To Portensia, the sister (part I)

Beloved Sister,

This letter I write in haste and in exhaustion. I have not slept for days, so forgive me if my words lack their usual lucidity.

By now father will have apprised you of the report I sent to the Senate. However it is but half the tale.

We marched from Secracium on the 25th day of July. The garrison evacuated the town behind us, as I recommended. I took two dozen men with me, and twice as many horses, and headed back to Mediolanum with the greatest possible haste. I left Marcus with the rest of the men, who joined by the Secracium garrison, were marching back on foot.

Perhaps my place, as their commander, was with my men. But my duty to Rome was greater than any such attachment—Marcus Domina reminded me of this, when forgetful of my duty, I suggested he take a correspondence to Trivarius while I returned with the men. Centurion Domina has been with me since my 16th year, ever since father sent him to me during that campaign under Tiberius in Hispanica. Although father thinks it was just a case of momentary boyish sentimentality, I have never regretted freeing Marcus. His loyalty to our family has only grown since then. Never has his advice to me rung false, and I cannot count the times, when headless of his own skin, he has jumped into the fray to save the life of a fellow legionary. Myself, I owe him my life several times over, and yet he has never seen it fit to mention this, nor has he ever tried to use our familiarity to aggrandize himself.

When he was nominated as Centurion, it was his own merits which recommended him, not I. He is the only Centurion I know of who is a freedman, not a Roman citizen born. But even the native sons respect him, and though his ginger hair marks him as one of Gaulish blood, they wrap their arms around him and love him as a brother.

It is only this love and loyalty which he commands, which allows me to send this note to you. For at this moment I am stripped of all rank and office and am a prisoner of V Macedonica. It is likely I will be executed when this campaign is complete. Perhaps these will be the last words you will have from me sister.

Know that while I have not seen you these many years on the frontier, you are always foremost in my heart and in my thoughts. Know also that the things you will hear me accused of are lies. Your brother was loyal to the Eagle till the end.

Even when you were still a young girl, old Seleucus, observing your inquisitiveness and your prodigious memory, told father that you would one day make him obsolete as major-domus. So it surprises me not at all that you have become father’s greatest confidant. But in this matter I beg you to keep your own counsel. And I ask you to exercise your talents now; read this missive and memorize all that is pertinent in it, and then destroy it. For once you have read it, you will understand why it represents a grave danger to your person, and why you must not allow there to be any suspicion that communication between us has occurred.

I regret that I must place you in such circumstances, but I could not reach out to father as he is watched constantly. Furthermore, I believe his inflexible faith in the Senate, which was merely a source of boyhood frustration in the past, could prove fatal to our family now. Were he to hear this tale, he would think me insane, or addled by some apothecary’s tonic. He would beg mercy for me, and in doing so would reveal that he had knowledge of the events here, and thus would seal the fate of our family.

I am alive now only because I am thought to be completely isolated. Should my captor know I have gotten word out, he will not hesitate to put an end to me, regardless of the consequences.

Of how I arrived in these circumstances you will be curious:

I arrived back at Mediolanum on 13th day of August. Though I was exhausted from the ride, I went to Consul’s palace and requested an immediate audience. This I was granted, but the Trivarius did not see me alone. When I entered the Consul’s audience chamber he was already conferring with a man.

I felt my report was of a nature delicate enough to demand privacy but the Consul declined to dismiss his visitor. “This is Cyriacus Avitus, Quaestor and representative of the Senate,” He said to me with a frown. “This man can be trusted to hear anything you have to report, because in any case I would have to provide him with the information, for he has been appointed as Inquisitor over us for the duration of this campaign.”

The Consul was clearly not pleased with this nanny that the Senate had sent to watch over us, but he was courteous to the man. And by his manner it was made clear to me that I would have the opportunity to talk to him alone later.

After I delivered my report to Trivarius, essentially repeating what I had already written, I counseled him to hold camp until we had further instruction from the Senate.

To this Trivarius replied, “I have already received orders from the Senate. We are to march to Noviomagus immediately.”

“I protest Consul, you cannot do this!” I exclaimed, for I had seen the nature of the beasts. And I knew our legions, accustomed to fighting human adversaries, would have no chance against them.

The Quaestor had been silent up until this point, but now he spoke up. “It is not your place to protest Tribune. It is for you to listen and obey. If you have difficulty with this, I’m sure the Senate can find a suitable citizen to replace you. Do not think that your name makes you untouchable.”

