2.9

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

In the end, we didn’t turn the ship around.

There were practical reasons. The whirlpool that had nearly sunk us, for one. I thought I had the trick of navigating it now, having watched the solar barge, but that ship had been moving with the current. Even if Griffon, Selene, and I all added our full strength to the effort, I wasn’t sure the Eos would be able to do it while fighting against the Nile.

Beaching the ship and marching back the way we’d come had its own problems. Leaving a vessel as fine as the Eos unattended was all but begging the Fates to see it stolen. It was too heavy for the men to carry it with us over land – a year from now, with the proper training, maybe. But not as they were. Beyond that, I had seen with my own eyes the sort of beasts that lurked along this river. I wouldn’t leave my men to guard the ship in my stead, not even if all ten of them together stayed back to do it.

Those reasons alone would have been enough for any sensible man, without adding on the fact that Griffon and I remembered nothing of what had taken place between the shores of Alexandria and deep veins of the Nile river. We hadn’t even remembered Alexandria was our intended destination until Selene reminded us of it. Even then, it was only a place in our minds. The motivations to go there were gone.

It was all lost, hidden somewhere beneath the surface of the sea that was our souls. A flower of a phrase, but I hadn’t been able to disagree when Griffon spoke it out loud. The words fit. Selene hadn’t teased him over it either, only peered at him with a strange expression.

We didn’t know where to look, and even if we did, we were too far down the river now to turn back without giving up our ship. All of those things were reason enough, and all of them combined would have been worth less to me than the wooden coin in my pocket if that had been the end of it.

Like him or loathe him, Lync was a part of our crew. The foul-mouthed pirate child was too young to be a legion man, and because of that I hadn’t recruited him the way I recruited the other ten, but he was a part of us. The same way I had been part of my father’s legion, when I first came to them as a boy. If it had to be done, I would swim through the whirlpool myself to see the boy safe. If it had to be done, I would hitch myself to the Eos like a mule, and drag her through the riverbank all the way back to sea – and heaven help whatever creature tried to stop me.

I didn’t need to do those things, though. Because I knew the boy was alive, and I knew he was not alone.

“The eagle cried its dim defiance, and it took the boy up in its talons. It took flight from the crow’s nest and fled north. It was followed, but you, Captain, and you, Flame, you two lit up like the dawn, burning, clearing out a way…”

Sorea had saved the boy in my stead, and would stay with him until the danger had passed. I knew it, though I didn’t know how I knew, and in that same way, I knew that Sorea still lived to see it done.

It wasn’t the same certainty that I felt about the men under my command. The night sky might be large enough to take no notice of a single absent star, but I was not nearly so vast. I was as aware of the men of the Fifth Legion as I was the fingers of my hands, and I knew from past experience that I’d feel their absence just as keenly.

What I felt for the eagle that had followed me from Rome was not that. It was more than just my own hopes, but a different shade than pure gut feeling. The only reason I knew it was there at all was that I didn’t feel it for Scythas, nor for Jason, not for Anastasia or the Flame. I did feel it for Atlas, that would-be warhorse I had ridden from the Orphic House. That discovery had led me to ask Griffon if he felt the same awareness of his pure white mare, Kronia. He did.

It was enough to keep me in the boat, if only just. In the hours that followed, I probed that vague awareness like it was a loose tooth stuck in my mouth. Griffon hadn’t known any more than me about the feeling, and he clearly took that as a personal insult. We both knew the virtuous beasts we’d marked as our own were alive and well, but we didn’t know how we knew that. We didn’t know where they were or what connected us to them.

We lacked context. It was a familiar frustration by now.

A good man once told me that uncertainty killed more soldiers than any sword or spear. If there ever was a thing that I didn’t understand, I owed it to my superior officer to ask him about it. If he didn’t know, then he owed it to the man above him to swallow his pride and ask. No matter how many laurels a man wore on his brow, no matter how many triumphs had been celebrated in his name, there wasn’t a soldier under the sun who wouldn’t die if he fell on uncertainty’s blade.

Years later, beneath the canopy of a legion captain’s command tent, I had asked that same man what I was to do with my uncertainty, now that there were no men above me left to ask. His answer was succinct.

“You ask your oldest spear, sir.”

