"The chariots that came first," Vibulenus shouted. He was in effect a rank of his own, a stride behind the leading legionaries and a stride ahead of the second rank, but he was marching in time with the centuries to either side. The strap of his shield was already beginning to chafe the skin of his left forearm, and the unfamiliar effort of holding the piece of equipment advanced was causing his biceps muscles to cramp. "What happened to them?"

Clodius Afer twisted his head enough to look past the cheek-pieces of his helmet at the tribune. He grimaced, a facial shrug because those were the only muscles not bound by armor or clutching equipment. "Not our problem," he shouted back; and he, like Vibulenus, hoped that was true.

The trees grew more thickly on the lower slopes of the valley. One of them forced the tribune to dodge aside to pass it between him and Clodius. Close up, the tree had even more of a snaky unreality than it and its fellows displayed at a distance in the mist that had already burned away. The bark was segmented into pentagonal scales, and the trunk, nowhere thicker than a man's thigh, terminated without branches in a single fleshy nodule thirty feet above the ground.

Vibulenus brushed the trunk with his left shoulder and wished he had not. His shield rim and the fabric of his tunic sleeve glistened with a thick fluid scraped from the bark. It felt slimy where it soaked through to his skin.

"Ready!" called the file closer, facing the men to his left.

Simultaneously, the centurion of the Fourth Century roared toward the mass of his own unit, "Century-"

The nearest war cars had rolled across the center of the shallow valley and were now climbing toward the legion. The draft animals looked distinctly unlike oxen now that the tribune had a closer view. They had four gnarly horns apiece, one pair in the usual place atop the head and the other on the nose. Vibulenus had not heard of anything like them, even among monstrous births catalogued with omens.