I was about to open my mouth to say something in my defense, but I was beaten to it by Trivarius who sprang to my aid, “Enough Cyriacus! This man has served Rome loyally for the better part of a decade. And you should know that his reputation amongst the men is predicated on his abilities, not his name—old and revered though that may be. You may be Inquisitor, but I am still Consul, so you will be civil to my men, or you can head back to Rome and make your complaints there.”

The Quaestor was wisely silent then. Trivarius has not been in Rome for several years, but I’m told he is still much loved by the Senate and the people. The Quaestor was not so foolish a man as to make an enemy of him.

I looked closely at the Quaestor for the first time then. He was nothing remarkable to look at, somewhat thin, but not painfully so. But there was something a little strange about the way he carried himself. I could not put my finger on it at first, but later I realized what it had been that disturbed me about him. The man hardly blinked, and his gaze fixed for unnaturally long periods of time on a single spot, as a lizard might when watching an insect on a leaf. When he addressed me, he looked at me not as though he were watching me, but as though he was focusing on something far behind me, as though I was transparent and irrelevant.

I wished I had taken greater note of his unnatural demeanor then, but of course I had no reason to at that point.

Later, after the Quaestor had left us the Consul and I conferred in private. The Consul said to me, “Scipio, you must know that your tale is hardly believable. The details are so outlandish that it is easier to believe that you had intoxicated yourself, than to say you spoke the truth.”

I was about to defend the veracity of my story, but the Consul held up his hand to give me pause, and continued, “You needn’t say anything Cornelius. Even if I did not believe your missives to the Senate, which I do since I have never known you to indulge in drunkenness, there are things I have seen in the last few days, which only make sense if your tale is true.”

The Consul then told me of the strange escort that had arrived with the Quaestor. The man had not arrived with just his bodyguards, but had brought an entire cohort of legionaries with him. What business did a mere Quaestor have, traveling with 6 centuries, almost 500 men! But that was not the only strange thing. According to the Consul, the Quaestor’s men were not conventional legionaries. And the next day I went by the drill grounds outside Mediolanum where they were being garrisoned to see this for myself.

First they were not Romans. They were mostly swarthy Syrians and Nubians, and they seemed to have been selected for their great size and strength. Most of them stood at least a head higher than our own men.

Then there was the matter of their strange kit. None of the Quaestor’s men wore armor, and not one had a gladius or a pilum. They carried strange bulky gear, which on a battlefield, would have insured their slaughter at the hands of any decently armed human foe.

Some of them carried huge unwieldy wooden mallets, each with a single six-inch iron spike embedded on its head. The mallets were so large and heavy that it would be a challenge to heft them over the shoulder, much less swing them in battle. Something so large could not be used in a fight, because your opponent could just nimbly step aside as you struggled to heft the thing to deliver a blow.

Others carried long thick wooden poles that at first glance looked like spears, but on closer examination I found had loops of stout cord or wire where a spearhead would be.

The only weapons that looked even remotely practical were the huge curved scimitars that some of the larger Nubians carried. But even these should have been somewhat smaller to make them more effective. No opponent would sit still while his large adversary leisurely wound up to deliver a blow with these great blades. Any legionary worth his salt would dart in with his gladius and gut the man wielding such a weapon, as he hefted the blade for its first swing.

But I knew there must be some method to this madness, for as I watched, the Quaestor’s men went through a series of most puzzling drills, the significance of which escaped me completely at the time.

A week after my arrival, Centurion Domina returned with the First Century, and the Secracium garrison in tow. Their journey had been uneventful except for a brief encounter where they had surprised some Gauls who were looting an abandoned village. Marcus was reluctant to delay and so had given the bandits swift deaths instead of the customary crucification that is prescribed for such crimes.

When I discussed the matter of the Quaestor’s cohort with Marcus, he was as puzzled as I was. But after seeing the men drill for himself, he came to a startling conclusion. “Young master, these men are clearly armed and trained to kill the beasts we saw in Noviomagus.”

“But how can this be?” I asked the Centurion. “For I had heard nothing us such enemies until I saw them with my own eyes. And if the Senate knew of them, then why would they send us uninformed into such danger? Why would they abandon II Augusta to such a fate had they known? It makes no sense.”

“And yet young master, you cannot deny it. Why is the Quaestor here with such strangely armed men? These weapons, they were not made to kill men, so we must assume they are designed to kill something else. And we have seen just recently, what else on this earth needs killing, is this not so Tribune?”

