Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion
The Forlorn Understand the Cup of Defiance
Aemilianus, formerly a Tribune, once a companion in Gaul to the divine Julian himself, and who bore a scar down his right side now from that last hectic battle in which the Emperor himself had fallen while flinging himself into the thick of the fighting. A scar earned even as that young Augustus had attempted to rally his soldiers with only a shield to defend himself. One can learn a lot about a man and his temper as he emerges from battle and I learned a lot about Aemilianus, once an intimate of Julian, once a Tribune in the palatini ranks, and now a dusty praepositus of some ragged limitanei troops from some nameless frontier fort further south as he vented his spleen upon me.
His rugged face, marked with that fiery Gallic hair and beard, reminded me of one cast in bronze. The sun here in the Harra had not been kind to it. It was the face of those legionaries Julian had brought with him from the West and took into the dust east down the Euphrates – all Gallic and Germanic Romans, haughty, eager, and tough. Qualities the desert soon dried up in that dusty air and endless heat. His cheeks were sun-burnt, ruddy even, and in places his reddish hair had a faded almost singed feel to it. Only his eyes remained hard and granite-like. They had a colour of washed-out stone riddled with flecks of green marble. It was a hard face burnished by war and loss and a bitter anger. I knew that face well. It reminded me of my own.
Around us, his ragged men fanned out, picking up kit and weapons, looting where they could, squabbling over coin and gem, spitting at each other in contempt and casually sending what shades still hovered about the corpses into the afterlife – and only a few of them did that with kindness, it must be said. His wounded were being tended to by a dozen thin and clumsy medici.
He ignored them and cast a practised eye over the men of the Second Maniple. Ahead, the dust was fading over the dim horizon and I knew the Saraceni would not be back for some time. I saw Philostrus herding the five remaining men of his tent-mess out into that desert, spacing them out and moving lightly forwards, despite the tiredness I knew they would be labouring under. Around me, the rest of the Maniple were rooting about for water bladders and dressing their wounds as best they could. By my side, stood Suetonius and the draconarius, both holding the Second’s standards high in the dry empty air.
His anger fell on me like a storm and that voice rang out without let – a voice used to shouting commands in the heat of battle – and I let him rant. It was not me he shouted at, of course. He needed to vent and I was the perfect target for his spleen. So I waited while he shouted and cursed and as I did so I uncovered something of this officer and his temper as the areani hiding in the bush learns about the barbarians as they tramp past him. What I heard surprised me.
They had all been moving in column south and west up from Gerasa to rendezvous with the Dux Palaestinae and his guard at the castellum of Nova Herculaneum. Once there, they had all moved east towards Nasranum along the old Strata Diocletiana, a mixed column of horse, foot and supply wagons. He told me that along with these two ragged units of limitanei numeri, the Dux himself, Cassianus, was escorted by two vexillations of horse – the Second Clibanarii Horse of Palmyra and a body of local horse known as the Ala Saraceni under the command of a chieftain now promoted into the army of Rome with the rank of Tribune. Foederati horse. The Dux himself, Cassianus, had been chaffing at the orders from the Augustus to move east and root out the discontent in the local Arab tribes west here of the great Euphrates river. For four days they had marched and trudged along the old Roman road and then broken off east over the Harra towards our fort. Discontent had been rife. The cavalry elite – the Palmyrean Clibanarii – had removed themselves from camp duty while the indigenous Arab riders had sauntered about the loose palisades at night disdaining discipline and patrols. Only the two numeri under his command had maintained any sort of order – both units were a mix of Syrian and Greek lads with a sprinkling of Arab, Punic and Semitic blood – all tough if rowdy desert fighters: one a unit of scouts and skirmishers, exculcatores, and the other primarily arcuballistae men used in tracking and harassing local nomads or raiders, in concert with the exculcatores. Both numeri were simply designated as the Third and Fourth Felix Arabum. Fights had broken out and Cassianus himself had remained cloistered inside his campaign tent ignoring the factions all the while writing hasty epistles to the Augustus informing him that all was well here in the Harra and that he, the Dux, was desperate to join his imperial divinity north against the usurper, Procopius.
