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Fateful First Meetings
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
The only answer was an ignorant snort. Dim lamplight danced lazily throughout the tent shared by the two youthful Roman officers, defying the darkness reigning over the vast army encampment outside. One of the officers shifted slightly in his bed, glaring tiredly at his companion, who sat hunched over a stack of books at a small campaign table.
“I said, don’t you have anything better to do?” the exhausted officer asked irritably, blinking sleep out of his eyes. That morning’s battle had been long and bloodily fought with each side suffering heavy loses. Of course, Rome had been victorious in the end, as always, but never had the Northern Army won a battle at so heavy a price. Their numbers had been halved in only one engagement, and the end was still far from sight. What once had been four legions now barely mustered out at two; desperate reorganization had placed both the young men in command of their own cohorts and second only to their legion’s commander. Those advancements, in turn, had placed them under the same roof.
The studier mumbled something under his breath in another language; his eyes were still riveted on the text before him as he finally responded, “Like what?”
“Like sleep, maybe?” came the impatient retort.
“Sleep is for those with nothing better to do,” the younger man replied shortly, making several notes on the parchment lying beside the mountain of books. Abruptly, he shifted his attention to another volume to verify his work.
“Well, what better is there to do at midnight?” Quintus Magnus demanded.
“Think.” He made another note, glanced to another book, and then crossed the lines out.
“Can’t you think in the dark?”
Maximus finally favored his roommate with a withering glare, mentally adding the word idiot to his newly constructed list of his companion’s attributes. “Yes, I can read in the dark,” he responded sarcastically “I can write, as well.”
Quintus sighed heavily as Maximus returned to his studies. He could obviously see that there was no way to win this battle, which said more for his intelligence than Maximus would have originally thought. Might as well chalk up sleep for the night. “What are you doing anyway, Meridius?”
“Thinking.”
“You already said that,” Quintus snapped.
“Well, it’s as true as it was the first time,” Maximus replied levelly, not allowing Quintus enough of his attention to get annoyed with him. However, the older man’s insufferable whining was making his thinking more difficult. He supposed it was unavoidable, though. Questions were always inevitable.
The other man growled in irritation. “Are you always like this?”
A smile quirked on Maximus’ face as he glanced at his roommate with newfound humor. “Yes.”
Looking at him as if he’d gone mad, Quintus finally questioned, “Are you doing this just to annoy me?”
The smile widened into a full-fledged grin. It was amazing what people conjectured from just a few words when they barely knew you. Then again, in his experience, most human beings were quicker to judge than they were to understand. “Not at first, no,” he replied honestly, struggling not to laugh.
“Not at first?” Quintus echoed in confusion.
“Well, hell, you make it so easy…” he trailed off, chuckling at the other man’s expression. Quintus looked like he didn’t know if to be offended or not, but people tended to get that way around Maximus a lot. They called his sense of humor strange. He couldn’t imagine where they got that idea at all.
“Are you mocking me?”
He shook his head, laughing. “Not yet,” he replied, then at the stricken expression, continued, “Take it easy. I’m not serious.” This man was far too staid for his tastes. He’d have to fix that – a task that he knew would not be easy, but he’d never shrank from an interesting challenge in his life, and wasn’t planning on starting anytime soon.
“That’s nice to know,” Quintus grumbled, flopping over on his bunk so that he was face down on his pillow. Amused, Maximus watched him struggle toward sleep for several long minutes, and then, just as the other seemed to be drifting off, allowed himself a loud chuckle. When Quintus failed to react, he continued laughing at him until the man sat bold upright and glared at him. “I thought you were thinking.”
“Oh, I am,” Maximus agreed, and then turned back to his notes without further comment. Hook, line and sinker… This was going to be incredibly fun. Sucker!
“Then what the hell are you laughing for?”
He pulled a volume from the bottom of his stack and began flipping through its well-worn pages, knowing that Quintus’ eyes followed his every movement. “Nothing,” he replied, careful to keep his voice blasé, never betraying his motives.