I had to agree with Centurion Domina’s assessment, for nothing else made sense, but it disturbed me in no small way that I had been left in the dark with regards to so weighty a matter, while someone like the Quaestor had been entrusted with the knowledge. I wondered then who in Rome knew about these creatures. Our family is clearly not amongst those privy to this secret, regardless of our prominence and stature. I know that Father or Seleucus would have informed me had they had any inkling of such things, so it must be that they know nothing.

A cohort cannot be armed and trained within our borders without the Senate’s knowledge. But if the Senate knows, then how is it that Father does not? Is he no longer a man of standing? One whose influence and support is sought out by those that serve the Empire? Has his influence waned so much that matters of such import are conducted under his nose without his knowledge?

And what of Seleucus? There was a time when our major-domus had spies in every great house in the city. A pot could crack in the house of the Julii, and a little bird would whisper that it was so in our Greek’s ear, well before even the matron of that house knew she was one vessel shy. I have lost confidence in him if a conspiracy so grand could go on, and not a word of it reach his ears.

Sister, I trust only you now. You must find the truth of these matters. Our family cannot be left ignorant any longer while the fate of the empire lies in the balance. I will tell you more now, to press upon you the urgency of your task.

A few days after Marcus had returned, all of V Macedonica marched out of Mediolanum, heading north once again for Noviomagus. Our progress this time was much slower than my journey the month before, for 6000 men, and the supplies needed to sustain them, cannot move as swiftly as a mounted century. But it was no matter. This time our mission was not to investigate with haste, but to reclaim our territory.

I for one was eager to return. Despite the confidence shown in me by the Consul, and the obvious corroboration by the Quaestor, I could not help but feel that many of the men and officers of the legion were still of the opinion that my men and I had hallucinated the entire events of the previous few weeks. That we had brought back no concrete proof, a beast’s corpse for instance, was held against us.

There were whispers amongst some of the men of the other centuries, about how the First had cracked. Many of those that passed on such gossip should have known better, as the First Century had always been the spearhead of V Macedonica. We carried the legion’s standard in battle, and it was no accident that we were entrusted with this task.

When we finally left Mediolanum I was as apprehensive as any of the men around me, but in a way I hoped we would see the beasts again. If for no other reason than to vindicate myself and my men.

It took us a month and a half to reach Noviomagus. By then the days were already growing short, and the nights were cold enough to require a thick woolen cloak for warmth. On the way we stopped at Secracium, and found the town had been looted after the garrison had abandoned it. But the signs showed that it had been human looters, nothing more.

When we reached the edge of Noviomagus, Trivarius sent me ahead with a few men to reconnoiter the city’s boundary. Again, on the north side of the town, I found the strange spoor of the beasts, but the trail seemed old.

We prepared a camp on the outskirts of the town in the typical Roman fashion. Trivarius has always been cautious, and though some Consuls are apt to dispense with either the ditch or palisade, Trivarius always insisted his men construct both. So our camp was by the book; both encircled by a man deep ditch, and surrounded by a man-high palisade topped with sharpened wooden stakes. As an added precaution the Consul also put one cohort to work building towers at each corner of the camp. By his instructions they were to be erected to the height of four man-lengths—no mean feat to accomplish considering that timber, so near to Noviomagus, was hard to come by. I wondered if it was not wiser to simply enter the city and fortify ourselves there, perhaps in the old Consul’s mansion, which from my earlier visit, I knew to be almost entirely intact.

But Trivarius, for whatever reason, was reluctant to enter the city until he had gotten some sort of verification either way—that we had been hallucinating, or that our story was true and the beasts were real.

Trivarius sent scouts out in all directions, with instructions to look for the distinctive mounds of the beasts which I had described in my report. But none were found even though we sent men as far as a half-day ride from camp.

Meanwhile the Quaestor sent a scout of his own out--a lanky Nubian, who rode a small wiry brown horse, and who was naked except for a ragged wolf skin that he draped over his shoulder. The man was unarmed, but carried a belt of small pouches around his waist. Out with a scouting party one morning I saw him near a small copse engaged in a very strange activity. He was removing small pieces of fabric or vellum from his pouch, licking them and rubbing them against various trees and rocks. Then he would examine the strips, as though they had something to tell him.

Though we approached and hailed him, he ignored us, and was off again, trotting off purposefully on his small strange steed, as though he had picked up some trail. But I dismounted at the spot he had been, and saw no sign of any trail. I would have thought the Nubian was a madman, except that every evening the Quaestor consulted with him eagerly, as though he expected vital intelligence from the man at any moment. The Quaestor was much less interested in what I or the other scouts of the legion had to report, and as often as not, he excused himself from the evening meetings where the Consul would hear our reports.

