1.95 [Sacrament of Salt and Ash]

Son of Rome

Wrathful hands seized me by the neck. They gripped fistfuls of hair that I had allowed to grow far too long, palmed my face, hauled on the white cloth of my chiton and dug their fingers into the gaps between my skin and the beaten bronze breastplate given to me by the Gadfly. My own shadow took me in its hands, and it dragged me down. Down, into the depths.

Down, to my knees.

Fight. Until the last man falls.

I planted my right hand flat against the ground, a finger’s width all that separated my knees from the earth. The veins in my arm bulged from the strain. The shadowed hands that had pulled me down shifted their grip, settling on my shoulders and pressing. I dug my fingers into the dirt, snarling my effort.

“I am a raven,” I said, accepting the head rush of an ideal faithfully followed and inhaling sharply as my midnight cloak roiled and pressed up against the grasping hands. I took that strength, the Greek exceptionalism within my soul, and I flooded my body with it. Muscles flexed. I rose – but glacially slow. Too slow. My eyes narrowed. “And I am an unkindness-“

“I am a soldier.”

My knees slammed to the ground. The midnight veil was torn from my face. Torn away by a man that could not possibly have the hands to do it.

I’d seen him lose those hands.

A dull keening fought my heart’s thunderous beating for prominence in my senses. The man’s eyes narrowed in disgust at the sight of me, and he reared back his other hand. A flash of blinding light and a deafening pain nearly drowned out the crack of the vine-staff breaking my left cheek bone. The blow threw me back, away from the dead man, and into the arms of yet more merciless shadows.

“What-?” I breathed, but another set of hands slammed down onto my face and covered my mouth.

“As a soldier, I swore to faithfully execute all that the Captain commanded – and so I fought.” The soldier’s voice echoed in my ears, countless others speaking with him and over him at the same time. The same words, all of them. My heart stuttered in my chest.

“I swore to never desert my service, and so I stood my ground instead.”

No.

“I swore not to seek the avoidance of death for the Roman republic. And so I died,” the First Spear of the Fifth Legion spoke, every word a harder flogging than any vine-staff could deliver. Every word hit harder than the last, because I recognized them. I knew them. I had received them, personally, three thousand times before.

The sacramentum militare.

“These oaths we swore to you, and not once did we stray.” The first spear reared back his boot while the men of his cohort pressed and pulled me down. “But what of you?”

The senior-most centurion of the Fifth Legion buried his boot in my gut and flung me back. I rolled and gagged, vomiting blood on the ashen earth-

Ashen.

I heaved and looked up and around me, at a field of rolling hills and broken shields. I looked further up, at the roiling black clouds of heaven above, and saw they weren’t clouds at all. They were crows. Thousands upon thousands of them, wheeling through the skies and cawing ravenously.

In the distance, I heard the howling of wolves.

“What of the captain?” A different dead man asked. A whip cracked against my back and tore the raven’s midnight cloak along with the flesh beneath it. I grunted, lurching forward. “What of Roma’s favored son? What of your vows?”

A boy’s voice rose above the rest.

My voice.

“This soldier swears that he shall faithfully execute all that the General commands,” I heard myself swear, less than a decade and more than a lifetime ago. The whip cracked a second time, striking the back of my head and flinging me to the dirt. The men of the Fifth spat on my back and pressed me down.

When I managed to raise my head again, I found myself in what remained of the General’s tent. It was nothing but a ring of broken stakes and mangled scraps of tent cloth now. The cot was in pieces, the sand table overturned in the mud. All that remained intact was a humble wooden chest. The chest that the General sat while about his business.

“Have you done as he commanded?” The Fifth Legion’s senior logistico, the wise man of war that Gaius had taken from his own favored legion to guide me, twisted my ear and wrenched my head to the side. “Did you listen?”

Fight. Fight until the last man falls.

“I-“

“Be silent.”

The dead man flung me out of the tent and I landed in the sea. The water was colder than any mediterranean sea could be. The shock of it stole my breath from my lungs, made my body’s instincts betray me and gasp for air where there was only salt water. I choked and kicked at the hands yanking at my heels. I reached, precariously, breaking through the water and catching the wood of a ship’s rail. I pulled myself up, even as fingers dug and clawed at my fingertips and sought to pry them from the rail.

“This soldier swears that he shall never desert the service.”

Coughing up seawater and heaving for breath, I looked upon the battered deck of all that remained of Rome’s navy. A shattered mast and a sail ruined by blades and arrowheads. All around, for spans and spans in every direction, Roman warships groaned and sank beneath the waves. No matter where I looked, there was no land to be seen. Nothing to be heard but the cawing of crows above, and the distant howling of wolves.

“Have you moved on?” The magister of waves asked me, perched atop his last sinking ship’s broken mast. He had a hand ballista cradled propped up on his thigh. The tip of its bolt was leveled at my heart. “Or are you still a legion man?”

