Primum Non Nocere

A man opened at the femoral artery has about as long as it takes his friends to carry him to a medicus. A running heart shortens that. Panic shortens it again. This legionary has both, and his friends propped him against my cart and ran back to the line, so he has whatever the carrying left him. He grips his upper thigh with both hands where the framea went in and came out the other side, and out of his mouth comes a low, wet negotiation with whoever he sees over my shoulder.

When I kneel beside him the mud takes both knees, shlup, and holds on. It is September in this country, and the ground keeps no warmth deeper than a fingertip.

The rain started the night before we marched and has not stopped. It comes down through the beech and oak as a mist that never dries, and it turns every cloak into a wet dog and every leather sole into soap. The light has been green since we entered the forest. It sits close and heavy on everything, and when I look up I could be lying on the bottom of a river.

I pack sphagnum into the wound and lean on it with both palms. This country is half bog, and the bogs are full of it, and between attacks I have been filling my satchel, because it drinks more blood than any linen in my stores. My grandfather taught me that when I was four. A Greek physician in Rome taught it to me again when I was fourteen, and Rome paid him for the lesson.

"Hold here." I take the legionary's hands and lay them over the moss. "Press down. Do not lift your hands."

His face is wet chalk. I find the pulse at his wrist, and it is slow, and I scratch that into the wax tablet on my belt. Some men's hearts do not race when they should.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen. Twenty in November."

"Press down."

I go to the next one.

The column has been strung out along the track since yesterday's dawn, when the first framea came out of the tree line, and it is so long now that the head can be dying while the tail is still arguing about breakfast. The line is being eaten from both ends, and my station sits in the middle of the meal. Baggage carts, camp followers, women, merchants who have sold rope and nails and salted pork to every campaign that would have them: all of it jams between the trees on a track too narrow for two wagons to pass.

Every recruit learns that a column is the worst formation for an ambush. Varus went out to Syria a poor man and came home a rich one, and nobody gets rich in Syria by reading ground. He led them in anyway, because Arminius told him the path was safe.

Arminius came to Rome two years older than me and lost his accent first. Arminius could quote Cicero while he cracked a walnut in his fist. His knuckles came back from the Illyrian campaign split and badly knit, and he wore his equestrian ring on the hand he hit people with.

Another one comes in. The javelin passed clean through his deltoid and touched no bone. He is a freckled Gaul gone gray around the mouth, and his fingers will not stop moving. They touch the edges of the wound, then the wrapping, then the mud.

"Leave it."

"My mother." His Latin carries the slur of Narbonensis; the vowels open too wide and the consonants go soft. "My mother bakes bread. In Nemausus. She built the brick oven herself."

"Tell me about the oven."

"It holds twelve loaves. She fires it with grapevine cuttings because they burn clean. You can taste the vine in the bread."

I tie off the dressing, and his fingers find the knot and start picking at it. His name is punched into the neck guard of the helmet in his lap.

"Calvus?"

"Yes."

"Calvus. How does she make the loaves?"

"She folds the dough over and over. She says you fold it till it goes soft, till it feels like, like a baby's arm."

"Tell me how she makes it. Every step, from the flour to the oven, and when you reach the end, start again. And do not touch the dressing."

His lips start moving. I go back to the knot he loosened, and my hands stop on it. I wipe his blood off them onto my tunic and tie the knot again.