An Emperor for the Legion by Harry Turtledove Page A

been one of the winter winds gusting outside.
    “Filth? This is true, it is—” As it had so often in argumentswith Quintus Glabrio, her voice began to rise. Heads all round the tavern turned toward her.
    But Scaurus was not Glabrio. He cut in: “If the slime you wallow in spreads widely, it will be the worse for you. Do you understand?” The quiet, evenly spaced words reached her when a shouted threat might have been ignored. She nodded, a quick, frightened movement.
    “Good enough,” the tribune said. He finished his wine at leisure and held up his end of the conversation with Nepos. When they were both done, he pulled coppers from his belt-pouch, tossed them on the table, and strode out, Nepos at his side.
    “That was well done,” the priest said as they walked back toward the Roman camp. “No rancor matches a former lover’s.”
    “Too true,” Marcus agreed. A sudden, biting breeze blew snow into his face. “Damn, it’s cold,” he said, and pulled his cape up over his mouth and nose. He was not sorry for the excuse to keep still.
    Once inside the ramparts of the camp, he separated from Nepos to attend to some business or other. He did not remember what it was five minutes later; he had other things on his mind.
    He feared Damaris was not simply letting her spite run free, but had truth behind her slurs. Frightening her into silence was easier than quieting his own mind afterward. The charge she hissed out fit only too well with too much else he had noticed without thinking about.
    The whole camp knew—thanks to Damaris and that shrill screech of hers—more about Glabrio’s choice of pleasures than was anyone’s business. In itself that might mean anything or nothing. But the junior centurion was sharing quarters with Gorgidas now, and the physician, as far as Scaurus knew, had no use for women. Recalling how nervous Gorgidas had seemed when he said he and Glabrio were joining forces, Marcus suddenly saw a new reason for the doctor’s hesitancy.
    The tribune’s hands curled into fists. Of all his men, why these two, two of the ablest and sharpest, and two of his closest friends as well? He thought of the
fustuarium
, the Roman army’s punishment for those who, in their full manhood, bedded other men.
    He had seen a
fustuarium
once in Gaul, on that occasionfor an inveterate thief. The culprit was dragged into the center of camp and tapped with an officer’s staff. After that he was fair game; his comrades fell on him with clubs, stones, and fists. If lucky, condemned men died at once.
    Marcus visualized Gorgidas and Quintus Glabrio suffering such a fate and flinched away in horror from his vision. Easiest, of course, would be to forget what he had heard from Damaris and trust her fear of him to keep her quiet. Or so he thought, until he tried to dismiss her words. The more he tried to shove them away, the louder they echoed, distracting him, putting a raw edge to everything around him. He barked at Gaius Philippus for nothing, swatted Malric when he would not stop singing the same song over and over. The tears which followed did nothing to sweeten Scaurus’ disposition.
    While Helvis comforted her son and looked angrily at the tribune, he snatched up a heavy cloak and went out into the night, muttering, “There are some things I have to deal with.” He closed the door on her beginning protest.
    Stars snapped in the blue-black winter sky. Marcus still found their patterns alien and still attached to the groupings the names his legionaries had given them more than a year ago. There was the Locust, there the Ballista, and there, low in the west now, the Pederasts. Scaurus shook his head and walked on, sandals soundless on snow and soft ground.
    Like most cabins, the one Glabrio and Gorgidas shared was shut tight against the night’s chill. Wooden shutters covered its windows, the spaces between their slats chinked tight with cloth to ward off the freezing wind. Only firefly gleams of lamplight peeped