Then yesterday morning, his scouts had picked up tracks south and east of the column. Light horse. A momentary dust-cloud had been seen to the rear around midday. The supply wagons became bogged down in wide tract of sand and the oxen dragging them seemed listless. His numeri became agitated and pointed out that as the fort ahead was only a day’s travel away that someone should ride out and alert them to send back a relief column. The Dux had rebuffed that suggestion and ordered the column onwards. Then the oxen had started to collapse and the word spread that the water was poisoned. The slaves and baggage-handlers in the column panicked and began to flee into the desert despite the fear of a whipping. In a rare moment of discipline, Cassianus had ordered the Ala Saraceni to fan out south and west to locate any possible trailing force. Of course, they were never seen again and promptly disappeared into the dust and the haze.
That night the column corralled the wagons into a Gothic laager and waited. The armoured statues of the Clibanarii clumped together in the centre of the temporary camp, tending to their horses, cleaning the iron and bronze of their armour, looking uneasily into the night. The Dux and his guards remained aloof from it all. Only he and his men stood guard, sending out light patrols as far as he dared into the cold space of the Black Desert – only to find nothing: silence, emptiness, solitude.
It was as if the Harra had swallowed them all up into a cold void; a pitiless gulf frozen under a glass dome of stars.
They came in the night on a wave of dust, light sand and a warm wind that felt unearthly, almost intimate. They fell screaming upon the camp in their hundreds even as the sentries raised the alarm and a dozen fire-arrows arced up high in a feeble attempt to illuminate what was coming. The thunder of the hooves was like a tidal roar upon a beached galley. It was then and then only that the Dux, Cassianus, roused himself like a lion and issued orders – a fighting retreat to Nasranum, through the fading night, under arms, in formation. In a moment, this Armenian Roman had transformed from a complaining Dux into a tough commander.
As soldiers dashed hither and thither about the palisades, orders were issued – the wagons were fired, the supplies torched, the remaining oxen slaughtered. In a great blaze of conflagration, with the fires leaping up high and the wood shelving in, embossed in sparks, the Romans had fought their way out into the desert, even as the Saraceni raiders had fallen back in surprise. That conflagration had bought them a moment in which they had been able to marshal ranks and push east in formation at speed – the armoured Clibanarii cutting through those few light raiders who had been too stunned to retreat in time, with his numeri and the Dux following in tow.
They had made perhaps four stades before the Saraceni had caught up with them and the real battle had begun.
For a single stades eastwards they had fought a retreat maintaining formation. The Clibanarii charging out time and time again to repulse the Saraceni riders even as they were about to overwhelm his men. These latter fought back-to-back without let, he himself, on foot, shouting out encouragement, plugging gaps, hauling in the wounded. In their wake, lay a black litany of fallen men and horses. Dusk arrived like a purple shawl and word rippled around the Romans that Nasranum lay ahead – relief and succour – and something broke then. Something snapped in the Romans and it was as if racing hounds had been let off a leash – for suddenly, the Dux and his guard were out of the lines and racing towards that phantom hope and with them went the armoured Clibanarii, all pell-mell and mixed up with the former. In a heartbeat, a fighting retreat and transformed into a desperate last stand as the lines collapsed. The Saraceni, scenting victory, swept in without let knowing now that the elite Roman cavalry were no longer there to repel them. All teetered on the verge of collapse –
Suddenly this Aemilianus broke off from his tirade and seemed to see me as if for the first time. His rapid words stopped and then he frowned as if recollecting an unpaid debt. He shook his head and I saw a crooked smile begin to creep over his face.
‘And then you arrived, my friend,’ he said slowly, as if unsure I were real and not a dream. ‘You emerged from the dust and it was as if Victory Herself fell down about us in protection.’
Aemilianus had a hard face, bronzed by war and defeat, his ruddy hair burnished almost into beaten gold, fiery glints like sparks in his beard. His eyes were hammered by pain and death into stony orbs. His mien was scarred and toughened by the oriental sun. I had marked it well as he had spat out those words to me in anger. His bafflement and bitterness touched a chord in me.
And I found myself smiling ruefully into his silence now – this dusty officer of ragged men; this man who had once stood next to the divine Julian and been moments too slow to stop that fateful javelin, this Roman officer demoted into a fading fort, commanding men who were only one step away from mangy desert jackals. I smiled as upon a brother – and reached out to grasp his arm in the old Roman manner.
‘Welcome to the Nowhere Legion, Aemilianus, welcome to the men of the Fifth.’
His frown only deepened and I laughed at that. I laughed for I had found a brother and he had yet to realise it.
Reply With Quote
I now have 4 updates waiting for me haha! Will get to reading them in the evening probably 
excellent to see you working so hard on this!
Originally Posted by SeniorBatavianHorse
I suppose it's partially my fault as I always vote for him. 
