He knew what he awaited—knew in his mind, wherever the dust the smartest Greek of the day said it was housed in the body—but did not trust his eyes, his ears, his soul, in this accursed damp land where snow cakes the unsleeping trees of mountaintop and northland in summer. This was a tireless land he sensed. Doubts crept upon him now that Virtius, Felix, Whoreson Plutus and Aptus were hours gone; up the road from the sea and deeper into whatever crap this restless land had to offer the interloper.

Sure, in his mind, in that tactical place that would soon be vacated by his agonizing shade he knew what came: five tall, hairy, fur-clad, long-haired face-painted bastards and their nasty little priestess, the one that sliced Hasti from ear to ear.

Should he just drive for her and avenge his brother in blood and sweat?

“No,” he mouthed to himself, feeling doubt creep over him like night’s shroud. “That is the fool’s bait.”

Should he kill the biggest bastards as Felix would do?

“Felix could get away with that,” he whispered to himself.

Should he think like Virtius, and just cleave them all, leaving five wounded unable to march? Did he have that kind of discipline?

“Hah, no Centurian am I,” he hissed between cracked lips.

Should he try to dance among them like Aptus serving up the best stroke for each piece of human business?

“Of course not, you have a broken leg,” he cackled deep in his throat, still hoarse from cheering on the tossed head of Plutarch yesterday as their brutal priesthood irreverently beseeched Neptune in his angry depths.

He heard them now, tramping up the way in his boot treads, coming along raggedly as undisciplined marchers do, not like a Son of the Legions.

They were about two bowshots to his right where the road bent around a large carved stone, where he had stopped to take a piss with the others. He had only moments of life left and he intended to sell it at the highest price he could possibly demand.

He heard a clang of steel, a loud crunch, more ringing steel and a shout, followed by grunts and cries, a choking gasp and a terrible cleaving crunch that sounded like that time Felix split that German auxiliary from shoulder to hip in that brawl over the Iberian whore…

A woman gasped, ran, and gasped some more. He could hear her labored breath from this distance, just as a fallen branch snapped under a large foot. Then came her shriek of terror.

Not a thing stirred in the snow-covered mist-hung wood of oddly grown evergreens. No, a woman panted, a woman moaned with fright and groaned of her own conquest. Branches broke, a woman moaned and groaned. A beast snarled. A woman sobbed and shrieked hysterically—the same woman, but somehow different—then she screeched in agony and ribs snapped and lungs popped on a stake or great spear.

Silence covered the wood, and if Virgil had any piss left he would have let it go then.

A panting came, punctuating the muffled steps of some great thing—a bear perhaps—if bears they had in this sea-spunk land. The panting was not that of a man but—a dog?

The muffled crunch of snow came louder now and the source of the noise came into view—and as it did so, the snow came again, snow that had not fallen for the day and the night of their maddened march up from the sea after the witch that never rested, that ever fled with snow falling in her wake. Now the snow came again, heavy alpine snow fallowing a mere day up from the sea a month before the harvest.

As the man and his pet came into view he felt his hand quiver, the rattle of his gladius on scutum betraying his fear. The man that walked toward him, as though he would walk through him, was unnaturally tall and broad and of barbaric aspect—looking more German than Breton or Gaul, but armed with a heavy sword strapped to his back. By his side strode a wolf, a wolf that was easily the size of a war mastiff, but seemed like a mangy sheepdog next to its hulking master, whose banded head of greasy black hair failed to soften the deep scowling black brows and the icy eyes beneath. In the giant’s hand was the long-haired head of another of his kind, a skull half again as broad as Felix’s block head.

“Oh fuck me with Neptune’s trident!”

“Come on you big bastard—come and get it!”

The man never slowed, just loomed closer, bigger, more baleful. The wolf by his side had the manner of a timid pet, skittish and apprehensive.

Come and get it you big bastard!” roared Virgil, wishing he could advance but unable to. He measured the giant for a gut stab as he walked on, loping jaunting along on his huge fur-strapped feet as if there were more wolf in him then the beast by his side.

Virgil braced his shield against his shoulder not wanting his wrist to get snapped when that big sword came out to shiver against its face. The giant did not draw his sword with his right as one would expect, but swung the head by the hair in his left hand over his head and brought it down in a descending arc. Virgil lifted his shield as if for the turtle formation and took the blow well, though it shivered his leg so that the very marrow in the broken bone lit on fire.

Virgil now stabbed upward with his gladius and a thunderbolt stroke his shield. He felt his shoulder separate even a as his wrist snapped and his elbow failed. He was now on his back, ruined arm and staved in shield laying dead-like out to his left as he attempted to sit up and stab the big man in the balls.

The wrist of his sword arm was now held in a hand so massive that it could have been a maul. Virgil felt both of the bones in his forearm bend painfully and then snap with a resounding groan that came up from his very guts. The giant looked into his eyes with peepers that reflected the impersonal ire of the alpine sky in deep winter.

All he had left was his spit—but a curse first. As Virgil was being dragged to his feet in an eye lock trance with the giant he snarled, “Fuck off you big bastard!”

He then began drawing up a mighty wad of mucus, blood, and saliva from his cold-parched throat and bleeding gums to hurl in the face of this monstrosity—and it inhaled mightily.

Virgil’s mouth was half open in the attitude of gathering insulting bodily fluid when the giant leaned forward as the wolf whined doglike and pathetic, and inhaled through pursed lips that seemed gray as the sky. The snow that was falling round Virgil’s shoulders and about the giant’s broad breast was drawn into the gray-eyed man’s mouth with the sound of a bellows. And so too was drawn his breath, torn from his lungs with such vicious suction that his chest burned as if he breathed fire itself.

The world offered no life for this husk made of mud. The sky gave up no breath for this effigy in the hand of god as it bobbed along dangling from its armored harness—its segmented turtle shell proof against man but not against what rules the ages.

The dog whined beneath it as it wondered emptily at its fate. No mechanism remained to it for the filling of its cavity, for the quickening of its blood, for the pointless resumption of its pained creaking existence.

It kneeled before the carved stone where it and its fellow automatons had so recently—in the dawn of a passed world—drained their filtration sacks.

The stone itself was festooned with the longhaired heads of the picture-faced effigies who had hunted them like sticks lurching along in the mud until the price for desecration came due. Above the carved stone a reproductive effigy that had once screeched terribly over a toothless man and groaned awfully under a soulless one was impaled on the broken branch of a tree that had once swayed in the wind of a different age.

The great hand of god tugged on its helmet reverently. With a song of shining stone he achieved separation and rose to meet her in her horrid fixed-eyed glory as the dog lapped up his memories as they fell away below…