Chương 122: 1.95 [Sacrament of Salt and Ash]

Son of Rome Wrathful hands seized me by the neck. They gripped fistfuls of hair that I had allowed to grow far too long, palmed my face, hauled on the white cloth of my chiton and dug their fingers into the gaps between my skin and the beaten bronze breastplate given to me by the Gadfly. My own shadow took me in its hands, and it dragged me down. Down, into the depths. Down, to my knees. Fight. Until the last man falls.

I planted my right hand flat against the ground, a finger's width all that separated my knees from the earth. The veins in my arm bulged from the strain. The shadowed hands that had pulled me down shifted their grip, settling on my shoulders and pressing. I dug my fingers into the dirt, snarling my effort.

"I am a raven," I said, accepting the head rush of an ideal faithfully followed and inhaling sharply as my midnight cloak roiled and pressed up against the grasping hands. I took that strength, the Greek exceptionalism within my soul, and I flooded my body with it. Muscles flexed. I rose - but glacially slow. Too slow. My eyes narrowed.

"And I am an unkindness-""I am a soldier." My knees slammed to the ground. The midnight veil was torn from my face. Torn away by a man that could not possibly have the hands to do it. I'd seen him lose those hands. A dull keening fought my heart's thunderous beating for prominence in my senses. The man's eyes narrowed in disgust at the sight of me, and he reared back his other hand. A flash of blinding light and a deafening pain nearly drowned out the crack of the vine-staff breaking my left cheek bone.

The blow threw me back, away from the dead man, and into the arms of yet more merciless shadows.

"What-?" I breathed, but another set of hands slammed down onto my face and covered my mouth.

"As a soldier, I swore to faithfully execute all that the Captain commanded - and so I fought." The soldier's voice echoed in my ears, countless others speaking with him and over him at the same time. The same words, all of them. My heart stuttered in my chest.

"I swore to never desert my service, and so I stood my ground instead." No.

"I swore not to seek the avoidance of death for the Roman republic. And so I died," the First Spear of the Fifth Legion spoke, every word a harder flogging than any vine-staff could deliver. Every word hit harder than the last, because I recognized them. I knew them. I had received them, personally, three thousand times before. The sacramentum militare.

"These oaths we swore to you, and not once did we stray." The first spear reared back his boot while the men of his cohort pressed and pulled me down.

"But what of you?" The senior-most centurion of the Fifth Legion buried his boot in my gut and flung me back. I rolled and gagged, vomiting blood on the ashen earth- Ashen. I heaved and looked up and around me, at a field of rolling hills and broken shields. I looked further up, at the roiling black clouds of heaven above, and saw they weren't clouds at all. They were crows. Thousands upon thousands of them, wheeling through the skies and cawing ravenously. In the distance, I heard the howling of wolves.

"What of the captain?" A different dead man asked. A whip cracked against my back and tore the raven's midnight cloak along with the flesh beneath it. I grunted, lurching forward.

"What of Roma's favored son? What of your vows?" A boy's voice rose above the rest. My voice.

"This soldier swears that he shall faithfully execute all that the General commands," I heard myself swear, less than a decade and more than a lifetime ago. The whip cracked a second time, striking the back of my head and flinging me to the dirt. The men of the Fifth spat on my back and pressed me down. When I managed to raise my head again, I found myself in what remained of the General's tent. It was nothing but a ring of broken stakes and mangled scraps of tent cloth now.

The cot was in pieces, the sand table overturned in the mud. All that remained intact was a humble wooden chest. The chest that the General sat while about his business.

"Have you done as he commanded?" The Fifth Legion's senior logistico, the wise man of war that Gaius had taken from his own favored legion to guide me, twisted my ear and wrenched my head to the side.

"Did you listen?" Fight. Fight until the last man falls.

"I-""Be silent." The dead man flung me out of the tent and I landed in the sea. The water was colder than any mediterranean sea could be. The shock of it stole my breath from my lungs, made my body's instincts betray me and gasp for air where there was only salt water. I choked and kicked at the hands yanking at my heels. I reached, precariously, breaking through the water and catching the wood of a ship's rail.

I pulled myself up, even as fingers dug and clawed at my fingertips and sought to pry them from the rail.

"This soldier swears that he shall never desert the service." Coughing up seawater and heaving for breath, I looked upon the battered deck of all that remained of Rome's navy. A shattered mast and a sail ruined by blades and arrowheads. All around, for spans and spans in every direction, Roman warships groaned and sank beneath the waves. No matter where I looked, there was no land to be seen. Nothing to be heard but the cawing of crows above, and the distant howling of wolves.

"Have you moved on?" The magister of waves asked me, perched atop his last sinking ship's broken mast. He had a hand ballista cradled propped up on his thigh. The tip of its bolt was leveled at my heart.

