Read Online The Dragon Book by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann - Free Book Online Page A

said. There were ten dead men lying down around him, where Vincitatus had shaken them off her claws. He grabbed a sword and a shield that was only a little cracked, and yelled after her, “Come back and get me out of here, you damned daughter of Etna!”
    Vincitatus was rampaging through the army again and didn’t give any sign she’d heard, or even that she’d noticed she’d lost him. Antony looked over his shoulder and put his back to a thick old tree and braced himself.
    The Gauls weren’t really what you’d call an army, more like a street gang taken to the woods, but their swords were damned sharp, and five of the barbarians came at him in a rush, howling at the top of their lungs. Antony kicked a broken helmet at one of them, another bit of flotsam from the dead, and as the others drew in, he dropped into a crouch and stabbed his sword at their legs, keeping his own shield drawn up over his head.
    Axes, of course they’d have bloody axes, he thought bitterly, as they thumped into the shield, but he managed to get one of them in the thigh and another in the gut, and then he heaved himself up off the ground and pushed the three survivors back for a moment with a couple of wide swings, and grinned at them as he caught his breath. “Just like playing at soldiers on the Campus Martius, eh, fellows?” They just scowled at him, humorless colei , and they came on again.
    He lost track of the time a little: his eyes were stinging with sweat, and his arm and his leg where they were bleeding. Then one of the men staggered and fell forward, an arrow sprouting out of his back. The other two looked around; Antony lunged forward and put his sword into the neck of one of them, and another arrow took down the last. Then another one thumped into Antony’s shield.
    “Watch your blasted aim!” Antony yelled, and ducked behind the shelter of his tree as the Gauls went pounding away to either side of him, chased with arrows and dragon-roaring.
    “Antony!” Vincitatus landed beside him and batted away another couple of Gauls who were running by too closely. “There you are!”
    He stood a moment, panting, then he let his sword and shield drop and collapsed against her side.
    “Why did you climb down without telling me?” she said reproachfully, peering down at him. “You might have been hurt!”
    He was too out of breath to do more than feebly wave his fist at her.

     
    “I don’t care if Jupiter himself wants to see me,” Antony said. “First I’m going to eat half a cow—yes, sweetness, you shall have the other half—and then I’m going to have a bath, and then I’ll consider receiving visitors. If any of them are willing to come to me.” He smiled pleasantly and leaned back against Vincitatus’s foreleg and patted one of her talons. The legionary looked uncertain, and backed even farther away.
    One thing to say for a battlefield, the slaves were cheap and a sight more cowed, and even if they were untrained and mostly useless, it didn’t take that much skill to carry and fill a bath. Antony scrubbed under deluges of cold water and sank with relief into the deep trough they’d found somewhere. “I could sleep for a week,” he said, letting his eyes close.
    “Mm,” Vincitatus said drowsily, and belched behind him, a sound like a thundercloud. She’d gorged on two cavalry horses.
    “You there, more wine,” Antony said, vaguely snapping his fingers into the air.
    “Allow me,” a cool patrician voice said, and Antony opened his eyes and sat up when he saw the general’s cloak.
    “No, no.” The man pushed him back down gently with a hand on his shoulder. “You look entirely too comfortable to be disturbed.” The general was sitting on a chair his slaves had brought him, by the side of the tub; he poured wine for both of them and waved the slaves off. “Now, then. I admired your very dramatic entrance, but it lacked something in the way of introduction.”
    Antony took the wine cup and raised it.