There were near on twenty of the big hairy clean-faced bastards lurking about with their giant gaunt wolfish dogs—a wolf’s worst dream more like. They seemed loathe to approach the snow, as if its very fall described a curse, implied a deathly doom.

Felix stood before him, magnificent in his lion head coif mounting his helmet as if the beast had eaten his head and his scarred muscular face popped out like Mars’ hand-puppet of defiance to scream obscenities at the world. Felix had once been the aquifer, the ‘Eagle Bearer’ of the legion. He had begged though, to be allowed back in the lines, to crash through the breech in the wall at Hill Fort Three, to cleave men, smash enemy shields, but more importantly to be the center of attention when the noise of battle submerged all else to a cipher. Felix was his own sort of god, a challenger to Mars in training.

Felix walked over to him, on his way hurling the four pila in his left hand to Aptus, who caught them like a lictor seizing the sacred axe in bundled sticks that was the scepter of his office. The Mad Signifier then came nose-to-nose with him, placing his hands on his shoulders, and kissing his forehead.

“Do you know how bad this hurts us Plutus?”

He began to answer but started to cry, so choked it back and stood at attention even as his bowels roiled and ran.

“You have always been our lucky boy, the soft smile of First Cohort; the little brother we all left at home; the baby boy we would not get to father until retirement. Even that stone-eyed penis Virtius there he is dying inside over leaving you. Me, Aptus, Hasti, Virgil—bite on this hard point we say. But you, you are our soft spot boy—we don’t want them to have you. But we have sworn to get that bitch and you are done.”

Rise vagina, rise and become a hard penis of war!

Somehow he found his voice, though it cracked. “I want an honorable end Felix. I fear only that I will take none down to Dust with me; will not diminish the enemy on your heels. Please, cast my pilum at least, before you go—then I will stand, like you at Hill Fort Three, in the breech cleaving big chunkers at the knee!”

I almost believe that crap! I shall die a hard man yet!

Felix stepped back, raised both fists to Mars and howled like a wolf in a darkened forest. He then began his mad dance, usually reserved for victory celebrations after the day’s fort had been built.

Plutus looked about at the nervous skin-clad giants with their oversized weapons and their great mangy dogs that whined no more but shrunk back uneasily by their masters’ hips.

Felix then shouted—for this was the pilum game he played with the darters betting the little bastards over spoils that he could outcast their darts with the heavy shield-piercing pilum. That had always been great fun, watching the barbarian auxiliaries in their wolf coifs trying to best Felix in his lion coif as he hurled a weapon the weight of their entire bundle.

The barbarians were entranced, their dogs skittish, Plutus enchanted despite his misery, Virtius glaring impatiently, but Aptus—ever practical, supremely practiced Aptus—noted a fact of concern, by pointing to the great bicep of Felix’s throwing arm, a muscle the size of a child’s head, but for the last three days imbedded with broken links of mail amidst the massive purple-red bruise. Tough as iron-tipped stakes Felix was—the strongest, the craziest—but fearful of the surgeon beyond reason as well. Aptus pointed to the bruised, abraded, festering muscle of the throwing arm where a number of half exposed iron rings were imbedded in the skin and muscle from a blow that would have broken another lesser arm, indeed many a leg.

Felix flashed a glare of rage at Aptus and screamed, “Shit in your eye Perfect Post, every stroke the text of Apollo read by some drill ground Greek war slave!”

He then recalled his real audience and turned on heels pointing at each and every one of the barbarian huntsmen who stood just beyond the snowfall about a pilum cast off for a normal soldier. He then stopped in a crouch, pointed to his own arm and screamed, “You buttholers think the casting arm is ruined—sit in range contempt in your eyes!”

They don’t speak a civilized tongue no doubt—if they speak at all—but surely they understand our madman.

Felix then straightened up, extended his throwing arm, and slowly curled it back in the pose of making a muscle to impress a child or a wine house girl. As the purple-ridged line of veins and the puss-rimmed circles of iron began to start out on the piling muscle he looked at it with rage and screamed, a long lion’s roar of a scream as he squeezed with all his might and the iron rings began to pop out of his flesh!

Felix was ‘off his horse’ now, leaping and cavorting like a nightmare shade, dancing around on his left foot, and then he raised his throwing arm—streaked with blood, puss, and melting snow—and Aptus complied with their years’ old trick. Aptus hurled a pilum in the air so that it would fall butt first, having in fact pre-aimed it so that the point would fall outward facing the target. For all the show in Felix it was Aptus that managed the affair. Felix then leaped in the air from a twisting motion and seized the falling and leveling weapon and hurled it as he came to ground. The heavy weapon was not yet level when his hand cast it with a might grunt and the heavy shaft fish-tailed through the falling snow to rip through the breast bone of one startled giant, sending his dog and the others around him scurrying back down the rise in their lumbering way.

The huntsmen on the other side of the rise had actually edged closer for a look, almost touching the snowfall in their morbid curiosity. Aptus whistled the about face and tossed a pilum—my pilum, mine—straight up, point leveling as it fell in the direction of the curious and Felix sprang to it like a great cat and hurled the falling pilum. The man who was the target saw his doom and made to move, and for his trouble was transfixed through both of his big dirty thighs, flopping and squirming in agony as he dragged himself away down the leftward slope.

There was now only one pilum left, that belonging to Aptus himself, who noted with a curt nod, “The buttholers flee Signifier, a leading cast?”

Felix looked at him with wild fire in his eyes as Plutus thrilled despite his misery, for they were about to do the trick that had caused stoic Vespasian to roar with laughter and declare Felix ‘the very Bastard of Mars’. The big men and great hounds were loping of faster than any legionnaire, indeed any auxiliary, could hope to keep pace, and they were already at range. Felix ran off down the hill in line with the largest beast man of a barbarian, who was lumbering off at about a dart’s distance, and Aptus expertly cast his pilum in a nearly flat trajectory over Felix’s shoulder, who caught it with a bounding lunge and let it loose with a mighty twist that had him pirouette three times on his toes and fall nonetheless from the effort. The cast was so far distant that Felix had time to rise to a knee and see the massive bolt sink with a sickening though distant crunch through the lower ribs of the giant’s back.

As much as Plutus wished to cheer this illusory victory his shout caught in his throat, for the snowfall had followed Felix and thickened about him as if the sky—or perhaps the goddess of this not yet raped land—were particularly angry with the Mad Signifier.

We are cursed, and thereby doomed, and the Prime Centurion knows this, grinding his teeth to powder under his heavy jaw as he chaffs to be off after the sorceress.

Felix walked over to him, took his scutum, strapped it to his back, and then placed his own pugio in Plutus’ left hand. He held his narrow shoulders in his great hands and said proudly, “You will kill us one of the big bastards, I am sure. See you in the City of Dust.”

Aptus walked up to him and patted his shoulder lightly. “Use the edge of the gladius. Save the pugio for stabbing the hounds. Once you put the gladius in some guts during the press you will never get it back. Fortune, slut though she is, be with you brother. I will not be far behind the way this is leveling out.”

Here I stand, dead, doomed, and all alone until I bite the dust.