"Or are you still a legion man?"

"I'm-" The string released and I lunged sideways. The ballista's bolt punched struck the flesh beneath my left shoulder instead of my heart. I tumbled back over the edge of the ship, bleeding freely. I landed in the mud. The howling of wolves wasn't distant anymore.

"This soldier swears that he shall not seek to avoid death for the Roman republic!" The sacramentum militare was a holy Roman oath. Beneath the light of raging heaven, it bound the man to the legion. If ever broken, it rendered him sacer - given to the gods. Thy heart and soul for Rome. I raised my head. The Fifth Legion stared accusingly back at me. Scattered and broken, their throats torn out and their armor cratered into their own broken bodies. The dead and the dying. The victims of my one and only campaign.

Some of them had no eyes left at all, but I felt their glares regardless.

"Captain of Salt and Ash," a guttural, growling voice tore through the howling and the chatter of crows.

"Have you avoided your righteous end?" I shouted and surged up, planting my feet and struggling to rise. My fingers dug into the mud and found the haft of my spear. I strained with everything I had to bring it up.

"You owe your men a death," the Carthaginian hound spoke. Lectured me.

"I intend to pay them," I said furiously, left arm trembling as I forced it up while the hands of a dozen armored legionaries sought to press it down.

"Come then. Stand, if you can. Kill me, if you can. It won't matter in the end - not in this place." I seethed.

"In here, out there, it doesn't matter. I'll kill you twice." I lunged. I fell.

"You owe your men a proper death." The dog of heaven stalked away while the men of the Fifth piled onto me one-by-one. Weighing me down and pressing my face into the mud.

"Why!?" I thrashed, abandoning my attempts to rise and focusing all of my efforts, all that remained, on holding on to my spear.

"The enemy is there! Punish me when the dogs are dead. Try me in the courthouse of their broken city, condemn me overtop their corpses! Our work isn't done!" If I had a weapon, I could still fight. If I drew another breath, I could still fight. If- The first spear took my weapon in hand and tore it from my grasp.

"Our," he repeated. His scorn made my skin crawl.

"Our. As if you're one of us. As if you're the Captain that we called you. As if you're any Roman at all." The soldiers that had helped raise me took me by the shoulders and threw me up against a wall of charred brick. It cracked and fell apart, infirm already, and I tumbled through the rubble. Around me, the city of Rome burned."' I am Roman,'" one of five thin-strip tribunes hissed in my ear, the young officer slamming a knife through the back of my knee while I struggled to rise.

I bit down on an agonized sound and put my weight on the other leg."' And I am Greek.'" A second thin-stripe finished the quote, hammering his own dagger into the back of my other knee. Both men, junior officers that were nonetheless years my seniors, twisted their knives and condemned me in synchronicity.

"I am both of those things," I said, my voice raw with pain and heated weakness.

"I am both, but I am Roman first! First, before, and above all else!"

"You are nothing. You are no one." I bared my teeth and called upon the captain's virtue- And saw stars. Stars and fallen statuary. Bricks, shards of painted clay, the remains of fallen columns - a build had collapsed overtop of my head. I struggled to clench my fist, even so. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Gravita- Knees and elbows and unforgiving fists.

"Your father was a good man," a veteran legionary lamented, forcing my head down. I recognized his voice, picked it out of the hundred others speaking the same words overtop of it. His name was Calvus. He'd served in the same cohort as my father, before my father became the Fifth's captain.

"Your uncle was a great man," Gaius' senior logistico mourned, forcing the length of a whip between my teeth when I tried to bite through the fingers holding me down. Bridling me like a horse.

"You are neither of those men," the first spear condemned me, as frank as he had ever been. He knelt and met my glare with wrathful disappointment.

"And you are neither of those things. You can play along, that's true enough. The Greeks taught you well, and you studied Caesar close enough to act the part that he assigned you. But you aren't a captain. You aren't one of ours. You never were, and even now you can't recognize it - because the East has overtaken the portion of your soul that could." It was a struggle to speak around the whip. I tried. He shook his head and gave me the vine-staff again.

"We respected your father. We believed in Caesar. But we loved you." My eyes went wide.

"And what did we receive for our love?"

"You swore to execute the General's commands," a young man whispered, nearly as young as me. His eyes were torn out and the flesh of his mangled throat parted like half-opened curtains every time he inhaled and exhaled.

"You swore. So why did you stop fighting!?"

"I didn't," I said hoarsely. He spat at me.

"You swore to never desert the service," another snapped.

"Yet here you are, entire worlds away. Sailing further east every day!"

"I have to get stronger."

"In the Greek way," the First Spear spoke disdainfully, and stomped the middle of my back, forcing me back down.

