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

with silver, and his skin had the tight translucence we had shared in Hyrcania, when the cold pulled our flesh hard about our bones.
    Lupus ordered a halt in good order ten paces away and went forward to greet him. After three paces, he said, ‘Demalion. Follow,’ and walked on.
    ‘You brought all your men,’ Cadus said, as we approached. No greeting, no clashing salute, no officers’ exchange of gossip. ‘None left to guard your camp.’
    Lupus lifted one shoulder in a shrug. ‘We disabled three units on the way. Our entire century therefore faces seven units of the best men in the Fourth legion. I decided it was worth the risk.’
    ‘All or nothing.’
    ‘I didn’t come here to fail.’
    ‘No.’ Cadus ran his tongue round his teeth, thinking. They were of a height, he and Lupus, and both mountain-fit, but in all other respects they were as different as the moon from the sun. Cadus was a big, broad man, and given to laughter. He was not laughing now, while lean-faced Lupus, by his own standards, was vibrating with a kind of wild joy.
    Cadus said, ‘Do you need help?’
    ‘Of course. And of course I cannot accept any. They will have us all flogged if we break the rules. Centurions will not be exempted.’
    ‘That may be their aim,’ Cadus said slowly. His gaze was fixed on Lupus’ face. They stood a moment, each lost in the other’s thought. It came to me then that the only centurion of the two legions who did not hate Lupus was Cadus, and that I should have noticed that before now.
    At length, Lupus said, ‘They set ambushes above the first three enemy encampments, and I have no doubt that if we had not … disabled them they would have endeavoured to drive us down into the camps for the men there to take us prisoner. It could be, therefore, that we may drive some men of the Fourth in your direction. If they were to stumble into your camp, might you find it acceptable to take them prisoner?’
    Lupus’ eyes were wide with pretended innocence. In response, Cadus grinned in a way I’d come to know in Hyrcania.
    ‘I’ll set men in a chain along the route. If they run past us, we’ll take them.’ He clapped Lupus’ arm. ‘Good luck. Your men are good. If you make it, you’ll have broken the Fourth; they won’t try anything else in the last half-month before we go back to camp. Not at this end of the mountain, anyway.’
    Lupus half turned, and then wheeled back again. ‘It may be that I have read this wrongly, and that they do wish to destroy our camp. If your men would make themselves ready to block their passing, I would be grateful. I’ll send Demalion back to you if it seems such a thing is likely. That does not, I believe, contravene the rules as we were given them.’
    ‘It doesn’t,’ Cadus agreed, which might have been true by the letter of our temporary law, but was decidedly not true to its spirit. ‘But we shall keep this conversation between us three. And Demalion, if he comes, will be returning for treatment of a wound, not to bring news of an attack.’
    ‘Agreed.’ Lupus looked at me; they both did.
    ‘Agreed,’ I said, and followed Lupus back to our lines, grinning like a fool.
    We smelled the mules before we saw them; a ripe, warm scent of old hay and urine and steaming dung that left me aching to go in amongst them and run my hands under their manes to heat my fingers, as I had done as a child on the coldest days of herd-watch. I thought I knew about cold, then.
    With their smell like a wall before us, we inched round the last corner to the final enemy camp on our bellies, with our faces pressed to the ice.
    It was as well we were already down, for the camp built by the first century of the first cohort of the IVth legion was not like all the others, a huddle of tents with an earth rampart about, set in a vestige of shelter.
    Here, at the northernmost end of the Hawk range, the men had made the mountains their ally, setting their camp with its back in a natural corner, so