The Farthest Legion

The Cave And The Doorway

Madness.

The battlefields of historians and poets are such orderly places--brave Ajax battles Hector while the world watches. But at Troy, it was Ajax himself who prayed to Father Zeus to lift the fog so that both Acheans and Trojans might live or die in the light of day.

I never understood that part of the epics until I stepped, invisible, into a battlefield.

The noise pressed against every part of me. Spears struck shields so hard that their shafts shattered to splinters. Flights of arrows whistled. Screams and shouts rose from the injured and dying. 

Limbs and armor and standards tumbled past us as if they were all part of one large creature intent on tearing itself apart.

Like children trailing their teacher, we each held hands. Drutmund, or at least I guessed that it was Drutmund, lead us. Our course first skirted the worst of the fighting then brought us back, along the bank of the river. The very heart of the battle was near the excavation for the Batavian temple.

The Batavians themselves defended it with all of the ferocity which had made them such able allies to the Romans. And behind their foot soldiers, Batavian river boats had arrived in great number. Archers and spear casters stood on the decks and filled the air with death.

A detachment of miraculous Batavian horsemen mounted the bank directly in front of us, rising from the river as if they pulled Poseidon's own chariot. Each horse was harnessed with a mass of inflated bladders which must have made their river crossing trick possible.

Behind them, they drew a barge filled with still more troops. 

Counting out the precious moments until we would again become visible, we were forced to wait for the horsemen to rush past us and smash themselves against the approaching Roman line.

The Romans met their charge with a rising arc of spears.

All around us, the spears fell. I wondered what it would look like to someone following the flight of one of those spears if it pierced me then. Would the air itself seem to bleed? None struck us and, as the last Batavian rushed to his doom, we crept onto the barge and across it. One edge of the barge touched the very dike wall which had once seemed the most broken thing in our lives, only a day before.

The hand I held before me and the hand behind me each pulled hard. I pulled back as we clustered more closely together. We stumbled down a muddy bank into the hollow of the recently emptied excavation. The mud clung to our lower bodies until we must have seemed a sort of crab thing, scuttling sideways on eight legs. Across the bowl of the excavation was an open cave mouth guarded by perhaps twenty wary Batavians.

This then, was our third delay, and I had counted to six hundred already.

While we were still a good distance from the cave, someone's hand pressed my head in close to the others', and I heard Drutmund's voice whisper, "They will surely see us if we do not give them something else to look at. Ganhard, you know what to do."

One of our number, surely Ganhard, separated. I could see his muddy legs set out back the way we had come to travel the circumference of the bowl, coming upon the cave from the far side.

I wondered even then how the Batavians could have missed these odd, unconnected legs crouching and scuttling toward them, but they watched the rim of the bowl resolutely, unaware until one unfortunate, the farthest from us, began to cry out. His cry ended with a gurgle as he fell back, clutching his throat.

The others rushed to where he lay and raised their shields to defend against archers or spears perhaps, but there were no arrows. He rolled and kicked his last.

I saw Ganhard's legs enter the cave, and we followed from our side.

The cave was a narrow, dark place with low, stone ceilings which scraped my head. If we were visible now, it didn't matter as there was very quickly no light to see at all.

Still holding hands, we ducked and crouched and breathed in the dark. If the Batavians had a man waiting inside, he would be able to kill us easily in the dark, one by one as we approached.

When the hand before me, surely Drutmund himself, released mine. I nearly shrieked and ran back for the daylight, but the quarters were close and my master behind me blocked the way.

A barest whisper came from ahead. "Here. Step up, then turn to the left. Be very careful. There is a sheer drop to the right, and the way is narrow."

I followed his instructions, pressing myself to the left wall, and I could soon feel the open air to my right and hear echoes of small sounds and dripping water which seemed to come from a long, long, way down.

With no warning, the wall I pressed against ended, and I fell into a perfectly circular room with smooth walls and a floor carved with twisting patterns like none I had ever seen before.

But I had no time to spend staring at the floor.

The room was illuminated by a red doorway, hexagonally shaped like one cell of a honeycomb. The edges of the doorway glowed red as heated iron, but there was no feeling of heat.

Drutmund's now visible silhouette stood in the doorway with Ganhard. Drutmund turned back to my master and myself and waved us forward. "They will have her at the temple."

He plunged through the door and down a hillside beyond.

I did not move.

Through this doorway deep in a cave, a cave which was itself beneath a mighty river, I saw red, swollen stars. Between me and the stars, I saw the outlines of trees like none I had ever seen. Likewise dim and red was the light from an enormous moon. Too large.

Just above and to the right of this monstrous face, a smaller, paler, sister moon moved with visible speed toward the zenith.

Ever resolute, my master crawled past me and was the first Roman to step through the doorway to the land we would come to know as Medea.

I will admit that the first Greek followed him with much less haste.