The diggers work on behind us. When it is over, someone tallies our dead. Sometimes I wonder

what matters most, the deaths or the fact that someone records them. Armies and civil governments are much the same. My Prydn have their own customs regarding death ... my squadrons are thinner, tiring. So many missed Mass yesterday that Drust jeered "Philistines!" at them. Most of them had simply fallen asleep when they had the chance. . . .

Small miseries grown large for lack of relief. Being stiff and sour with damp from sleeping in the rain or mist. Comfort narrowed to dry clothes and a fire when any deadwood found had to be dried out and burned with more smoke than warmth.

A foggy morning, Ambrosius striding down the line of the returning patrol to hail him.

"Patricius, you forgot to report yesterday. How many dead?"

He wanted a number when Padrec remembered faces. "Nine, Tribune."

"Inform Gallius and try to stay regular with your tallies. There'll be a burial detail for the Christians and cremation for the rest."

"No need, sir. Each is barrowed by his own fhain brothers."

Ambrosius cocked an eyebrow at the unfamiliar word. "Barrowed?"

"Interred."

"So that's why I've never seen dead Faerie. Where?"

A vague gesture to the hills around them. "Under the hill. I don't know. One doesn't ask. They are taken away."

"I see. Well, watch for patrols from the fort from now on. We're that close."

More pictures. Sharing the windfall of a chicken with his brothers. No one else in the legion bothered to pay for such things when they passed a trev. The hapless fowl was merely neck-wrung and lugged off, but Prydn

Parke Godwin

paid in silver scrupulously counted out into the astonished owner's hand. It galled Padrec's sense of right: they weren't getting their proper rations. He was losing weight; the sodden clothes hung loose on him. Bad food, a constant state of fear and feral alertness. Where does Gallius send our rations? He and his own men eat well enough. That potbellied bastard, Jesu forgive me, hasn't lost a pennyweight since we marched.

And the incongruous turns of war, like the old army brothel. Until fnty years ago, the imperial roads were busy as the arteries in a man's body, thousands of miles of graded highway dotted with army brothels every twenty miles or so. Gallius' maniple thought it foresight of an admirable breadth. The one Padrec's scouts encountered had been supported by Marchudd's family during the Parisi hegemony. When Rhiwallon reasserted his claim, he saw no reason to close it. That the remaining women were worn as the road did not daunt the maniple. They had only one scruple, which Gallius relayed with relish to Padrec.

"You. Priest. The men have made it clear they want those Faerie of yours kept away from the house. I won't be responsible if you don't."

Padrec lounged against the back of his reclining horse, eating a leek flavored with crumbled salt. The priest rarely rose when Gallius addressed him. Now he didn't even interrupt his lunch.

"No difficulty, Centurion."

"I wouldn't be so casual, holy man," Gallius glared. "They mean it."

Padrec chewed languidly. "We've been there and back. The ladies gave us gifts from their garden. But Prydn's picky in the matter of love. To them the women are unclean."

Gallius brayed at the absurdity. "They're unclean!"

"Very unpleasant smell." Padrec took a noisy bite of the leek. "House, musky perfumes, a clout of scents the men don't trust because they can't recognize them. Dirt. Incense. Cheap wine. God knows what else. It would be

like drinking from a muddy hoofprint. But don't let it deter you, Centurion."

In point of fact, Gallius intended to make lusty use of the house. He felt his taste clearly slighted by this odd priest and wouldn't leave the field without a victory. "I've heard you have one of those Faerie women yourself."

Padrec's eyes slid up to him. He got up, dusting salt crumbs from his hands. "My scouts are waiting."

"Tell me." Gallius' manner became confidential. "What are they like?"

"Pardon me?"

The grin of knowing intimacy became actually repugnant. "You know."

Padrec regarded him gravely. "Do I know? Ah, how can I put it? It is beyond description, but I will try. Last year, far north of the Wall, a black fawn was born that some say held prophecy for those who could read it. Yet I could not. No, truly." Padrec leaned in to the larger man, utterly serious. "And the Egyptian priests of Amon said that while God was a black cow, look you, Isis was definitely not a bull. Do you believe that?"

"What? Of course not. What are you talking about?"

"That is a wise question," Padrec said. "Thank you. Excuse me, my men are waiting."