So I spoke to my new men of the Fifth. I settled them back onto their benches, put their oars back in their hands, and I spoke to them of myriad things as we flew along the river Nile. I asked them questions. Questions about themselves, about their circumstances, about the places they had come from and the people they had known. I asked them, with some regret, about the terms of their enslavement. I asked them what they knew. I asked them if they would teach me. I asked them questions I would have never dared to ask my father’s men, for fear that I would lose their faith in me as their captain.

I asked, and I listened, and I buried deep my pride. It was the uncertainty that killed a legion.

I spoke to my men, and we sailed, racing against the sun.

The heartland of Aegyptus had been an arid desert, once. The Republic’s oldest records spoke of a corpse kingdom long past its prime, the land’s shifting dunes and sun-baked stones its tomb. Greek civilization had been old long before Rome staked its claim on the seat of Seven Hills, but the golden age of god-blooded pharaohs had been a distant memory long before the first Greek Hero was born. What remained of the great nation could hardly be called an echo.

Perhaps it had been that way, back in the earliest days of the Republic, but at some point things had changed. I had seen it with my own eyes, marching down the golden road that Gaius paved for all his legions on campaign. Four years ago, I had come to Egypt expecting a desert waste, and instead I had found a thriving wonder. We flew through it now, on the Eagle River’s wings. Lush green jungles as far as the eye could see.

The river ran rapid through the heartlands of Aegyptus, both the channel and the veins. Wherever a thread of Nile water flowed, the green growth was doubled. More than one legion man had remarked with dark humor that there were almost as many beasts of virtue on the Nile banks as there were in a legion brothel. The creatures were all twice and twice again too large, too dauntless, too hungry.

Every serpent carried a bit of dragon in its blood, and every stork a bit of golden eagle. The thicker the river vein, the stronger the wildlife grew. A hippopotamus was dangerous enough on its own, but the hulking bulls that swam about the Nile’s heart veins could break a war elephant’s spine with their teeth, or simply drown the beast in shallow waters.

And then there were the crocodiles.

The men were still too tense to appreciate the sights, and that was a shame, but that meant they were also too tense to worry about what we shared the river with. It was better that way. Let them dedicate their bodies to rowing and their minds to answering my questions. Let the outside world wait until we’d escaped to a thinner river vein. The Nile was a winding river, and I knew from my time on campaign that it had as many offshoots as the Black Forest had roots.

Griffon and Selene were not nearly as preoccupied. I found them both equally enthralled when I finished my rounds and rejoined them at the front of the ship. An idle thought struck me as I watched them drink in the sight of something they’d only heard stories of before – the Titan Flame had been lazy when he molded these two from clay. Born of different fathers, I had seen identical twins that didn’t look as similar as they did in their wonder.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“It makes sense,” Selene was insisting when I approached, leaning with her arms crossed on the ship’s rail, next to the wood-carved figurehead of a curious woman. “In fact, it makes more sense than all of your ideas – all of them put together, maybe!”

“Ho? Then where is the foam, sister?”

The only sign of her consternation was a faint flush of red.

“Scattered, I should think.”

“You should think, and yet here you are instead-“

While they jabbed at one another as siblings did, I pulled an ivory lie in the shape of a bench from the dark place where ravens kept their baubles. I set the bench down just behind them, angled to catch the setting sun. It cast no shadow of its own, frail fiction that it was, but I did. At the angle I’d placed it, my shadow covered the entire bench. And when I sat down on it, the bench held me – sturdy, like it had been carved from horn. I let them bicker on a moment longer while I settled myself, pulling a mermaid bone and a celestial bronze spear from my raven’s place. I’d kept half an ear on every conversation on deck while I made my rounds, so I knew what they were arguing about.

“Four years ago, in the spring, I marched down that riverbank with Gaius’ Fifth Legion.” I finally spoke up, and pointed. “During that time, the river flowed as all rivers do – into the sea. When we left the Old Kingdom and marched back west, two seasons had passed, and the river had started to flow in reverse.”

“Why?” Selene asked, eagerly. Griffon looked on with clear interest.

They wanted a concrete answer, but I only had hearsay and a sickly gut instinct. “None of the natives could tell us for certain what had caused it, but they weren’t surprised it had happened. It was a phenomena they’d seen before. A good omen, they said.”

“Praise to him whose throne is Right and Truth. Repent and give your thanks, soldier of the west. The new Pharoah will be strong!”

“Barbarians and their superstition,” Griffon mused, cheek propped up on a closed fist. The disdain was still there, but there was a thoughtful undertone to it.