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which the maniple had executed. Caius felt less excluded than amazed at the way she began to chat with Brutas, who had ranged himself between the two litters and taken the whole procession in hand.

    “What else can they do?” asked Claudia.

    “March, fight, swear—”

    “Kill?”

    “Kill—yes, they’re killers. Don’t they look it?”

    “I like the way they look,” said Claudia.

    Brutas studied her coolly, and then replied softly, “Really, I think you do, my dear.”

    “What else?”

    “What else do you want?” asked Brutas. “Do you want to hear them? March to cadence!” he shouted, and the deep voices of the troops chanted to step,

    “Sky, earth, road, stone! Steel cuts to bone!”

    The doggerel was blurred and coarsened in their throats, and the words were difficult to understand. “What does it mean?” Helena wanted to know.

    “Nothing actually. It’s just a marching cadence. There are hundreds of them, and they don’t mean anything. Sky, earth, road, stone—nothing really, but they march better. This one came out of the Servile War. Some are not for the ears of a lady.”

    “Some are for my ears,” said Claudia.

    “I’ll whisper it to you,” he smiled, and bent to her as he walked along. Then he straightened up, and Claudia turned her head to stare at him. Once again, the crucifixes lined the road, the hanging bodies strung like beads along the way. Brutas waved at them. “Did you want it to be genteel? That’s their work. My maniple crucified eight hundred of them. They’re not nice; they’re tough and hard and murderous.”

    “And that makes them better soldiers?” asked Helena.

    “It’s supposed to.”

    Claudia said, “Have one of them come over here.”

    “Why?”

    “Because I want you to.”

    “All right,” he shrugged, and shouted, “Sextus! Break out and attend!”

    A soldier broke out of ranks, swung on the double in front of and between the litters, saluted, and swung into step in front of the officer. Claudia sat up, folded her arms, and studied him intently. He was a middle-sized, dark-skinned, heavily muscled man. His bare forearms, neck, throat and face were tanned almost to a mahogany brown. He had sharp, jutting features, tight-stretched with skin, moist with sweat. He wore a metal helmet, and his great, four-foot shield hung on his back over his haversack. In one hand he carried the pilum, a thick, six-foot spear of hardwood, two inches in diameter and shod at one end with a wicked, heavy, eighteen-inch triangular iron point. He wore a short, heavy Spanish sword, and his leather jerkin had laced on to it three iron plates across the chest, and three more hooked on to each shoulder. Three additional iron plates were hooked from his waist and swung against his legs as he marched. He wore leather pants and high leather shoes, and under that enormous weight of metal and wood, he marched easily and apparently without effort. The metal he carried was oiled, just as his armor was oiled; the stench of oil, sweat and leather mixed and became the singular smell of a trade, a force, a machine.

    From where he rode behind them, Caius could see Claudia’s face in profile, the lips parted, the tongue stroking them, the eyes fixed on the soldier.

    “I want him next to the litter,” Claudia whispered to Brutas.

    He shrugged and threw an order at the soldier, whose lips twitched in just the faintest smile as he dropped back and marched next to Claudia. Just once his eyes fixed on her, and then he looked straight ahead. She reached out and touched his thigh, just barely touched it where the muscles were bunching under the leather, and then said to Brutas,

    “Tell him to go away. He stinks. He’s foul.”

    Helena’s face was rigid. Brutas shrugged again and told the soldier to fall back into ranks.
     

VII
     
    The Villa Salaria had a rather ironic name, which recalled the time when so much of the land to the south of Rome had been a malaria-infested