The other man sighed loudly, and Maximus heard him turn over once again. He doubted it would last long, but in the meantime, he dutifully returned to his books. The answer he was looking for had to be in there somewhere, and he hadn’t been reading just to annoy Quintus, no matter how much fun that was. Suddenly, the solution hit him like the proverbial ton of bricks. He growled out loud in frustration.
“What now?” came the exasperated snarl.
Tired of his own game, Maximus let his head drop tiredly into his hands. All that study for nothing? Well, it wasn’t quite useless, but enlightening himself on boring old battle tactics hadn’t exactly been his original goal. It was amazing where a little imagination and distraction always got him… and how it always made him feel like a full-blown idiot in the end. “I’m stupid,” he grunted.
“Well, that’s surely news.”
Despite the unveiled insult, Maximus snorted in amusement. It seemed that Quintus did have a sense of humor, after all… And, hell, if that wasn’t worth the bookwork, he didn’t know what was. Maybe some good had come of his studies anyway. Still, six hours of study, and all he’d learned was that not all answers came inside books – it was infuriating. Completely infuriating.
“What were you looking for?” Quintus continued, now too curious to sleep. Of course, Maximus reflected, he had his attention just when he could have cared less. The game was over, now. Then again, Quintus seemed unaware that there had been a game going in the first place.
“The answer to a pointless, philosophical, question,” he grumbled, still angry with himself for assuming the solution would have been in a book. Six hours, seven volumes and four languages hadn’t helped him one bit – not a one of them held the answer because no one had ever succeeded against that damn tactic before. Made the tactic itself seem pretty well armored, but then again, that’s why it had almost defeated four of Rome’s legions, a fact that still had Maximus fuming.
“You spent six hours looking for
the answer to a ‘stupid, philosophical question’?” Quintus echoed in
disbelief. “What’s wrong with you?
Wrong, indeed… He’d have spit in his own eye if it had been
feasible, or have shot himself in the foot with a crossbow if he’d had one
handy, but it was not and he did not.
Besides, he’d never been that good a shot, anyway. “I was curious.”
“About what?”
Maximus laughed at himself. “If we could have done anything different today,” he replied, thinking, Might as well admit that I don’t think our tactics worked. What the hell do I have to lose? It’s not like he respects me anyway. He probably just sees me as an inexperienced officer who’s bit off more than he can chew – just like everyone else does. Oh, to hell with it all. “If there was a way to prevent losing that many men.”
“I think we did pretty well, considering we were ambushed,” Quintus commented.
Maximus tuned around to fully face him. “We lost half of our men,” he said harshly, visions of the desperate battle playing fleetingly before his eyes. “That’s not good.”
“We were ambushed, Meridius,” Quintus reminded him.
“And that makes it better? Rome is not supposed to fall victim to ambushes,” Maximus shot back. “We are supposed to be the best in the world.”
The elder officer shrugged. “Maybe this proves that the Roman army is human, too.”
“And maybe it proves that we’ve gotten overconfident,” Maximus frowned. At Quintus’ confused expression, he continued, “Over the past two years, we’ve hardly met any resistance in the north. We fight, we win, we conquer. Barbarian tribes dive out of our way, hoping to their infernal gods that we’ll just ignore them and move on. But suddenly, we’re ambushed on the march by an organized force. Does that not strike you as strange?”
Obviously, those facts had never occurred to Quintus before – light just seemed to dawn on his face as his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. Maximus frowned to himself, wondering why he was the only one who had drawn that parallel thus far. It was painfully clear to him that the Roman Army was about to have a full-scale war on their hands, if they liked it or not. The northern boarders didn’t seem to be as ‘pacified’ as the senior officers claimed they were. He wondered, not for the first time, what else was being hidden from the rest of the army, and why.
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Quintus finally replied thoughtfully. Maybe the man possessed more sense than Maximus had credited him for in the first place. At least he caught on pretty quick. “But what does that have to do with your ‘thinking’?”
“We can’t prevent their organization, and I’ll assume we can’t predict them,” Maximus thought aloud. “But maybe we can minimalize the amount of damage they do by not letting them predict us.”
