Undecided

The damping coldness wakes me up in the morning. The day is grey and gloom. I check the time on my HUD, it’s 512 A.M. I get up from the back and find Caesar’s already in the living room reading a book. He is wearing a formal garment. The bronze armour shines outside a white tunic, the greaves and arm guards are silver. A sword tied on his baldric. Beside him, golden helmet with scarlet crest rests on the table. 

“Exciting, aren’t you?” Caesar says without looking at me as I find a chair to settle myself.

“Today is the day. Black Beard said it’s a raid. How many enemies do you expect?” I ask and bite on a leftover bread.

“A raid? Black Beard is never careful of choosing correct words… He meant an annihilation. I have one military base left, which is my mainstream. Pompey will pour all of his forces, I bet. He’s a man of dignity. He wants a total victory. Careful my friend if you would join us. Even with Impeders, we cannot let down our guards.”

I want to tell him that his soldiers will frighten away when they witness the power of Impeders. I decide to not to tell him the psychological impact that Impeders would bring to Earthlings, because I want to give him a surprise with jubilation. 

“Are you ready?” Caesar asks heavily, eyes profound. “Pompey is a man of principle. He always attacks when the first rooster crows at the break of the dawn. Black Beard must have informed my centurions. They are standing by waiting for me now. Let’s make a move. We have to deploy the Impeders before Pompey’s charge.”

I nod with a mouthful of the last bite of bread, clap my hands off the breadcrumbs. 

Caesar stands up with his mental equipment rattles, the red paludamentum swings as he turns toward the door. 

I blow the candle and follow him outside. This time, I remember to close the front door which is faces at a carriage. Chill drills all the way to my heart. It’s foggy outside with terrible visibility. I can only see the murky and blurred shape of Caesar’s house as I hop on the carriage. 

I don’t know how Caesar manage to steer the horses to the right direction. The road is so lumpy that several times I'm almost thrown off the carriage. I think Caesar is taking a wild and secret path, judging by the tree branches swoosh past me over our heads. Besides that, all I hear is the clopping of our engines. 

Our horses rear up as they are halted among the mist on a slight ramp. Wonder how much strength did Caesar exerted on the horses to make them stop.

Waves of shadows surge in front of us: the legionaries. I can’t make out individual appearance, can’t see anything besides dark silhouettes splitting aside to from a path. They fog amplifies and distorts the rhythmic thumping of spears and shields on the ground as they greet their leader. One man walks along between them. Caesar.

Caesar gestures the troops to quite down as he stands firmly on the platform. I’m still at the outskirt of the army, Caesar is a ghostly shadow above the sea. The man of the moment starts his speech.

“Today, we will face our enemy. Today, we will fight for our family… don’t bend… honour…” Caesar’s words travel to my ears sporadically through the mist. “Pompey has declared that we are the enemy of the Rome!”

“NO!” Soldiers thunder as I squeeze myself closer to Caesar. 

“Gods have chosen him but they have abandoned him, too. He wanted prophecy, we will show him the prophecy.” Caesar opens the Impeder crate. “The apocalypse of Pompey lies inside this box. A god has contacted me and endowed me with these divine weapons. The god calls them Impeders. We shall impede the Pompey today and crush him tomorrow. WE SHALL PREVAIL!”

“Ave Caesar!”

The great man calls up officers to hand them Impeders. I make my way to them and assist them learning how to use Impeders. Meanwhile, Caesar starts issuing orders to soldiers to change their formation into a circle. Each forty of them group up and hold out the shields to box themselves inside. There are fifteen shielded rectangular boxes defend along the circumference of the circle. The centre of the circular formation is the stone platform where Caesar gave the speech and now serves as a watchtower that provides overall views of the battleground. I guide officers and Caesar to project the screens around the circular formation. Caesar asks me to set the height of the screen to fifty metres to prepare the possible arrow rains. 

Soldiers and officers are astonished when they see the huge blinking blue screens outside their formations. They couldn’t resist whispering to each other even at Caesar’s presence. They are fully convinced that the gods are on Caesar’s side. 

The larger blinking circle that pieced up by the Impeders disappears as Caesar orders to activate them and warns the soldiers not to approach anywhere close to the place where the blue screens were at. We can hear the hissing sound and see the steam as the water vapours in the fog contact the invisible screens. 