"Where Caesar and all his legions failed, you alone will triumph. You alone are worth more than Roma and all of her legions."

"No!" I pounded my fists against the broken cobble streets.

"That isn't what I'm saying-!"

"It's what you mean." A strain was building in my spine.

"In Greece or in Thracia, wherever your barbarians take you, a captain may be something else. But in Roma, a captain gives more than he takes!" The first spear slammed his vine-staff over my back, and the men of his cohort roared their approval.

"You strut through the East while your soldiers rot in salted fields and have the audacity to brag about having led them! As if you earned that honor! As if it were yours!" The man that had saved Caesar's life personally on the battlefield struck me again with his martial instrument. The man that had earned the epitaph Virgus, the Staff, struck me with the implement of his discipline.

Sextius Baculus, the First Spear that had struggled the most of any man to make up for my lack as Captain of the Fifth Legion, struck me a fourth and final time - and broke his vine-staff over my back.

"You think you can be a better Greek than you were a Roman? By all means, show us." They waited while I gagged and wheezed. When I finally managed to suck in a breath, I could barely manage a word.

"How?"

"How does any Greek begin their journey? Any cultivator at all?" Three thousand hands laid themselves upon my shoulders, and then three thousand more.

"Stand," the Fifth Legion commanded me, pressing down with all their might. I struggled and strained worthlessly. I couldn't even raise my knees from the rubble. They threw me through toppled buildings and fountains of ash-tainted water. I rolled to a stop in the middle of the Forum. Before the Twelve Tables, or what remained of them.

"Stand under your own power!" Six thousand hands clamped down again, pressing, pushing, crushing. I screamed my effort to the crow-blackened skies and pushed back with everything I had. I rose a fraction, a hairsbreadth, before the strain in my spine turned to searing pain and my knees slammed back to the earth.

"We bolstered you," the Fifth thundered, in my ears and all the world around me.

"From the day your father died until the day we left to join him, you stood under our power. You took from us, and all we had we gave to you!" I howled until my voice cracked and broke apart. I dug my fingers and toes through stone in search of purchase, tore the nails from them as I scrabbled and strained for leverage. At an unspoken signal, all three thousand of them drove my head through the cobbled stones and then heaved me up, into the air, before driving me back down.

"You swore you'd die for Rome's republic, yet here you are. Alive."

"Until the work is done," I rasped, delirious with pain.

"The work-""There is no work! There is no Rome any longer - you failed! You lost!"

"Even so-"" STAND."

"I can't." I clenched my eyes stubbornly against the building heat. I whispered the words hoarsely, like a prayer. We don't weep until the battle is won.

"You can't. You couldn't. You never will." Three thousand dead men slammed a gladius hilt-first into the rubble so that its gleaming blade pointed to heaven. The metal was polished and gleaming. Unmarred by war. Untested and untempered. No. Not yet.

"You reaped the rewards of your father's service without any of his efforts," the man that had served in my father's first cohort judged me.

"You stood on our shoulders and called yourself our captain. Made us carry your weight, while we languished with our own."

"No longer. It's your turn to bear it." The Fifth Legion pulled me to my feet one last time. The gladius' blade gleamed beneath me.

"You're going to carry that weight." The weight of three thousand worlds fell upon my shoulders all at once, and I went blind from the pain. I felt the ground crack, brick crumbling to dust beneath my heels. My knees shook, and the agony in my spine doubled. Redoubled again. I felt something crack inside of me, hairline fractures running along the pneumatic channels forged by the Rein-Holder's marrow.

"All you've ever done is fall," the legion that raised me spoke, each of them as one. With a synchronicity that I could not match, because I was no part of them anymore - if I'd ever been at all.

"If that's all there is to you, then fall. If you can't stand like a Captain, then the least you can do is fall like one."

"No," I groaned, straining beneath the weight of three thousand broken soldiers.

"You want to be Roman? You want to be ours? Then be what you claim to be! Be a Captain, for once and never again! What does a Captain do when he loses his legion!?" They pressed me down further. A finger's length at a time. Their hands pressed and their fingers clawed at whatever they could grasp. I resisted with all that I had, and then more after that. Not yet. They howled and raged. Rome fell.

"If not in life, then in death - die. Die a Captain's death!" Not until the work was done.

"FALL ON YOUR SWORD." Light bloomed in the darkness of the fallen city. The crows above cried out and screamed as their wings were burnt and their frail bodies broken, their fragile flesh fried by lightning currents. Scavengers plummeted from the sky. Griffon lunged up from my shadow and grabbed me by the shoulders. The mutilated shadows of the Fifth reached out for him, and he struck them down with twice as many searing hands.

Some of them burned, some of them crackled with fierce lightning, but every pankration hand glowed.