Quintus got up out of bed and moved to the second chair in the tent, scooting it over to Maximus’ side. He, too, was thinking rapidly, but he did not have all the answers he clearly wanted. “How?” he asked.
Locating a clean sheet of parchment, Maximus sketched as he spoke. “On the march, the army is rather strung out. That makes us move faster, but also hurts us if we’re ambushed by a large force.”
“But we keep the units compact to prevent that,” the other officer interjected.
Maximus was thinking quickly now, almost too quickly too keep up with himself. “Yes, but that’s to prevent smaller ambushes,” he agreed. “We’re dealing with a force almost as big as our own, whom, I’m presuming, are knowledgeable about Roman tactics.”
“They certainly seem like it,” Quintus grumbled, remembering, just as Maximus did, how easily the enemy reacted to their previously undefeated response. The outside legionaries branched into a supposedly unbreakable line, as per their training – only to be broken through immediately, allowing the ambushers to prey easily upon their supply wagons and officers. Without the advantage of superior Roman training, it surely would have been a rout.
“Yeah,” Maximus breathed with slight irritation. “We form lines, they concentrate on our weak points and break through. No one’s ever done that to us before.”
“And you think you know a way to prevent that?” Quintus asked curiously.
He swallowed his own hesitation; he’d formed a million battle plans in his mind, but had never shared them with anyone, even theoretically. But why stop now, even though he’d not thought the entire plan through yet? “Well, the ambush is coming from both sides of the army, so we cannot branch away without playing right into their hands. We cannot go forward, because we do not know what’s in front of us. And we can’t fall back because they’d expect that, as well.”
Quintus’ eyes followed his quill’s every movement on the parchment, absorbing his words as if they came from some tactical genius instead of some inexperienced, seventeen-year-old officer. Vaguely amused, Maximus continued.
“So we collapse toward the center. The vanguard pulls back until it’s almost on top of the leading cohorts, which pull back until they are the tip of a diamond. Basically, we form a giant testudo,” he said, referring to the legion’s famed method of defense, named for the turtle shell it resembled. “Enemies and arrows cannot get in, and we can attack whenever we want because all our men are within hearing distance. Until we move onto the offensive, they can’t do a thing.”
His roommate’s eyes widened with newfound respect and excitement. “Where did you get that?” he asked. “From the books?”
Maximus sighed in frustration. “No,” he replied. “There wasn’t anything on how to defend against an ambush; just how to make them.”
“So you made that up? Have you told the general yet?”
Maximus shrugged. “No, I just thought of it.” Not like I would have told him anyway, he thought to himself. What do you think I am, an idiot? Not in this life.
“Just now?” Quintus pressed disbelievingly. “That just occurred to you?”
“Yes.” Maximus stretched the word out, not seeing what the other was getting at. What the hell was the big deal, anyway? He was always critiquing battle plans to himself and figuring out better ways to deploy them. He’d just never bothered to tell anyone before.
“We’ve got to tell the General this.” Quintus suddenly jumped to his feet, and pulling on a robe, dragged Maximus up out of his chair.
“What?” Maximus jerked his arm out of his roommate’s grip. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, I think you’re a fucking genius,” Quintus replied seriously. “We can use that tomorrow, don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t see – and I am not a fucking genius,” Maximus replied, frowning heavily. “And even if I was, it would not be worth waking the General at midnight just because I was curious.”
“Curiosity, genius – same thing,” the older man retorted. “Who cares which it is?” Then he paused thoughtfully. “Damn, you are right about the midnight thing, though.”
“Yes, I am, and sensible people are asleep right now.” Maybe I can just get him to shut up and sleep; then maybe he’ll forget about it by morning. Damn, why did I have to keep him awake, anyway? Note to self, Maximus: harassing people is more trouble than it’s worth, he thought.
“I thought you said sleep was for people with nothing better to do?” Quintus challenged him.
Maximus groaned and rolled his eyes. “Now I’m fucked,” he mumbled under his breath.
Quintus grinned in response. “Yes, you are,” he agreed amiably. “Now, what else do you have?”