I hope the battle will start and end soon because the water vapours are consuming the charges of Impeders. If they hold for a long time with continuous contacts with objects, Impeders will be overcharged and be disabled for a moment until they recharged. It makes a shorter endurance for Impeders since we set their screens to that large. Worse, the sunlight is not available for them to recharge. I estimate that Impeders can stay active for four hours in the current state, this number will be smaller when arrows and humans clash themselves on the screens, but it should be long enough to shatter the hope of the enemy and to dismantle Pompey’s army. They might be demoralised even before their charge when they see their arrow rains vanished into the steam. 

We are ready for the victory. 

I hear the distant marching sound. Then the silence. Only the screens are hissing, which make the whole scene horrid. We know Pompey’s army has surrounded us but we can’t see each other. 

We are waiting for the rooster to crow.

I stand beside the Caesar on the platform, overseeing our troops. The shielded boxes are dark tombs, there’s no trembling of hands. The time freezes. 

C**k-a-doodle-doo!

The rooster crows from a distant place. Caesar tightens his eyes to concentrate, nobody moves. 

The sky gradually darkens as the whizzing sound increases and subdues the hissing. I hold my breath as a deluge of arrows pours down. The arrows are vaporised at the half way by the screens which hiss furiously louder. The evaporations produce clouds encompass the incoming arrows. The rain lived short. Followed by the silence. None of us makes a move. Even the wind holds its breath now.

A sonorous war-horn whoops three times from afar. The ground starts shaking as if the horn has awakened some ancient giant monsters. The tidy marching footsteps engulf us gradually. Caesar shouts to order the defence stance. Our soldiers extend their spears out through the gaps between the rectangular shields. 

Each time the footstep gets louder, I cold sweat more. Although I’ve seen the grandness of the Roman battle from the spy drones, it’s different at all from being in it. Caesar and his officers are reticent. The startled birds flap past above us. My heart accelerates, hands are trembling. The stomping sound of Pompey’s army convinces me that they are at least tenfold of our men. I can’t imagine how stately the battlefield looks like without the fog. 

Still, we can’t even see the shadow of them as they stop. The abominable silence again. I’m concerning how long would the screens hold. 

The mournful war-horn ululates. Enemies cry as they charge toward us. Caesar’s face statue, eyes cold. A black human shape who holds a sword over his head fades in. Hiss. He disappears as he runs onto the screen. The troops behind him don’t stop. When I can see the clothing of the hostile vanguards, they evaporate into red mists. 

Maybe it’s the terrible visibility that keeps Pompey’s soldiers from seeing their fellows’ mysterious deaths while they are alive, they charged in formation until the last one of the wave vanishes. Before he dies, I see his appearance clearly as the fog thins out. He’s in the ebony armours and wears a black mask with a white lion drew on it. 

I don’t hear the retreating or scattering footsteps from our enemy. The horn wails again. The same amount of soldiers charge to us and die cleanly as their predecessors did. The b*****d blows the horn again and again. Earthlings fizz into the mists. 

Aren’t Earthlings scare of death?

The fog is fading away, which reveal the breathtaking column-and-row formations of Pompey’s black legion that encircles us. The periphery soldiers of the army look like ants. I can see cavalries, archers, swordsmen and spearmen at once. Upon a crooked cliff stand Pompey and his officers, a black flag with their lion sigil flutters beside them. The same banners are among the troops as well. We are as if trapped on an island amidst an endless black sea that roars and roils. 

The cavalries dash toward us under another arrow rain after the last light infantry turned into the mists. Same result. But I don’t see a slight disturbance amongst their army, the fear failed to visit them. Even the archers sacrifice after they ran out of the arrows. Each time their soldiers pull out swords or point their spears and charge toward their tombs, my anxiety grows. 

When the troops before Pompey’s last row of cohorts walking into the hell, the invisible screens start blinking red. 

“The screens will be depleted in thirty seconds,” I whisper to Caesar. 

“Javelin formation!” Caesar commands as he nods at my warning. His guards pull out swords to protect the platform. 

Our troops swiftly change the formation into the javelin shapes. They look like the indicators on a clock. 

The last charging horn wails. Enemy soldiers march steadily before they are close enough to charge. The Impeders die right before the first row of Pompey’s force clash on it. Caesar’s javelin formations eliminate enemy swordsmen but are scattered by the cavalries. We are outnumbered. 

Horses ruthlessly stomp on the unprepared soldiers. Lances puncture through the shields into the flesh. Behind me are the same fights beside a huge shape I haven’t noticed before. Black Beard roars as he crushes the skulls into gravies with a war hammer on one hand and ricochets a flying pike with a shield on the other. A knight lunges to him on a dark horse, Black Beard notices him and charges toward the horse with his shield on the front. The horse is knocked out with a thunk, and the knight falls off the horseback. The momentum hurls Black Beard forward to punch the knight with the shield. The skull crackles and scarlet flower blossoms. 