"Arrogant mongrel corpses. Don't touch my brother." The Scarlet Son of Alikos kicked the captain's gladius out of the rubble and spat phlegm into the Fifth Legion's eyes before pulling me back down into my shadow. Then up and out of it. We emerged from the shadows and delirium, in the Orphic House once more. I sagged, head falling back limply as darkness encroached from every corner- Griffon slapped me hard across the face.

"Are you out of your mind?" he demanded wrathfully, tearing the midnight veil from his face and glaring furiously into my eyes." Demons within. Were the ones that tore down your city not enough for you?" I moved my lips, but I didn't have the strength to give the words the breath required. He snarled and shook me by the shoulders, before turning and throwing me up against a wagon-wood support beam. It cracked and groaned, bending dangerously.

"Have you forgotten what we came here to do? Have you forgotten what lies ahead?" He gripped me by the chin, his pneuma blazing through the uninhabited Orphic House. His pankration hands seized benches and chairs and tore them apart, tossed them at the walls and up into the rafters in his fury.

"You can't afford indecision anymore! You have to choose, Sol."

"Choose?" I rasped, struggling to stand. Under my own power, for once in my life. My limbs felt heavier than they ever had before. The weight on my shoulders was more punishing now than I could ever remember it being.

"You've stood stagnant since the day your legion fell," Griffon said, scarlet eyes boring into mine.

"The path ahead is forked and you've wasted a year of your life trying to walk both roads. You have to pick one. I don't care which it is anymore. Be a Roman if you're a Roman. Be a Greek if you're a Greek. But pick one! Pick one path and walk it! Show me conviction!" Griffon all thirty of his pankration hands and banished the shadows from the Orphic House.

"Show me Sol!" I admired the men that raised me, each of them for different things. My father for his pure and unshakeable tenacity. Aristotle for his wisdom and his way with spoken words. Gaius for the weight he carried on his shoulders, always, like it wasn't there at all. But no matter how many times I'd tried to deny it since that night a year ago, the truth of it remained. No one had ever inspired me like Griffon could.

We forced open the horn gates of the Orphic House and staggered out into the frigid winter air, our breath clouding like steam as it left our mouths. Griffon abruptly stopped before the first wooden step, and I planted the tip of my celestial spear in the wood to halt my own momentum, straining against the weight on my shoulders and the infirmity of my wounds. Griffon stared down the steps in disbelief." What." Three horses we had given to the Thracian gatekeepers in exchange for admittance to their holy house.

One horse had been offered to the earth. The docile mare that I'd originally picked out, before passing her on to Selene and then Scythas, lay dead in the snow with a bleeding axe wound in her neck. A second sacrifice had been attempted after that. It had failed. The black stallion and Griffon's white mare stood over the crumpled corpses of the Thracian gatekeepers, each of their muzzles drenched with human blood.

As we watched, aghast, Griffon's slender runner dipped her head and took a dainty bite out of the Thracian woman's thigh. The cause of the woman's death was impossible to miss, her skull split open like an overripe fruit and its contents scattered across the snow-covered steps. The man's cause of death was as apparent - there was a crater in his chest, his ribs broken and curling away from a central point of trauma like the limbs of a spider.

The culprit behind both deaths raised his black head from the man's corpse, bone cracking between his teeth as the stallion chewed. He had an axe wound on his left flank, near his neck, but it didn't seem to bother him much. Wrathful golden eyes met mine, brighter than they had been before we entered the Orphic House. He snorted, and the steam that rose from his nostrils and mouth was thicker than what came from ours. I felt the heat from the top of the steps.

"Griffon," I spoke, my voice like shifting gravel.

"Remind me how an animal refines itself." Slowly, the Scarlet Son began to smile.

"The same way we do," he said, stepping down the first step. His bright white runner whinnied softly, eyes burning with a curious anticipation that reminded me of Sorea." They eat." He leapt off the steps and his mare bolted. At the same moment, the stallion reared up on two legs, lashing out with monstrous strength at the airborne Greek. My bronze spear struck the stallion in his side. It staggered him just long enough for Griffon to shoot past, whooping in glee to match the starlight mare's spirited whinnying.

The midnight warhorse recovered in the beat of a single moment and screamed a challenge up the steps at me.

I placed one foot on the stairs and immediately fell through them.

"Your name is Atlas," I declared, prying the rickety wooden boards up and tossing them aside. Steam seethed through the stallion's teeth at my presumption. I advanced through the snow, one painful step at a time.

"You and I are going to bring raging heaven down on the city of Carthage." The midnight charger tossed his head and dug furrows through the frozen earth. A refusal if I had ever seen one. I inhaled slowly.

"I wasn't asking." Atlas charged, and I moved to meet him.