After the fear was the dampness, never being dry, the plodding on, struggling up hills, slipping and sliding down the other side. The monotonous creak of the heavy-wheeled onagers and catapults, men groaning and cursing as they strained with the oxen to haul the wheels from one mire after another. Sometimes there was good road, more often the paving stones were gone for other building, and the heavy equipment had to muck along snail-pace. More and more, Ambrosius stayed forward with the alae now, sniffing ahead for Coritani. Where are they? Will they hit us now, or wait in the fort?

And then that first godsend victory, more blunder than skill, when the outcome rolled loose like a dropped ball

on a playing field where either side could pounce on it, and Ambrosius did.

Pictures ... the thinning trees before the long, fog-wisped meadow. The whirr of a wet-winged bird from one branch to another, shying Padrec's horse. Be still, you damned fool.

That morning the scouts picked up fresh tracks near this wood. They were very close to the hill fort beyond Wye now, and Ambrosius chose to ride with this patrol: Malgon, Padrec, and forty-odd Prydn of the first squadron under a young man from Reindeer fhain. Ambrosius rode with a pilum in his fist.

"From the other side of that meadow, we can look across the glen straight into the fort when the fog clears. Almost count noses."

He wanted a look at it before committing his force, what new ditches or ramparts, if any, and an estimate of strength. Ambrosius was daring but not rash. The tribune read Caesar in his tent and played chess against himself when he could find no other opponents.

"The sun's burning off the mist," he remarked to Padrec. "Let's get across the open while it'll hide us."

Padrec relayed the order to Malgon, who moved soundlessly up the line. "My men say the Coritani are very close. Closer than the fort."

"How do they know?"

"They feel them."

Hardly conventional, Ambrosius privately felt Faerie instinct a bizarre way to search out an enemy, but he wouldn't argue. Caesar was a rule-flouter and would readily employ any advantage at hand. He gave the command to move out by twos, taking his place ahead with the squadron leader, Padrec and Malgon at the rear. They left the cover of the wood and moved silently along a thicket of blackberry and briar, the ponies shuffling through the soggy meadow grass. In wet like this, they rode with bows unstrung and spent much time straightening warped arrow shafts over a fire. Padrec and Malgon clopped softly out of the wood behind the rest.

Ambrosius by now would be near the other edge, ready to slip into cover on the other side. For no good reason, Padrec glanced toward the white swathes of mist swirling over the meadow south of them, and there were the Coritani horsemen.

In the instant he had to see if all, before the explosion of discovery, it was comic. The Coritani patrol, their groping counterpart, were plodding across the open meadow to enter the wood they'd just left. A little farther apart in thicker mist, they would have passed unseen to compound the ridiculousness. Then someone in that ghostly line saw them and pulled up sharply.

"Look!" And then, redundantly, "There they are."

The astonishment was mutual. Padrec never knew who gave the order, and later it was irrelevant. In the crucial seconds when the two lines gaped at each other, two riders dashed along the Faerie ranks, brandishing pilums, Ambrosius and Drust, his fhain brother, singing out in Prydn:

"Spears, brothers. Spears. We go\"

The men from Reindeer fhain were a touchy lot. Almost all were new fathers away from wives for the first time, worn mean by fear, hunger, and fatigue, just waiting to ignite. Padrec saw the pilums lift and dip forward. Then Drust shot out, spear couched, low behind his Chi-Rho shield, Ambrosius just behind him, roaring to the rest.

"After us! After us!"

The patrol spurred forward in an eager, ragged line. Padrec had no spear, only sword and shield, and in the instant they collided with the unprepared Coritani, he saw the enemy had no spears either. He heard the high-pitched scream of a mortally wounded horse, raised his shield as someone cut at him clumsily with a sword.

The Coritani could not snatch back the lost initiative. They went down like stuffed targets, quite often with their Prydn aggressors, ill-braced in their saddles, on top of them. Then someone hamstrung the beautiful black, the long-ago gift from Cru. The animal stumbled and

pitched Padrec into the grass. Someone kicked him in the ribs. The air bellowed out of him. The blow rolled him over against the agonized, writhing horse, and he blinked up at the tattooed face, saw the sword raise— and freeze, as the pilum thrust outward from the painted body like another arm suddenly grown in the middle of his chest. The man fell sideways, and Drust yanked the pilum from the body.

"Padrec, be hurt?"

"Just kicked."

Drust swooped and grasped him under the arms, dragging him clear of the roil. "Thee must fight," he worried. "Must use thy sword."