Finally on our third day on the outskirts of Noviomagus, the Consul finally lost patience and taking an escort entered the town. I accompanied him and took him by the shortest route, directly to where we had found the mound of corpses a month earlier.

But there were no corpses there this time! The square was completely clear, save for the broken mortar and other debris which remain scattered about as before. Trivarius looked hard at me then, and I could see that even though I had earned his trust through my years of service under him, that his faith in me was being sorely tried by the absence of what I had assured him would be conclusive proof of the veracity of my report.

After that the whispers in the camp grew to a crescendo. Men in other centuries openly laughed at my men. And I could not blame them, for I began to doubt myself what I had seen before.

I have heard of the dancers of Crete, who after making offerings to Apollo together drink a concoction of diverse herbs. And afterwards they claim to have danced with the god himself, and this story is corroborated by all who have drunk the potion, but none but them--a hallucination in concert, known only to be so by the observations of sober outsiders.

Could my men and I have been the victims of some such hallucination, a dream we fantasized as one?

On the forth day Trivarius told me to stay in camp, ostensibly to take a rest, but he sent other scouts out. From Marcus I heard that these ones were given orders to ride north in search of signs of the Visigoths. So it appeared to me that the Consul had lost faith in my story entirely, and was now searching for an entirely human explanation for the devastation of Noviomagus.

On the fifth day I was again asked to take a day of rest. By now I was certain that barring a reappearance of the beasts, the consul was likely to remove me from my commission. And I could not blame him. The legion could ill afford to have irrational or hysterical men amongst its officers, and from what had been observed thus far, I was rightly judged to be so.

But every morning the lanky naked Nubian rode out on his small brown horse. Day after day, he left at dawn and returned by dusk to confer with the Quaestor. And the Quaestor’s cohort continued to train in their strange way, with their strange arms.

I wondered what the consul must make of this strange display, which unfolded daily in the field outside the camp. I must admit, it was the only thing which kept me from doubting my own sanity. For as Marcus had said to me before, these arms and these men had only one clear purpose. And no one raises a cohort to fight hallucinations.

On the thirteenth day after our arrival at Noviomagus, my prayers were answered. The Nubian returned at midday instead of at dusk, as had been his custom. From my tent I observed him ride directly to the officer’s tents where the Quaestor was billeted. This was done in direct violation of the camp’s protocol; no man may ride within the palisade but the Consul. That has always been the legion’s tradition. But observing the man’s urgency, and long accustomed to his strange ways, the guards on duty let him pass while still mounted.

After what must have been a very short conference, the Quaestor emerged from his tent and hurried to the Consul’s, which was at the center of the camp. Moments later the Consul emerged, and the entire legion was ordered to ready itself for march.

Immediately the camp became a flurry of activity as men emerged from their tents to put on their armor and sandals. Here and there Centurions called to their men to form up. And our cavalry alae were already mounting and heading out behind the Nubian, most likely to scout the route the legion would take—Trivarius never marched into the unknown, and the cavalry were his eyes.

When we left the camp all the men left with us, save the 4th cohort which remained in camp to guard our supplies. Trivarius also had Marcus and the First Century stay behind. I thought I would be given the same orders, to remain behind with my men, but it was not so. Trivarius ordered me to ride beside him as we left the camp. Marcus saluted me as I passed out of the gate, and I could see that it was enough for him that I was being allowed to accompany the legion, even if the First was still on probation.

As for the Quaestor’s cohort, they were marching with a purpose, and behind them rolled three large ox-drawn wains, each carrying a collection of large earthen pots.

By dusk we reached our destination, a non-descript field like any other scattered across the province, save that this field had a rich crop of mounds, just as had the field from that nightmare day a month before. Only this time it would not be a nightmare for us, for I had with me an entire legion.

But if I had imagined some sort of heroic lining up of legionaries against the beasts, it was not to be. For when we reached the field, the Quaestor approached the Consul.

“Consul Trivarius, I ask that you allow my men to deal with this…this situation. It will go easier if we are allowed to work, without other men’s panic to deal with.” He said.

If the Consul was insulted by this implication of his men’s cowardice he did not show it. “By all means Quaestor, by all means. Show us how it is done. And if you cannot do it, then be sure my men will be there to finish it.”

The Quaestor nodded and without a single word further returned to his men.

