"01 - The Cutting Edge 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

Ullacarn. It was very hot and had palm trees. The mountains to the north were
perhaps the Progiste Range. The XXth formed up and marched away along the coast,
maybe heading for somewhere called Garpoon.
The hot, arid country was hostile and unfamiliar. The rocky hills were full of
cryptic wadis that could be full of djinns.
Ylo had no illusions about heroism or glory. He knew the odds against a tyro
surviving his first battle. He knew that even those odds were vastly better than
the chances of a simple legionary ever winning as much as one word of praise
from his centurion, let alone recognition from the officers. He admitted to
himself that he was terrified, and would be perfectly satisfied if he could just
conceal that terror from his companions.
The best he had to look forward to was another twenty-three years of this.
He survived the first day's march. And the second. On the third day he found
himself in the Battle of Karthin.
Karthin eventually ranked as the first of the year's seven victories, but it was
a very narrow win. Proconsul Iggipolo held to the standard belief that Zark was
one huge waterless expanse of sand; he knew that djinns were red-eyed barbarians
who fought on camels in the brightest sunlight they could find. He therefore
marched three road-weary legions into a swamp, an evening thunderstorm, and the
caliph's trap.
Bogged down in mud by their armor, the imps soon learned that djinns fought very
well on foot and could conceal ten men behind every clump of reeds. Sunset
failed to halt the slaughter, and dawn revealed Ylo's maniple isolated,
surrounded, and hopelessly outnumbered.
Honor, politics, and even discipline had vanished in the night. Hunger, terror,
and exhaustion were unimportant. Survival was all that mattered. The morning was
a foggy blur of noise and blood, sword strokes and the screams of the dying. The
maniple shrank steadily. The centurions and the optios fell; the standard
disappeared. A tesserary shouted commands until he took an arrow in the throat,
and after that it was every man for himself, and no one seemed to know which way
was home.
Whether he had tripped or been stunned or had merely fainted, Ylo never knew. He
lay facedown in a bloody ooze for a long time, keeping company with the dead.
That was not cowardice, and he was far from alone in his collapse. Imps rarely
made great fighters. They were never berserkers, as the jotnar often were, nor
fanatics like the djinns. They did not covet martyrdom, as elves did in their
darker moods. They lacked the suicidal stubbornness of fauns or the stony
stamina of dwarves. Imps were just very good organizers, with a driving urge to
organize everyone else as well as they had organized themselves.
Eventually Ylo realized that he could still hear the beating of his heart. Then
another beat, as well. And a bugle! He was very tired of the swamp. He rose from
the field of dead, lifted a sword from a nearby corpse to replace the one he had
lost, and decided fuzzily that he was too weak to carry a shield. He trudged off
through the mud, heading for the drums and those twenty-three more years.
He had lost one sandal; bare skin on arms and legs was blistered raw by the sun.
His sodden tunic was rubbing holes in his skin, something heavy had dented his
helmet so that it no longer fitted properly, yet none of the swords, arrows, and
javelins that had been directed at him had penetrated his hide.
The sky was blue; the fog had faded to patchy ghosts haunting the vegetation.
The first Ylo saw of his salvation was the top of an Imperial standard advancing