He was no longer marching, his feet stuck in mud—no, in his bowels, for they had just run down his legs as the death chill rang within his rattling chest. His eyes had been open and unseeing for the full day now, the sea so far behind one might wonder if there had been one. Had they truly been tossed on unfriendly waves, or had Dust’s Boatman ferried them across the Styx. Through the riot of fever he could hardly tell.

The reeking mess that pooled around his old boots melted the snow and seeped through the leather strapping and warmed his toes at least.

Oh, this is the end. I am sick, lost.

He heard the boots stop slogging through the blizzard, a blizzard no wider than a screaming German bitch could toss a head.

Three paces ahead was Aptus; stoic, quiet, man-butchering Aptus—the best in the Legion. Aptus turned and looked into his eyes, looked down, and raised his hand to Prime Centurian up ahead, making the wiggling bunghole sign which indicated camp fever and the danger of shitting one’s self to death if you caught it as well.

If Felix makes a joke of this I have a chance. If he is serious, I am doomed—we are all doomed in any event; indeed we follow the very Bitch of Doom herself!

With that thought he felt his heart turn to ice, as if an icy hand squeezed it. He felt the chill descend and looked once more at his legs, seeing bloody piss running over his knees.

The hand of Death upon him, and known for what it was, he looked up and saw the world more clearly. The four of them were strung out along the length of a darter’s casting run, three paces separating each. The heavy snow could be seen falling in a line, a head-toss wide; a line that trailed off into the distance along the otherwise green swell of the grassy ridge marking the Bitch of Doom’s path, and ended not ten paces behind Plutus.

We are cursed.

He then looked around as he heard the great dogs whine and saw that it was true. A band of strange clean-faced but long-haired warriors, who bore no swords or shields but hefted great spears, heavy clubs and long-hafted axes stood off at a pilum cast’s distance. If Plutus was feeling good and took a running start, he could perhaps impale one of the dirty bare feet. As it was, he could barely hold his heavy shield-wrecking weapon.

Prime Centurian seemed to be calculating the snowfall and motioned for the loose circle, eyeing Plutus critically, making certain he knew, that—though dying—his duty was his duty. They stepped easily into the circle and the snowfall adjusted, causing the strange hunters with their great hairy hounds, to step back a few paces, the dogs whining in protest.

He recalled then Plutarch, their sissy Greek oracle—the man who he so terribly missed, as with Plutarch along he was not last in strength and honor.

He then blurted, “She has grasped my heart and squeezed. She is Moros—what the Greeks name Doom, the Bitch of Doom.”

Prime Centurian nodded, and ordered wedge formation—close wedge. And immediately, as if drawn by their very bodies, the snowfall fell in a wedge of furious flakes, much heavier than when they stood in the circle. Prime Centurian barked, “Circle,” and they expanded their tiny four man formation, the snow obliging as they did so, and lessening as its radius increased.

I might be the weakest, but I know what a radius is and how to measure it. I should have been in the engineering cohort!

They called Plutus ‘Whoreson’ for the fact that he had been a wharf rat of Ostia playing and stealing along the street where Hasti and Virgil once played, where they had returned one day to patronize his mother, the Whore of Wharf Alley. Pultus was twenty-one and had come to dread his mother’s business—men over all the time as Plutus had to walk the streets. Eventually, when Hasti and Virgil had decided to stay the night he had had enough and struck Hasti, who laughed. Virgil and Hasti had then declared that his mother could stop whoring if he joined the Legions, as his payment could be sent home to her.

That was a long time ago. Hasti and Virgil were dead and his mother, if she lived, was at least comfortable in her tenement.

He blurted in his delirium, “I miss you Mother, I do!”

He was immediately shamed as the damning indictment of his coward heart swept over the muted snowfall.

Aptus hung his head in shame on his behalf.

Prime Centurian could be seen expending much needed reserves of will power to resist the impulse to have him cut out and flogged, for such parade ground niceties where impractical here and now. The tall, dark man with the black shadow beard that grew to his eyes and the heavy lamp-shaped jaw, ground that big mandible rather than do his commonplace duty—for he had bigger problems.

Felix though, strongest man in the Legion, ‘Mad Signifier' of Prime Cohort, who was ever sent into the thick of the fighting, laughed sardonically up into the sky and turned to Plutus, “I miss her too boy!”

They all laughed at that, and somehow the stuff which squirted from his body with every rolling laugh troubled him far less than it had, meaning to him that he would not die dishonorably of the shits and pisses but by an enemy hand. The notion made his soft heart shrink in his chest. But it seemed to pump blood the quicker now that he was engaged in mirth—saved from the womanly hand of Doubt by Felix once again.

Dusk gathered about them as the snow fell.