The day was already drawing to an end, and we had at most an hour of light remaining, but the Quaestor did not provoke a battle immediately. First he sent groups of men to forage for wood amongst the nearby trees, and shouted for our Centurions to ask our men to do the same. In short order the 5000 odd men there had stripped the surrounding countryside of almost everything flammable, be it bush, branch or tree.

Everything was thrown onto the field, on and amongst the mounds. Then the mighty wains were drawn to the edge of the field, and teams of large Nubians unloaded the huge earthen pots, and broke them upon the piles of wood. It was then that I saw what the pots contained, large quantities of well aged oil.

Finally the stage was set. And the plan was revealed. The Quaestor would roast the beasts alive even before they could emerge to fight us. I cannot say that this cowardly tactic displeased me at all. For having seen the beasts in action before, I had little desire to see how men matched up against them again.

Lighted torches were passed from man to man, and the Quaestor’s cohort surrounded the entire field in a loose line. I observed that the men with various armaments were not segregated, but that each type of soldier was distributed evenly around the field. In the front line stood the men with the noose-tipped poles, and shoulder to shoulder with them were the Nubians armed with scimitars. In the rear ranks stood the men with the giant mallets.

Everything proceeded in an unearthly silence. Typically before a battle the field rings with the curses of men, the sounding of the signal horns, and shouting of the centurions. But on this field every man took his position in silence. The only sound was the ambient noise of thousands of soldiers—the footfalls on soil, the slap of weapon against flesh, the scrapping of pila against leather.

The sun finally went down, and though the night was cold, I could see the sheen of sweat on the bare-chested men taking position in the field. And just behind the ranks of the Quaestor’s men, our own legionaries nervously formed into ranks. From a distance our men’s arms looked small and insignificant when compared to the unwieldy monsters that Quaestor Cyriacus’ men carried.

And then it began.

A signal horn sounded and the men around the field began throwing their torches onto the oil soaked piles of wood. Almost immediately the field became a conflagration. There had been sufficient illumination before from the scattered torches that the men carried, but now the entire field was awash with light, turning the night into day. I was standing perhaps a hundred feet away from the front lines, on a small hillock, accompanying Trivarius and the Quaestor, but even at that distance we could feel the heat of the fire on our faces. Closer the heat was unbearable, and the ranks of men moved back from the field. Some of the long haired Syrians found that their hair had caught fire—their habit of dressing their locks with cooking grease was unfortunate in these circumstances—but the men kept calm, and the few that had taken alight were quickly thrown to the ground by their comrades and the flames on them snuffed out with dirt.

It seemed then that we waited an eternity for something to happen. The fire blazed merrily sending embers heavenward, and the arrival of a stout breeze fanned it to such an extent that the men were forced even further back. I could not imagine anything corporeal bearing the heat, for even bronze and iron turn red hot and soften in such infernos.

Interminable as the wait seemed then, I acknowledge that it must not have been very long in reality. The tension before battle stretches time, of this I am aware.

The men stood motionless at the field’s edge, driven back by the heat of the fire. They gripped their weapons tightly and stared into the blaze, looking for any sign of motion. And at last it came.

At first there was just a minute shifting of the burning wood, indistinguishable from the natural settling of logs as they burn. Then on the north side of the field, a portion of the ground buckled, the soil rising in a paroxysm of hot coals and soil, and there in the midst flames, seemingly untroubled by the heat, a beast emerged.

Beside me I could hear the Consul mouthing a curse under his breath, but the Quaestor spoke up, “There you see Consul Trivarius, the greatest enemy of the Empire, indeed of humankind. Formica Magnus it is called.”

“How is it you name the beast, and yet I have never heard word of these creatures before now?” asked the Consul then.

But the Cyriacus was already gone, spurring his horse down the hillock towards the rear of our lines, and shouting orders over the heads of our legionaries who lay between him and his cohort.

But his men needed no directions, and in one smooth action they went to work. The beast was attempting to take the shortest path out of the fire, but the Quaestor’s men with their strange gear were there to greet it. They rushed at the creature from its flanks and attempted to snag its limbs with the loops of cord at the end of their poles. Most did not succeed in their efforts, and one was disemboweled by a flashing pincer when he got too close, but at least one succeeded. And this was all the other men needed. Its mobility hindered by the weight of a man pulling on one of its limbs, the creature was no longer able to dart with any quickness. Another of its limbs was then snared in the same way, and then soon another. Soon there were three men pulling at the creature in different directions. It still moved, and bull-like in its strength it pulled the men this way and that as it attempted to get free. With its pincer it tried to snap the poles that had ensnared it, but the instruments were so designed to prevent this—the poles were thicker than a man’s arm and shod with iron for a foot or more past the tip.

