"Somtow Sucharitkul - Aquila" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sucharitkul Somtom)

RETURNED to the old castra, and I was studying the war
histories, trying to work out a viable stratagem, and, for fear of
keeping the legion too idle, had detailed two maniples of infantry
to dig more trenches and build more ramparts. Alone in the shade
of my praetorium with a flagon of Chian wine, I tried different
ways of deploying our meager artillery, our scorpiones, ballistae,
and catapultae, by arranging pebbles around a clay model of the
terrain. About two thousand men, a third of the legion, were dead
or wounded. It was depressing.
 I'd fallen asleep at the table. A lamp burned still, causing the
shadows to flit along the flaps of my praetorium. I was in my bare
tunic; outside, guards watched, their pila crossed over the
entrance. Suddenly I opened my eyes.
The shadow on the wall... was there someone in the room
with me? I listened. Was it a breathing? Ah no, my own, but—
There. A shadow on the wall, dancing against the quivering
lamplight... I reached for my dagger. It was jerked out of my
hands. I whirled around. In the eerie flickering, an apparition
leered at me.
"Jupiter defend me!" I cried, doing every avert-the-omen sign
I could remember.
The ghost did not disappear. It didn't move either. I took a
good cool look at it (I knew by now I must be dreaming, or else
why would the guards not have noticed?) and Virgil's description
of the hell-beings of Avernus, whom Aeneas saw on his descent
into Hades, was nothing compared to this.
It was a weatherbeaten face with a hooked nose and hawklike
brown eyes, and it was painted in garish reds and yellows and
striped with black. Its hair was long and white; and, in a
headband, a number of eagle feathers stuck out.
It was almost naked; it stooped with age, and its chest sagged
like an old man's. A breechclout of some kind of leather hid its
privates. It smelled of some strange oil; if it had bathed at all, it
was no Roman bath it took.
It grinned at me.
"Who in Hades are you?" I gasped at last, when pinching
myself several more times resulted only in an itchy arm. "And
how did you get in here?"
It shrugged. "I've never yet met a Roman I couldn't creep up
on," it said genially.
'You mean you're—"
"Hechitu welo. I am Aquila the Barbarian."
"Oh, but you do speak Latin, I see."
"What do you think? We've been taking your baths, reading
your ghastly poets, and watching your indecently gory spectacles
for the past thirty-five years."
So this was the famous tactician who had demolished the
legions of Pomponius Piso! "I'm pleased," I said, "to have such a
distinguished leader as yourself working under my command."
"Under your command!" The savage began to cackle.