Unfortunately, the rest of our army is no Black Beard, they are soon subjugated by the cavalries. Caesar’s guards are slaying those who attempt to clamber the platform to get Caesar’s head for the reward. The guards are killed one by one despite their superlative combat skill. Black Beard rushes back for the Caesar, he swings the hammer horizontally, several Earthlings immediately find their heads have gone. 

A man punches me on the head. I stumble and fall over on the ground. The killer stands over me and chops down his sword. I close my eyes, thinking this is the end. I hear a thud and see a headless body standing still when I reopen my eyes. 

“Time to move, mate.” Black Beard stinks, pulls me up from the ground. Caesar and I are under the cover of Black Beard and the remaining guards to escape the mess. 

We are panting when we settle down at Caesar’s house. Clearly, we had a fiasco. The worst is that we have left those Impeders on the battleground. 

How did we lose? Why there wasn’t any fear among them? Were they robots? Impossible. It’s the subordination that bound them together against the superior weapons. My imaginative future shatters when I close the door. 

The hawk, which is not a nocturnal bird, why was it staring at me in the mid of the night? 

Questions are bubbling in my brain. I feel so sorry about Caesar, about his men. He is demilitarised, the possibility of overthrowing Pompey diminishes. Caesar should have been on the throne if we the Bitsners didn’t interfere. Innocent Earthlings wouldn’t have died. Although Pompey’s soldiers are fearless, they have families. How many widows and orphans did I make today? My arrogance had killed those men, had devastated Caesar’s fate. My fate. 

What’s more staggering than the dauntless black legion of Pompey’s, is the resistance of Caesar’s six hundred troops. I did not see any of them had capitulated or fled. When the Impeders depleted, I already knew we couldn’t win the war, Bitsners would surrender under such impossibility. 

It’s the love that unites Caesar’s soldiers. I remember my research of Caesar before arrived on Earth. Besides Lucretius’ financial help to maintain the army, Caesar’s love for each of them has tied their hearts. 

“Gentlemen,” Caesar says importantly. “We have apparently lost the battle…”

Black Beard remains silent, wiping the blood on his hammer. The guards are weary and ragged, they are listening to Caesar raptly even some of them are bleeding. 

“We’ve lost our last military base. That have proven I’m not a right person to lead you. I appreciate all of you who devoted your faith and blood to me. But I don’t deserve them. I who lost, shall not drag anyone else into the mire of sorrow and danger.” The air is suffocating, gloom is all over people’s faces. “Now I ask you to leave me, you shall never mention your allegiance with me to anyone else. You don’t need to follow me anymore. Go back to your wives and children…” 

Caesar plods toward a chest. He picks all the pouches inside and lays them on the table.

“These are the most I can do for you. Hope these can heal the wounds on your hearts.” He opens all the pouches and pours the golden coins out. “Take them and bring your families away from Rome. I will face whatever is coming myself.”

Nobody moves. 

“Take them and leave!” Caesar bellows and bursts into tears. The despondent man falters. “I have failed you, failed the gods. It’s the finale of my story. I will remember your names when I go to the heaven.”

“We are not going anywhere without you, Majestas,” one of the guards says staunchly. 

“He’s right. You are the only leader I have served whom I feel rather like a family member, you never speak to us with imperiousness as other leaders do.” An older soldier says with watery eyes. “Fellows love you because we can feel that you love us.”

“Love?” Caesar smiles sadly. “What can it bring to us? Victory? All I see is the corpses of our brothers. My love has dug the graves for you, who would sacrifice for me, a person who doesn’t deserve your sacrifices.”

“Majestas, when I met you, I didn’t see the fortune an’ power you can bring to me. I saw a man who’s nothing like a superior, I saw the kindness in this man. I follow you because you give us the hope, you fight beside us. You are the man who can save the Roman Empire.” Black Beard says slowly. “You are the saviour. I’ve bound my life to yours. I’ve sworn the oath. We are the blood brothers.”

“Majestas, the sun will still rise tomorrow.” I address Caesar with sincere respect. 

“Ave Caesar!” Men shout, clapping the torn shields with blood stained swords. 

We drop everything in our hands afterwards and huddle together heads to heads. We courage each other, claim the brotherhood and bawl for those who died.  

I’ve learned something from this debacle. In this little house, I feel a different kind of love. This is the love that can crush the Meridian Walls. This is the love that can break the chains. This is the love can spark the fire. This is the love my Emperor fears.