knowing neighs and immediately settled down.

I nodded
in satisfaction and sat back, ready to reluctantly endure a thousand more years of riding through this winter wasteland as long as my answers were still out there.  I settled in and bundled my blanket under my chin again, shivering around the cold but remembering to bend my neck and wiggle my toes every few minutes.

I was just about relaxed when a runner
plodded through the snow in my direction.

My immediate instinct was to draw on him but then I noticed he was one of the legionnaires normally assigned to flanking duty.  I raised a fist in the air, wincing again this time because I’d neglected to stretch my
arms and shoulders as well, but at my signal, Minicius tiredly called for a halt, and the entire contingent of legionnaires stopped on a dime.

I waited impatiently for the man to reach my side, setting my posture
so that I sat commandingly atop Felix and put on my business face.  When he arrived, I was immediately upset that he’d taken as long as he had since emerging from the brush.  He wasn’t out of breath or perspiring but still he took a moment to compose himself.

“Speak!”  I demanded.

The man blinked in surprise but then shook his head as though clearing it from a stupor and answered.  “Legate, we have found something.”

I fidgeted angrily.  “If your next words don’t explain what it is you’ve found
, I will sentence you to the
fustuarium
!”

The man cringed at the threat, not wanting to suffer the march through a tunnel of his fellow legionnaires ordered to beat and stone him to death as he ran the gauntlet.  Even if he survived, and
had therefore escaped further punishment, he would still be banished from the legion.

“My apologies, Legate,”
the man said politely, but my expression wasn’t impressed.  The man quickly understood and hurried to his next point, realizing that his last words hadn’t actually been an explanation.  “A Roman legion fort has been erected a short march from here.”

“
What?”

The man nodded vigorously to reiterate his point.  “It is as I say, Legate.  There is a Roman fort not too far from here.  Its size indicates there may be as many as two legions withi
n.  We cannot explain it.”

I sat there silently, waiting patiently with my eyes closed.

Almost two minutes passed while the legionnaire stood there, shivering in the cold, waiting for me to say something before he finally grew the balls to interrupt my thoughts.

“Legate?”

I opened my eyes, and sighed at the sight of him.  “I was hoping you’d disappear.”

“Legate?”

I ignored him and turned to Minicius.  “Organize a scouting party, Centurion.  Lead the party yourself and get to the bottom of this.”

Minicius
looked confused.  “The bottom of what, sir?”

I smiled, finding that I was starting to enjoy
myself whenever I confused these local yokels with my fancy talk.  “Just find out who calls the fort home and make sure they’re friendly.”

He saluted crisply.  “At once, Legate!”

***

Three hours had passed and I was
growing frustrated.

I’d ordered the legionnaires to make temporary camp as we waited for
Minicius to return, a rest that was much welcomed.  They’d cheered and applauded the call for a break, but I’d shot the nearest legionnaires a venomous look and those in the immediate area quickly focused on erecting temporary barricades instead of cheering.  It hadn’t taken more than a handful of seconds before the remaining legionnaires got the point and did the same.

The local vegetation was sparse, just a few shrubs and trees that made up a forest so
thinly populated that I could barely refer to it as a forest at all.  It allowed for clear sight lines in all directions but also a few trees to sit back and relax against, as I was doing just now against a tree barely out of its sapling years.  It was thin and flexible, which I found quite comfortable to lean against.  Before me was a small fire and Felix stood munching on something he’d found in the snow just beside me.

Besides Felix
, I was completely alone.  The nearest clump of legionnaires sat maybe two dozen meters from my position and I couldn’t even see my former friends.  Even my rifle was gone, left to rot in a forest till the end of its days, destined to be found by some kid digging in the dirt two thousand years from now, a relic of a bygone era that no one will understand and even fewer will believe.  It made me think of that kid Xenophon back in Byzantium and his possession of my butterfly knife.  Because of Archer, I knew the knife would become some ancient, unsolved mystery that would stump scientists and archeologists for millennia, a thought I recently found hilarious.

I chuckled to myself, but the chuckles quickly changed to coughs.  I hacked and sputtered for half a minute before settling down, and sniffed away built up mucus in my nose.

I thought I’d been getting a cold for a couple of days now, but hadn’t been sure until just now.  It was an odd sensation since I’d always been a pretty healthy guy, rarely ever experiencing bouts of sickness.  While the exterior of my body was beat to shit, with more scars than I could begin to count, my internals had always worked just fine.

Until now
, it seemed.

I grunted and retrieved my
water containing CamelBak.  I held it out and looked at it, noticing the duct tape that patched up the hose and bladder in a number of places, and it seemed that my CamelBak too was on its last legs.

I put the hose to my lips to take a swig only to realize
that the water within had frozen solid.  I tried again, straining myself as I tried to suck up a single drop of the liquid, but it was a fruitless endeavor, one that surged the rage within me, and I swung the CamelBak against the tree beside me, causing the hose to break away from it. I looked at the broken hose still in my hand, noting that we’d run out of duct tape weeks ago and there was no hope of fixing it.

“Fuck i
t!” I yelled and hurled it off into the distance.

Felix grumbled at my outburst, but I paid him no mind as
I drew my knees against my chest and wrapped my arms around them to keep warm, settling in to await Minicius’ return.  I shifted my body to attain a comfortable sitting position, and for the first time in weeks, felt a sense of isolation overwhelm me.  I might as well have been all alone out here, for all the companionship I’d had of late.  I no longer cared that my former friends were lost to me, nor did I mind having the fate of the universe precariously balanced on my shoulders anymore, but the idea of dying out here and most likely being left to rot in a hole somewhere was not comforting.

I shuddered at the thought and pulled my blanket around my shoulders more tightly,
but was immediately interrupted by a loud trumpet sounding off in the distance.  I craned my neck to the left and saw Minicius returning with his scouting unit, and with another contingent of legionnaires behind him.

It took a concerted effort
for me to rise to my feet, but when I was finally upright, I set out at a leisurely pace in their direction.  The sound of hoofs crunching in snow drew my attention behind me, and I saw Vincent, Archer, and Santino riding up on their horses only to draw up short of where I stood.  They eyed me cautiously and I didn’t even bother welcoming them.  I turned back and continued toward Minicius, the three of them falling in behind me atop their horses.

As our two groups grew closer
, I tried to discern any details I could about the legionnaires that travelled behind Minicius and his men.  Nothing seemed off about them or out of the ordinary, but because of their unexpected presence so far north, I half expected them to be some kind of parallel reality version of a Roman legion, one with horns and tails and fire discharging eyes, or at the very least, some kind of local tribe masquerading as legionnaires.

The last thing I expected to see was just another group of legionnaires, no different than the ones in their camp behind me.

“Hunter…”

The voice came from behind me and sounded like Vincent’s, but I igno
red him and continued walking.

The only discernible
difference between these new guys and the legionnaires behind me was that, on a whole, these newcomers seemed older and more mature than the Romans under my command.