Misplaced Legion (Videssos Cycle) by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

“What’s he mucking about for?” Gorgidas said indignantly. “I want another doctor, not spells and flummeries.”
    “You may as well let him do what he wants,” Gaius Philippus said. “Sextus Minucius won’t care.”
    Looking at the moaning legionary, Marcus thought the senior centurion was right. A bandage soaked with blood and pus was wrapped over a spear wound in Minucius’ belly. From the scent of ordure, Scaurus knew his gut had been pierced. That sort of wound was always fatal.
    Gorgidas must have reached the same conclusion. He touched Minucius’ forehead and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “A fever you could cook meat over. Aye, let’s see what the charlatan does for him. Poor bastard can’t even keep water down, so poppy juice won’t do him any good either. With the dark bile he’s been puking up, at most he only has a couple of bad days left.”
    The wounded soldier turned his head toward the sound ofthe Greek’s voice. He was a big, strapping man, but his features bore the fearful, dazed look Marcus had come to recognize, the look of a man who knew he was going to die.
    As far as the Videssian priest was concerned, all the Romans but Minucius might have disappeared. The priest dug under the stinking bandages, set his hands on the legionary’s torn belly, one on either side of the wound. Scaurus expected Minucius to shriek at the sudden pressure, but the legionary stayed quiet. Indeed, he stopped his anguished thrashing and lay still in the litter. His eyes slid shut.
    “That’s something, anyhow,” Marcus said. “He—”
    “Hush,” Gorgidas broke in. He had been watching the priest’s face, saw the intense concentration build on it.
    “Watch your mouth with the tribune,” Gaius Philippus warned, but halfheartedly—not being in the chain of command, Gorgidas had more liberty than a simple solider.
    “It’s all right—” Scaurus began. Then he stopped of his own accord, the skin on his arms prickling into gooseflesh. He had the same sense of stumbling into the unknown that he’d felt when his blade met Viridovix’. That thought made him half draw his sword. Sure enough, the druids’ marks were glowing, not brilliantly as they had then, but with a soft, yellow light.
    Thinking about it later, he put that down to the magic’s being smaller than the one that had swept him to Videssos, and to his being on the edge of it rather than at the heart. All the same, he could feel the energy passing from the priest to Minucius. Gaius Philippus’ soft whistle said he perceived it too.
    “A flow of healing,” Gorgidas whispered. He was talking to himself, but his words gave a better name to what the priest was doing than anything Marcus could have come up with. As with the strange stars here, though, it was only a label to put on the incomprehensible.
    The Videssian lifted his hands. His face was pale; sweat ran down into his beard. Minucius’ eyes opened. “I’m hungry,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
    Gorgidas leaped at him like a wolf on a calf. He tore open the bandages the priest had disturbed. What they saw left him speechless, and made Scaurus and Gaius Philippus gasp. Thegreat scar to the left of Minucius’ navel was white and puckered, as if it had been there five years.
    “I’m hungry,” the legionary repeated.
    “Oh, shut up,” Gorgidas said. He sounded angry, not at Minucius but at the world. What he had just witnessed smashed the rational, cynical approach he tried to take to everything. To have magic succeed where his best efforts had been sure failures left him baffled, furious, and full of an awe he would not admit even to himself.
    But he had been around Romans long enough to have learned not to quarrel with results. He grabbed the priest by the arm and frogmarched him to the next most desperately hurt man—this one had a sucking wound that had collapsed a lung.
    The Videssian pressed his hands to the legionary’s chest. Again Marcus, along with his