“Drag this trash from the trail,” he said, stooping to wipe the blade of his sword with fallen leaves. “I won’t have my men offended by the sight of him.”
“What orders follow, sir?” the scout said.
“We continue on. We see if this dog was telling the truth that we might expect the way to our enemy marked with ribbons.” Pulcher turned then and walked back to where the aquilifer stood holding the reins of his horse.
The lead scout, an Umbrian named Nasum by his comrades for his prominent nose, came upon two bands of crimson cloth dangling from a branch that hung above the trail. Two ribbons meant a change in direction. The men they hunted had left the trail. Nasum placed his fingers in his mouth and whistled for the other scouts to join him. When they appeared, he pointed left and right of the trail and the men hared into the bracken to find the new pathway.
A call drew Nasum and the others to the north where a scout stood pointing at a ribbon hanging from the low branch of a cedar. Nasum ordered one of his scouts back to where the two ribbons hung. This man would wait for the column and direct them onto the new track and to the rebels they sought.
The rest of the scouts, led by Nasum, continued on at a trot following the red ribbon trail deeper and deeper into the woods under the midnight shadows cast by the canopy of trees overhead. They could not see the sky but for the occasional beam of sunlight piercing the roof of boughs. And so they could not see the wheeling rings of buzzards high in the sky to the west and growing ever further south of them as they ran after their intended prey.
The ground became too rough and the trees too narrowly spaced for the combined centuries of the two legions to continue in columns. They broke into disparate straggling lines urged on by the curses of their optios. Their pila and shields snagged on branches, and they swam in sweat under their armor. The men at the front used mattocks to clear a path through the undergrowth for the rest to follow. They attended to the whistles and calls of the scouts rushing ahead.
Pulcher took to foot. His aquilifer led both their mounts up a steep incline thick with trees and bracken. All around him was the din of hobnailed boots crashing over the forest floor thick with twigs and needles fallen from the crown of nature above them. They marched like the boar from whom they took their name, unmindful of the noise they made and scornful of any who would oppose them. They were good men, tough men, and eager to redeem the courage lost to the damnable Jew magic that slew so many of their brothers. No one was more eager than the men of the Twenty-third. Pulcher was pleased to see that they had taken the lead on the march. They rushed up the hillside, pulling themselves up using handholds of scrub and pushing off from the boles of trees. They moved like men with a purpose in which they had invested their hearts. Their faces were grim and hard. He could see in their eyes an overwhelming hunger to spill the blood of the rebels who slew their officers and their comrades and shamed them all.
A series of high whistles came from the left of the ragged line of march. A scout came stumbling along the slope to where Pulcher stood.
“Nasum found a better way up, sir!” the man said, gasping for breath.
“Is there sign there? Are we still following the trail left by Critus?” the centurion asked.
“Like a dog in heat, sir. A dry stream, sir. Runs straight to the top. It’s the way the rebels fled, sir,” the man said with head bowed.
The optios were called and the cornicen sent for. The soldiers followed the blasts from the trumpet and moved to the left, eastward, across the gradient following the calls of the scouts. There lay a deep cut in the hillside, a remnant of a seasonal waterway now dry in the late summer months. Broad and floored with river stones, it was as near to a road as the soldiers had seen since leaving camp. They reformed into columns by century and started up the wash at a trot.
Pulcher watched the men moving by in order once again and was gratified. Most pleasing was the sight of the Thirtieth, his own boar-topped banner bobbing overhead, taking the lead now for the crest of the hill.
Nasum knelt on one knee on the scorching gravel and looked about him with narrowed eyes.
He held in his hand a stone rounded by millennia of waters passing over it. Tied about it with a stout knot was a length of red wool cut from a soldier’s skirt. The trail followed up the dry wash to level ground at the top of a mesa. Here the earth had been deeply scored with steep banks above which the thick cedar forest formed a hedge either side.
Buca, a half-Greek, trotted up to him ahead of the first legionnaires reaching the crest far behind.
“I don’t like it, Buca,” Nasum said.
“What is there to like or not like? It is sign. Our quarry lies ahead.” Buca shrugged.
“The coward we found,” Nasum scanned the trees as he spoke “said there had been a battle. We’ve seen no sign of it.”
“Perhaps he lied.”
“And perhaps he cut off his own ear?” Buca tilted his head as a curious dog might.
“And there were wounded, he said. We’ve seen no blood,” Nasum said. “Where is the blood? Some of
