Human for a Day (9781101552391) Read Online Free Page B

He heard the raucous laughter of the Visigoths spilling back into the street, two houses down. Smoke was already rising—they’d finally set a real fire here, too. “For all too soon we shall die.”
    There was no purpose defending this place. Their handful of legionaries had been set here to guard against looting, should the Visigoths be turned back or otherwise overlook the house. Now, well, it was a worthless fight. Nothing more.
    Longinus regarded his gladius . As swords went, his was not a bad one. He’d claimed eleven lives thus far with the blade. Perhaps a few more today.
    When they came, the Visigoths killed the drunkards out of hand. Rattus died swiftly as well, to his mild surprise. When they got bored with Longinus holding off three of them on the roof, they shot him with arrows until he could not stand. The kid they used like a girl until he begged them to permit him to die.
    He watched it all through the filmy eyes of an apparent corpse. If speech had yet been granted to him, Longinus would have begged them to take his head as well.
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    I tell stories about them, too. Or would if I had anyone to listen to me. Another grumbling old man in a world with no patience or place for grumbling old men. Veterans have war stories that no one cares about but the men they fought beside.
    Charles Martel is as a dead as Abdur al-Rachman. Nobody but me remembers them, or what happened in that rainy autumn deep in the forested country of the Franks. Anybody I might tell wouldn’t believe me anyway.
    Sometimes I’ve thought to write it all down. My memory used to be real good. A man isn’t made to remember everything, not even last week’s breakfast. But he should remember taking a life, a night with a woman, helping birth a baby.
    I’ve done all those things, a thousand times over. Most of the details are gone. Sometimes it’s like I’ve never lived at all.
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    Longinus had never felt much sympathy for the English. Once a Roman, always a Roman, he supposed. The English were edge-of-the-Empire rubes grown too proud of their mucky little island. But here in France, Charles VI, le roi , was a fool. The men who commanded his armies were little better.
    One thing Longinus had never done, not as legionary, mercenary, or soldier, was turn his coat. Desert, yes—there was small point in remaining with a defeated army. He had never fought for his own flag, or whatever surge of patriotism drove the sons of farmers and butchers and priests to seek blood. But he did not leave in the moment of battle, and not to the harm of the army he fought for in that season.
    What he never could forget was that the men at his side were just like him. The only difference was that none of them had ever been on a Roman execution detail one hot morning in Judaea. Other than that, they were all the same: soldiers in uniform who would kill or die for the sake of their next hot meal and the pay to come. Whichever came first.
    These names he knew, the pikemen in his line. Longinus was a caporal just lately. A dozen men to wrangle, and a sergeant to avoid.
    The French had not paid sufficient attention to longbows. Longinus had. He’d served at Crécy. He knew what the English could do. Even a generation later, the idea that a peasant could slay a sworn knight still seemed too difficult for the French nobility to comprehend. Longinus understood. He’d taken a clothyard shaft in the breastbone and been left for dead. One of the worst injuries he could recall, in fact, a deeply blossoming field of pain that had almost overwhelmed even his strange, accursed gift.
    Finding new and interesting ways to die was an occupational hazard of going for a soldier, but that didn’t mean he had to search them out. The frightened squad around him deserved better than their commanders would give them. Longinus was recalled to that by the smell of urine—Petit Robert had wet himself again. Mist and birdsong