“I’m-“

The string released and I lunged sideways. The ballista’s bolt punched struck the flesh beneath my left shoulder instead of my heart. I tumbled back over the edge of the ship, bleeding freely.

I landed in the mud. The howling of wolves wasn’t distant anymore.

“This soldier swears that he shall not seek to avoid death for the Roman republic!”

The sacramentum militare was a holy Roman oath. Beneath the light of raging heaven, it bound the man to the legion. If ever broken, it rendered him sacer – given to the gods.

Thy heart and soul for Rome.

I raised my head.

The Fifth Legion stared accusingly back at me.

Scattered and broken, their throats torn out and their armor cratered into their own broken bodies. The dead and the dying. The victims of my one and only campaign. Some of them had no eyes left at all, but I felt their glares regardless.

“Captain of Salt and Ash,” a guttural, growling voice tore through the howling and the chatter of crows. “Have you avoided your righteous end?”

I shouted and surged up, planting my feet and struggling to rise. My fingers dug into the mud and found the haft of my spear. I strained with everything I had to bring it up.

“You owe your men a death,” the Carthaginian hound spoke. Lectured me.

“I intend to pay them,” I said furiously, left arm trembling as I forced it up while the hands of a dozen armored legionaries sought to press it down.

“Come then. Stand, if you can. Kill me, if you can. It won’t matter in the end – not in this place.”

I seethed. “In here, out there, it doesn’t matter. I’ll kill you twice.” I lunged.

I fell.

“You owe your men a proper death.” The dog of heaven stalked away while the men of the Fifth piled onto me one-by-one. Weighing me down and pressing my face into the mud.

“Why!?” I thrashed, abandoning my attempts to rise and focusing all of my efforts, all that remained, on holding on to my spear. “The enemy is there! Punish me when the dogs are dead. Try me in the courthouse of their broken city, condemn me overtop their corpses! Our work isn’t done!” If I had a weapon, I could still fight. If I drew another breath, I could still fight. If-

The first spear took my weapon in hand and tore it from my grasp.

“Our,” he repeated. His scorn made my skin crawl. “Our. As if you’re one of us. As if you’re the Captain that we called you. As if you’re any Roman at all.”

The soldiers that had helped raise me took me by the shoulders and threw me up against a wall of charred brick. It cracked and fell apart, infirm already, and I tumbled through the rubble.

Around me, the city of Rome burned.

“‘I am Roman,’” one of five thin-strip tribunes hissed in my ear, the young officer slamming a knife through the back of my knee while I struggled to rise. I bit down on an agonized sound and put my weight on the other leg.

“‘And I am Greek.’” A second thin-stripe finished the quote, hammering his own dagger into the back of my other knee. Both men, junior officers that were nonetheless years my seniors, twisted their knives and condemned me in synchronicity.

“I am both of those things,” I said, my voice raw with pain and heated weakness. “I am both, but I am Roman first! First, before, and above all else!”

“You are nothing. You are no one.”

I bared my teeth and called upon the captain’s virtue-

And saw stars. Stars and fallen statuary. Bricks, shards of painted clay, the remains of fallen columns – a build had collapsed overtop of my head. I struggled to clench my fist, even so.

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Gravita-

Knees and elbows and unforgiving fists.

“Your father was a good man,” a veteran legionary lamented, forcing my head down. I recognized his voice, picked it out of the hundred others speaking the same words overtop of it. His name was Calvus. He’d served in the same cohort as my father, before my father became the Fifth’s captain.

“Your uncle was a great man,” Gaius’ senior logistico mourned, forcing the length of a whip between my teeth when I tried to bite through the fingers holding me down. Bridling me like a horse.

“You are neither of those men,” the first spear condemned me, as frank as he had ever been. He knelt and met my glare with wrathful disappointment. “And you are neither of those things. You can play along, that’s true enough. The Greeks taught you well, and you studied Caesar close enough to act the part that he assigned you. But you aren’t a captain. You aren’t one of ours. You never were, and even now you can’t recognize it – because the East has overtaken the portion of your soul that could.”

It was a struggle to speak around the whip. I tried. He shook his head and gave me the vine-staff again.

“We respected your father. We believed in Caesar. But we loved you.”

My eyes went wide.

“And what did we receive for our love?”

“You swore to execute the General’s commands,” a young man whispered, nearly as young as me. His eyes were torn out and the flesh of his mangled throat parted like half-opened curtains every time he inhaled and exhaled. “You swore. So why did you stop fighting!?”

“I didn’t,” I said hoarsely. He spat at me.

“You swore to never desert the service,” another snapped. “Yet here you are, entire worlds away. Sailing further east every day!”

“I have to get stronger.”