“Quintus Varus, give me back my legions!”

-Augustus Caesar wandering the halls of his palace after the loss of three legions in Germania in A.D. 9

They came, they crunched up the snow-laden path, paws and hide shod feet of hulking idiots.

He waited, tasted his saliva. He smelled his iron, felt his presence on the earth through the hobnailed treads of his boots, boots that had crushed head under heel from Gaul, to Germania, to Iberia, Breton, and now on the Emerald Isle, or the Misty Eerie as some called it—punch a hole in their skulls to that he said!

One tested the rocks above, skittishly easing his great bulk along the crag above. Aptus would gamble on him slipping and falling before he’d break guard to cover his head.

Two men and two hounds were down below to the left beneath the steep angled crumbling shale and jutting granite slope. He was glad they were there making their plans.

Coming up the trail into his teeth—and he had teeth by Mars' cock!—were three huntsmen and four hounds, the hounds panting, padding and whining in expectation as they gained on their masters and bore up on him. He did not under estimate hounds. When they were campaigning against the Gallatian rebels in Northwestern Iberia there had been a particularly tough crag fort—more of a cave really—that had only been taken by virtue of their mastiffs. The handlers he did not care for; despised them in fact. But the hounds, they were something to be regarded with craft and fortitude.

He waited under an increasingly heavy weight of snow. If he had not respected the Bitch of Doom before, he did now. Aptus had noticed all along that an even snowfall fell in volume over the lot of them, as if the bitch had but so much snow in her northerly lungs, with the snowfall per man increasing as their numbers fell. Now he imagined she had unburdened his commander and signifier of snow to pour it all on him.

They came, padding, then trotting, then coming into sight beyond the curtain of snow as he awaited with scutum shoulder-strapped and boss gripped and gladius in low guard.

Two hounds—each larger than he—leaped at him as one with two others climbing up their ass. He moved forward in check shoving one off down the slope with the shield as he gutted the other with a tip rip and smashed it against the rock face to his right with his elbow. The thing did take a nip out of his cheek but was soon mucking up the footing for its fellow hounds who raised up to bring him down with forepaws and jaws. He punched one in the mouth with the scutum rim, splitting its face open and breaking its neck, as he ran the other through the breast.

He was now wading forward through thrashing paws and the blows came on his scutum, great maws driving him back, and back he went, until he shuffle stepped forward and ripped the guts out of one big bitch-groaning pile of sheep shit. As he withdrew again under the maw blows of the other he cut off the leg beneath the knee and then shoved that moaning wife of Dust over the edge with his left boot—then came the spear, glancing off his lorica and piercing his bicep.

Nothing pissed off Aptus more than falling victim to a well placed blow so he ripped a savage backhand that took off the meat-eaters face—and they were all gone beyond the veil of strife, dead and dying before him—except for the big baboon from above who had danced down from the rocks behind him and hefted a boulder over head, which crashed down, shivering his shield arm and deadening the shoulder just as Aptus ran the beautiful, faultlessly forged, meticulously sharpened, and well oiled Spanish sword through that barbarian face.

He bulled in with his shoulder as he withdrew the blade from the sucking face and slammed the big bastard in the pit of the stomach with his armored shoulder, sending the dying huntsmen over the edge to sweep the two hounds and the man they were dragging up the slop away. A hurled spear from below ripped open his thigh and then glanced off the bone and dashed against the boulder that was his strong point.

Aptus of Capua, who had dreamed of being a gladiator as a boy but had joined the Legions instead, staggered back from the edge of the slope and listened as they came up over the rise. His shield would be a hindrance. Something had happened to make his shoulder too weak to heft it. He shucked the shield strap and tossed the weapon forward at a hound, which fell back down the slope again.

Another hound and a knife-armed huntsmen—wish you had that spear now boy—came up over the edge as Aptus drew his pugio and stepped in, his leg giving under him as he lunged. The hound was on him immediately, chewing on the lion coif as Aptus ripped its guts out with the pugio and then sheared off the bottom half at the waist as he pivoted out on his left leg, the right now maimed and tactically unsound.

The hound master’s blade shattered on his Lorica and Aptus cleaved him from armpit to hip sending him to sunset and sunrise in the same instance. Another hound—was it the last, please tell me it was the last Mars—was now gnawing on his left arm stripping the flesh and compressing the bones above his wrist. The pugio fell from his numbed hand’s grasp, and Aptus ran the heroic beast through the throat with his gladius just as its master swung at his head with a great long axe.

Aptus ducked the axe blow and came up into a forward falling thrust, running the barbarian through the guts with his gladius as the return blow of the axe haft knocked the wind from him and they tumbled down the craggy crumbling ice-run slope in the death grapple.

As they fell Aptus twisted the blade in the reeking bursting barbarian guts, noting that venison had been consumed by this big bastard in his final meal. When they hit bottom with a crunch, and the snap of bone, Aptus rolled free, but without his blade, the glorious gladius that had shorn the heads from eleven barbarian chieftains left in the seeping guts of his enemy.

Never mind, you have won. They lay dead and maimed all about. Dust is painting this on the wall of his sallow hall. Yet the snow still falls, falls only on me. I can barely see.

Gather yourself. The leg the leg.

Aptus checked his leg and found it was debilitating but not life threatening, the outside tendon being severed but no blood pumping vessel having been clipped. He ripped a slice from his cloak and bound it, then hobbled over—beneath the storm of snow piling up before his eyes—to free his gladius, which was nicked but whole, and was his ass if he got caught without it.

“I come to your Centurian, victory under my heel.”

And something answered, in a language he did not understand but in a tone he did, the tone Vespasian carried at Hill Fort Seven, in the deep timbre of an amphitheatre organ intoning the doom of a condemned actor. And that deep intonation in that alien tongue came from this very snowbound pit, from a human throat, but voiced through a mouth that was higher than Aptus could reach without flexing his toes.

“Mars, you are a donkey’s ass of a mean spirited god!”

And the sound of great wide stone-crunching feet came to him through the furious snowfall, as a shadow that appeared to be in size between the bulk of a horse and an elephant loomed in the dusky morning snow.

His unintelligible war cry got to the enemy far faster than his speared leg would take him, and when he got there he had to laugh at his chances.