“Heraclitus speculated endlessly on the consumption of the universe by fire, but in the end it was water that saturated his body, and he died in a dung-plaster.”
-Marcus Aurelius
He looked into her eyes, into her popping blue eyes as they slowly sunk beneath the lids. The stake was just right he thought, about a foot off the ground so he could maintain this position while he ground the rest of her barbarian family into abject misery.
“Take my Virgil will you bitch!”
“Take my Plutus will you whore!”
“Take my Aptus, my Perfect Post Stroke—take my partner, will you—you barbarian hag!”
“Your mother is the sweeter my dead dear! Would that I had run down the whole lot of you hens! Don’t think I don’t know that it were your men that have been hunting us, dogging us through this snowy-cursed land!”
His hobnailed boots slipped in the muddy bloody slush of morning as snow piled on his back and melted down his neck into the weeping face of the old hag beneath him. The snow also crowned the head of her pretty daughter so nicely adorning what could have been Mars’ own tent peg.
Virtius barked some maddening order or another, but he was not done.
Again echoed the drum-deep voice of First Centurian and he ignored it, as the Mad Signifier was want to do after butchering a village of enemy non combatants—“Without a sweat of help I’ll thank you very much mister parade ground drill until I want to cry and bite off Juno’s tit! I shall ignore you Centurian—mere man, leader of a unit that is dead, of a company of heroes gone to Dust.”
“Ignore me at your peril signifier!” roared the voice of Virtius Maniples, the ‘Iron Heeled’ Centurian of First Cohort, Legio II, Augusta.
“Go hump your own hag Virtius.”
With those treasonous words he heard the rasp of gladius sliding free of scabbard and the blade slicing into his flank as it plunged into the laboring wench beneath him, pinning her to the face of cold cruel Saturn, who might someday cough her up as a patch of weeds.
As he woke beneath the hiss of the respirator another gurney was being wheeled past him down the hall—Am I going to the O.R. or the E.R.?—the head covered, the two techs shaking their heads in disgust as they headed to the patient’s final appointment. The shorter Dominican tech spoke, “…raping an old lady like this and stabbing her? What a sicko. Back home son, he would not make it to court—Dominican necktie in his holding cell he would get.”
“Wait,” said the other tech, “That’s a Columbian necktie.”
“Son we have improved on that shit—trust me.”
No wonder I’m having such crazy nightmares with an Ivan around every corner with his morbid conversations.
The truth is not any less true for being morbid, legionnaire.
Get out of my head.
I am not in your head signifier! I stand before you demanding your duty!
This is not happening. I‘m ignoring you—you’re just and angry voice in my head.
Aptus was the best of us—and your companion I know. But we honor him best with victory; victory over Plutarch’s damned Bitch of Doom!
No!
“Yes Felix, yes!” and for the first time since he had been with the legion a superior struck him. Virtius, a man of the voice before the hand, slapped him thunderously across the jaw.
Virtius stood before him pointing to a mole of natural rock that jutted out into the Mare Atlanteum. His voice came like the toll of Dust’s very black iron drum, “There she embarks. I can overtake her. You, your legs are shot from this rape foolishness. We have angered the land Felix; this island opens up the bowels of Hades and spews its barbarian shades. You must stand while I race to keep our honor from sailing off into that.”
Virtius stood at attention and held hand to heart before extending it. “First Cohort, Legio Two Augusts, under Mars. Keep that big bastard off my ass Lucky.”
With a flourish of his ice-crusted cloak Virtius turned and plunged off toward the distant dark roiling sea, a body of water as one had never seen in their land, among the feuding blood-mad cities of their Middle Sea. And Virtus had to charge hard into the narrow gale of snow that somehow comically fell only ten paces wide into the face of the surging centurian.
Felix looked to his own place and saw that snow no longer fell above him. He looked skyward and saw the gloomy sky above and the summer sky all around, but not a flake. He turned and grasped his gladius instinctively as he heard a crunching tread and saw the black-haired giant emerge from the deep dark boles of the bent seaside trees.
The giant had a massive black iron sword in his right hand and the head of Aptus in his left, palmed like a handy fruit. He looked at his own puny sword and looked over to the five heads staked out all in a row, the two virgins, the new wife, mother, and grandmother, all grinning vacantly in death at him, their exacter of evil.
Felix had never been one to muse. If he had a thought or a feeling he acted upon it, buried it, or spoke it to the world. “So you savage girls, I suppose I deserve this in your eyes. I trust the afterlife of your kind is more like those green fields over there than this pit of mud where I ended your whining lives.”
Fully absolved of sins against humanity in the tiny precinct available for such considerations within his hardened heart, Felix was free to put the next seven seconds to use as best he could. The fence where the small cows he had butchered in his rage had been corralled, had lengths of tree arm thick and two pila long, and for one of these he raced, as the giant, momentarily outwitted, gave him the extra second he needed as it tried to cut him off with its inhumanly long loping stride. As he hefted the post so that the rough cut top would serve as a crude spear point, the giant tossed Aptus’ head in fury, and staggered Felix sideways from the force of impact.
“Don’t fall Lucky—teeter but do not topple!”
