The centurion walked the ranks, murmuring quiet words to individual men, inspecting patched and improvised uniforms – and their weapons. In return for other favours, mostly labour by burly legionaries, the local smith had eventually turned out a variety of weapons, including a decent steel gladio and pugio and pilum for most of the men. Many of them had helmets too now, simple steel bowls with a lip to protect their necks and cheeks. Few had body armour, though many wore a subarmilis, a heavy quilted undergarment designed to help with the load of a breastplate. The folk of the ayllu had done all this out of sight of the Inca’s inspectors, treating it as a kind of game, a way to get back at the overbearing tax collectors. The legionaries hid as much as they could in the open. They even had a big rock water tank, that they surreptitiously used to sharpen their swords.
Quintus came to Orgilius. The man had been a signifier, a century standard-bearer, but now given a field promotion by Quintus to aquilifer, bearer of the whole legion’s eagle standard, in the absence of the rest of the Legio XC Victrix anywhere in this reality. Indeed Quintus had hired a particularly skilled local metalworker to make for them a reasonable facsimile of the old standard, given the legion by a grateful Emperor Veronius Optatus seven centuries before. It seemed a suitable reward for Orgilius, one of the more intelligent of the legionaries, who had picked up the Quechua tongue readily and made friendships with local people, even with a few of the officials and military types who visited the ayllu. He had become a source of information upon which Quintus increasingly relied. Yes, Orgilius deserved his new honour – even if it was all Quintus had to give him.
And pride surged in Mardina’s own heart, as she waited in the ranks for the centurion to come to her.
She had spoken to the centurion long ago about her own thwarted military ambitions, on the other side of the jonbar hinge, her dream of joining the Brikanti Navy. But the recruiting of ‘barbarians’, as Quintus put it, into the Roman army had a long tradition. So, in the weeks since Inguill had come to call and the century had prepared for battle, the centurion had given her a lowly field commission. The tribunes had allowed her to join in the legionaries’ training routines – the physical exercises, the construction work, the fighting with wooden spears and knives. She enjoyed joining with crowds of men in the battle formations, the square, the wedge, the circle, the tortoise. In practice, in the end, Quintus had found her more useful as a quality check on the work he was having done quietly around the village. To the local people she wasn’t as threatening a presence as the average burly legionary.
She was even put on the payroll of the imperial army, and the salary due her, nine hundred sesterces a year, was duly recorded – to be paid, she was solemnly assured, when the legion finally returned to Terra and its collegia, less tax, punishment deductions and replacement equipment costs.
Now Quintus stepped back from the ranks, and looked over his men, and up at the standard above all their heads. This bright morning, with the century drawn up in a glittering array under the light of the Inti windows, Mardina thought that at last there could be no more self-deception about the meaning of all this. The century was a military unit, and it was ready for the march.
In proud Latin Quintus declared, ‘Well, if I was a sentimental man, and if I didn’t know you were a bunch of lazy, bed-hopping, wine-swilling slackers, I’d say you made a pretty sight for the eye, men, even under the mother’s milk that passes for daylight in this tub of a world – you are Romans! And proud of it! And I’m proud of you!’
That was the cue for the first cheer, which Titus Valerius led, raising his stump of an arm, and Mardina joined in with the rest. But Mardina noticed that Titus kept one eye on the sky; she knew they had timed this parade for the intervals between the overflights of the vacuum-eating Condors, the Incas’ spies in the sky, and if one showed up unexpectedly they would break up the display quickly.
‘We’ve a challenge ahead of us now,’ Quintus said now, ‘the like of which no Roman has faced before.’ He pointed west. ‘Probably a month’s march through this jungle, longer if the Sapa Inca spots us on the move and tries to do something about it.’ Laughter. ‘Then we face an unknown ocean, an ocean that spans the waist of the world … Pah. We’ll swim it. And then on to the hub, to Hanan Cuzco, where we’ll face down the Sapa Inca himself and his decadent hordes, and we’ll carve out a destiny that nobody who lives in this rolling barrel will ever forget!’
If that was vague, it was purposefully so, Mardina knew, because the whole strategy was vague, the more so the further out you looked. To get to Mars/Illapa: that was the only clearly defined goal. The rest was going to have to be improvised, hopefully with the help of the quipucamayoc. But the centurion was rewarded with another cheer even so.
‘Now before we start,’ Quintus said, ‘and I know very well it’s not New Year’s Day, I want us to remember who we are and what we are. No matter how far from home we are bound to the Emperor and the Empire. And we will say the sacramentum together. Titus Valerius, lead us.’
The big warrior, who had been rehearsing this, stepped forward and boomed out the words of the soldiers’ oath: ‘We swear by God and Jesu, and by the majesty of the Emperor who second to God is to be loved and worshipped by humanity …’
The legionaries repeated the ancient words, as they were used to doing every New Year.
‘… that we will do strenuously all that the Emperor commands, will never desert the service, nor refuse to die for the Roman state …’
The voices of the legionaries made a cavernous rumble. And when they were done they yelled and waved their gladios in the air.
Clodia Valeria ran out of the crowd of watching civilians, and hugged her father. There were catcalls at this, but Titus hugged his daughter back with his one good arm. And he exchanged a dark glance with Quintus, a glance Mardina understood, for Clodia had her own difficult duty to perform before this mission was through, as indeed did Mardina.
With the ceremony done the parade broke up, and the men formed up into a column for marching.
The legionaries themselves, laden with their cloaks and packs, would go ahead two by two, the standard-bearer leading the column, scouts probing the countryside. A rough baggage train formed behind. This included some of the wives the legionaries had taken from the ayllu – and one mother with a very young Roman-Inca baby. Michael the medicus walked here, with Chu Yuen and his burden at one side, and Clodia Valeria at the other. Then came some of the mitimacs who had volunteered to assist the march, carpenters, cobblers, cooks – and then a train of yanakunas, slaves used as bearers of baggage.
Mardina was surprised so many of the mitimacs, the ordinary taxpayers of the ayllu, had been prepared to come along. Well, most of their time and labour was their own to use as they pleased, and many, it turned out, had never travelled far from their home, either towards the eastern hub in one direction or the ocean in the other. Some, especially the young, were excited by the idea of joining this adventure, even if it was ill understood. In fact, Mardina suspected, some of them probably believed that this highly organised expedition led by the commanding Quintus Fabius was a fulfilment of a portion of their mit’a obligations.
When they were ready the scouts led the column out of the ayllu, to cheers, ribald whistles, even a scattering of applause. At first little children from the ayllu ran alongside, shouting and waving, and in the excitement even some of the tamer guinea pigs ran around, wondering what all the fuss was about. But the parents called their offspring back before the head of the column reached the fringe of the hacha hacha. Here the trumpets sounded, and soon anti guides materialised out of the forest, their blue-painted faces seeming to hover in the green gloom.