“Uncle? Where have you been? I expectedyou’d be here when I woke up.”
“I would have been if I could,” I answered,taking a stool and sitting down next to him, drawing a deep breath.It was clear that he had not been told, which was a good thing asfar as I was concerned.
“Gaius, first I want to make sure you’re allright. What did the physician say?”
Gaius laughed, wincing at the stab of painit must have caused him.
“That I have a head as hard as yours.Nothing’s broken, I just had a good bump on the head, and there wasa gash this long.” He held his fingers about three inches apart.“It had to be sewn up. Otherwise, I’m fine.”
He searched my face, knowing that somethingwas amiss.
“But you have news of your own, don’t you? Ican see it in your face.”
I nodded slowly, trying to frame what I wasgoing to say. Finally, I plunged in, knowing there was no way tosoften the blow.
“Scribonius is dead.”
His face was already pale, but it turnedeven whiter as his jaw dropped.
“What? How?”
I quietly explained the story I had toldPrimus, and while it pained me to lie to Gaius, I knew that what Iwas doing was for his own good. He listened intently, asked a fewquestions that a military man would ask before lying back on hiscot, staring up at the tent ceiling. Nothing was said for sometime, and I am afraid I must have dozed off, since my next memoryis of getting quite a start when Gaius reached out to place hishand on my arm.
“I’m sorry, Uncle,” my nephew said, his eyeswide and glistening. “I know how good a friend he was to you, andhe was a great man. He was the best man I knew, next to you.”
“No, he was better,” I replied, and that iswhat I believe to this day.
Sextus Scribonius is the greatest man I haveever known, greater even than Gaius Julius Caesar, at least in myeyes. I remained there for a while longer, then left him so we bothcould get some rest. I knew that we would be marching the next day,and I needed to get some sleep while I could.
As promised, we only spent one day in campbefore resuming the march. I had managed to get some rest the daybefore, yet I still felt drained when we set out, another sign thatI was getting too old for my job. It was common immediately after abattle that the men would be in a more somber mood, and this daywas no exception, without the usual chattering and singing thatmarked the miles of the march on a normal day. I believe that itwas also due to the realization by the men that there would befighting ahead; before the battle two days before they had beenlulled into the sense that this was nothing more than a trainingmarch. Now it was very, very real, which was actually a good thing,because the men were also more alert, no longer complaining abouthaving to wear their armor. While the 13th had been busyhonoring their dead and recovering from battle, the cavalry hadremained busy, one of the disadvantages of being in that part ofthe army, since they had suffered losses as well. However, I neededto know that we had completely dispersed the confederation of thethree Thracian tribes, along with the location of the other armythat had been spotted in our path ahead a few days before.Concerning the former, I was happy to learn that, by all reports,the small groups of surviving Thracians were streaming back totheir respective lands with seemingly no interest in reforming totry to avenge their defeat. By sending out detachments no smallerthan fifty men, in many cases. they were able to run thesestragglers down and put them to the sword to make sure that theydid not ever cause us mischief again. At the end of the first dayback on the march, one of the advance scouting parties returned toreport that the blocking Thracian force had presumably learned ofour victory because they had reversed course and appeared to beheading back to Serdica, now less than two day’s march away. Thiswas somewhat unsettling news, since I had no way of knowing whetherthe garrison of Serdica had been stripped to augment or create thisThracian army. For all I knew, there could have been ten thousandmen in Serdica that this force, now estimated to be about eightthousand men, would combine with and make taking the city extremelydifficult. When I tried to discuss this with Marcus Primus, he wasdismissive, seemingly recovered from his fit of nerves of just acouple of days before.
“It doesn’t matter,” he sniffed. “Whateverfaces us, we will sweep aside.”
That was easy for him to say, since thechances of Marcus Primus leading the army in an attack on Serdicawas about as likely as Caesar rising from the dead, perhaps evenless so. I pulled Masala aside.
“Try to talk some sense into the Praetor,” Itold him. “He needs to be prepared that things aren’t going to beas easy as he thinks.”
Primus’ aide nodded grimly, but I could tellthat he held no real hope of being successful. Shortly beforemidday, two days later, our vanguard caught their first sight ofSerdica, sending word back to the command group. I trotted Ocelusforward, accompanied by the Praetor, Masala, and the rest of theTribunes. Topping yet another of what seemed to be a never-endingseries of low mountains, I pulled up short next to the Centurion incommand of the vanguard, my breath catching in my throat. I
