The legionaries repeated the ancient words, as they were used to doing every New Year.
“…that we will do strenuously all that the Emperor commands, will never desert the service, nor refuse to die for the Roman state…”
The voices of the legionaries made a cavernous rumble. And when they were done they yelled and waved their gladios in the air.
Clodia Valeria ran out of the crowd of watching civilians, and hugged her father. There were catcalls at this, but Titus hugged his daughter back with his one good arm. And he exchanged a dark glance with Quintus, a glance Mardina understood, for Clodia had her own difficult duty to perform before this mission was through, as indeed did Mardina.
With the ceremony done, the parade broke up, and the men formed up into a column for marching.
The legionaries themselves, laden with their cloaks and packs, would go ahead two by two, the standard-bearer leading the column, with scouts probing the countryside. A rough baggage train formed behind. This included some of the wives the legionaries had taken from the ayllu—and one mother with a very young Roman-Inca baby. Michael the medicus walked here, with Chu Yuen and his burden at one side, and Clodia Valeria at the other. Then came some of the mitimacs who had volunteered to assist the march, carpenters, cobblers, cooks—and then a train of yanakunas, slaves used as bearers of baggage.
Mardina was surprised so many of the mitimacs, the ordinary taxpayers of the ayllu, had been prepared to come along. Well, most of their time and labor was their own to use as they pleased, and many, it turned out, had never traveled far from their home, either toward the eastern hub in one direction or the ocean in the other. Some, especially the young, were excited by the idea of joining this adventure, even if it was ill understood. In fact, Mardina suspected, some of them probably believed that this highly organized expedition led by the commanding Quintus Fabius was a fulfillment of a portion of their mit’a obligations.
When they were ready the scouts led the column out of the ayllu, to cheers, ribald whistles, even a scattering of applause. At first little children from the ayllu ran alongside, shouting and waving, and in the excitement even some of the tamer guinea pigs ran around, wondering what all the fuss was about. But the parents called their offspring back before the head of the column reached the fringe of the hacha hacha. Here the trumpets sounded, and soon anti guides materialized out of the forest, their blue-painted faces seeming to hover in the green gloom.
And that was when the grumbling started, as Titus had predicted to Mardina. She knew that many of the legionaries had never gone farther into the jungle than you needed to take a discreet piss. Now they weren’t happy at walking into the great green chamber of the forest, past the slim columns of the tree trunks, under the dense canopy that excluded so much of the light, with the antis like elusive shadows all around—and the legionaries jumped at every crack of a twig, every hiss of a snake or clatter of scorpions.
But the complaints lessened after an hour or so, when they reached a clear path—not a metalled road, it was mere dirt beaten flat by bare feet, but it was a straight path heading directly west, and all but concealed from the sky by the trees. After the confusion of the denser jungle, the column quickly formed up in good order once more, and the march to the west continued.
Another hour and they passed through an anti village, round huts built on frames of branches and walled with reeds, the people all but naked, some at work skinning animals or pounding grain or tanning leather or tending fires. The antis stared curiously at the legionaries—and they stared back with interest at the bare breasts of the women, and with horror at the elaborately pierced penises displayed by some of the men. Everybody seemed to be tattooed, Mardina thought; faces like the jaguars of local mythology peered at her from every shadow. She was poignantly reminded of the tattoo on her own mother’s face.
Soon the village was behind them, and the march continued along another straight track. Some of the walkers peeled off to fill flasks from the stream that watered the village.
This was to be the strategy, to keep to the deep forest tracks as much as possible—to exploit what the antis had built here. For this was the real anti culture. Mardina herself had seen a little of it, and from their arrival here Quintus Fabius had sent out his scouts to study every aspect of their environment. The antis were not town dwellers like Romans or Incas, but they were not savages living at random in the jungle either. The Roman scouts had found a network of settlements and trails cut or burned into the forest, neat round clearings connected by dead straight lines, all invisible from outside the forest, and mostly screened from the air by the forest canopy. And it was these tracks the Romans would follow, as far as possible, relying on the support of friendly antis as they traveled.
It might work, Mardina thought. The Inca state seemed to have an ambiguous relationship with the antis. In theory they were mitimacs, taxpayers like every other citizen of the empire. And they did make tributes when the assessors came calling, from the produce of the forest. Their wiry archers would also serve in the Inca’s army, and reasonably disciplined they could be too. On the other hand, the Sapa Inca would occasionally order his troops to make forays into the forest, seizing goods with the excuse of unpaid mit’a, or even taking antis as slaves, yanakunas—but there could be anti raids on unwary ayllus too. It was a wary relationship then, between two quite alien cultures. But on the whole the Incas seemed content to allow the antis to live their lives under the cover of their forest canopy, invisible even to the vacuum-eating Condors. And the antis were useful to the Romans now.
So here they were: Roman legionaries marching through a three-thousand-mile-long habitat in space, and Mardina was one of them. When she thought about it, she was thrilled.
They had walked about seven hours when the surveyors said they had covered twenty miles, the standard target for a marching day.
They came to a clearing, perhaps once occupied by the antis but now abandoned, with the scuffed and blackened remains of old hearths pierced by the brilliant green of saplings. The men broke formation, dumped their packs, and changed their boots for camp sandals to ease their feet. They looked exhausted to Mardina; they weren’t in as good shape as Quintus might have hoped. But they would toughen up—and their work for this day wasn’t yet done.
With the spades they carried on their packs—tools they had been allowed to keep on arrival in the habitat—the legionaries got to work creating a camp for the night. Some worked around a perimeter sketched by the surveyors, digging a ditch and building walls. Others hastily assembled spiky caltrops from fallen tree branches and scattered them around the perimeter. Soon the tents went up, sheets of heavy leather carried by the yanakunas, in neat rows along what was effectively a narrow street, with latrine ditches threading out of the camp. Meanwhile the fires were lit, the pots were set up, and the smell of cooking filled the air, mostly a broth of guinea-pig meat and vegetables and fish sauce.