Still, so great was the strength of the beast that it did succeed in eventually snapping one of the poles. But as it was doing so it had a new problem to deal with.

A large Nubian wielding one of the heavy scimitars charged in, and winding himself to deliver a massive blow, struck one of the ensnared limbs of the beast. The blow was forceful enough to sever a young tree-trunk, and when it struck the creature’s limb we heard the sound on our hillock, a hundred or more feet away, like the cracking of a hard nut shell. The creature limb was sliced cleanly in two, and stream of bright yellow fluid spurted out of the stump, and pooled in the dirt.

The creature then gave out a shrill call, and lunged viciously at its tormentor, but he had already leapt out of reach, and with one limb still ensnared it could not move nearly quick enough to catch him.

The men with poles moved in again, and snagged more of the creature’s limbs. And with gruesome repetition a man with a scimitar would dart in when the creature was sufficiently immobilized, and remove another of its limbs. Until finally the creature could not support its own weight and collapsed in the dirt, lying in pools of its own unnatural fluids.

Only then did a man with one of the mallets leave the lines and approach the beast from the rear. Out of reach of the formican’s formidable pincers, he used huge crushing blows to methodically crush the creature’s torso from the rear. With each massive blow of his weapon, the iron spike on its head would deeply puncture the creatures thick armor, and new gushes of yellow liquid would jet out, as though the fluid had been held at great pressure within the beast’s body.

The last blow was delivered to the smallest segment on the anterior end of the creature--which might have been its head--but by then it was no longer moving.

And across the field other battles were just beginning, but each unfolded in a similar way.

Sometimes the Quaestor’s men would lose. A creature would break free and slay many men before it could be ensnared again, but eventually each was overwhelmed, as the formicans were far outnumbered by Cyriacus’ cohort, even if V Macedonica was not thrown into the mix.

To make matters worse for the Formicans, they seemed to have no coordination amongst them at all. They emerged from their holes one by one, and seemed to fight without direction. The uniformity of action I had witnessed a month before, was completely absent. On this night they fought like mindless beasts, not like the coordinated killers I had seen earlier.

Perhaps it was just the beasts in panic. Perhaps this was how they fought when the odds were against them and their annihilation imminent.

And it was their annihilation that night. One hundred and forty four mounds we had found in that field, in a grid twelve by twelve, just as I had seen in the other field a month before. And by dawn there were one hundred and forty four dead formicans within the circle of soldiers.

Amongst the dead creatures we found over two hundred of our own comrades, some still alive, but all too badly wounded to save. It seemed that in battle against the formicans, you were either unscathed, or you were killed. There was no moderation between extremes, for if the beasts’ terrible pincers found you, nothing could save the limb or body so grasped. And in the midst of battle, losing a limb was as fatal as losing your head, as there was no way to drag a man from that circle of slaughter, to bring him to a surgeon. With the press of bodies so tight around the field of battle, one’s own comrades formed a barrier as impenetrable as stone, and so deep wounds were unfortunately fatal wounds.

The Quaestor’s cohort had born the brunt of the casualties however. V Macedonica had lost only a dozen men. This had occurred when a single formican had succeeded in breaking through the cordon formed by Cyriacus’ men, and had come into contact with our soldiers. Our men were not armed to deal with the beasts, and the century that came into contact with it had hurled their pila at it ineffectively, and then charged in with drawn gladii and raised shields. In an instant the beast was amongst them, breaking their ranks and killing men indiscriminately. Our legionary swords did not have enough mass behind them to penetrate the creature’s thick carapace, and the gladius being a thrusting weapon proved entirely inadequate for the task of slicing through the creature’s limbs. Things would have gone much worse, but units of the formican-killing cohort soon came to our aid and slew the beast, closing the cordon once again.

We took our dead and returned to camp, bearing a single formican corpse in one of our wains. The Quaestor and a small group of men remained behind in the field conducting some examinations whose significance escaped me. With Cyriacus was the naked scout who had led us to the field. The man went from formican corpse to formican corpse examining each closely, as though he expected to find a distinctive one, when it was quite clear to me that they were as indistinguishable as olives in a jar.

On the return journey I heard not a single whisper further about either the First Century or myself. All gossip regarding our cowardice and hallucinations had evaporated.

When we reached our camp we found it littered with corpses. Marcus and my men were nowhere to be seen, and the ground outside the palisade was heavy with formican spoor.

[TO BE CONTINUED]