Out of the Waters by David Drake

Author:David Drake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER XI

Corylus staggered. His feet were still planted firmly, but now they were on gritty soil with a slight downward slope instead of a flat mosaic floor. That had thrown him off balance.

The Cyclops was thirty feet away. It turned its head toward him with a bellow; the sound was like a huge wave smashing into the shore. At the same time it shuffled awkwardly to bring its body around, like a duck trying to rotate in tight quarters. Over its head, the boulder quivered.

Corylus knew from experience that stone weighed three or four times as much as flesh did, and he could see that the boulder was the size of the Cyclops’ torso. No man he knew could have lifted an equivalent mass. Even for the monster, it was a strain to be balanced rather than a whim to be toyed with. Still, the sea three hundred feet offshore—half the length of a foot race—bubbled and slapped where a similar missile must have landed.

The surface on which Corylus stood was a few hand-breadths higher than where the Cyclops’ feet were planted. It wasn’t much of a slope, but rather than turn and run uphill—

“Ears for Nerthus!” Corylus screamed as he charged the monster. It was the war cry of the Batavian Scouts; well, of the Scouts when they weren’t slitting throats silently in the darkness. It wouldn’t mean anything to the Cyclops, even if he wasn’t a beast without language, but it put Corylus in the right frame of mind.

The Scouts had their own temple grove separate from the altars of the rest of the cohort which Publius Cispius had commanded on the Danube. An oak, a broad spreading wolf tree, stood in the center. They nailed to it the right ear—salted to preserve it—of every Sarmatian they killed.

The Cyclops grunted and hesitated, repositioning the huge boulder. The creature probably hadn’t expected its victim to attack, which would have been justification for Corylus’ tactics if he’d needed one.

He hadn’t. The Batavians were a crack unit, as good as any non-citizen auxiliary cohort in the army—and better than the legions which were deployed in luxury in the eastern provinces, anybody on the Rhine or the Danube would have said. He could either have fled the monster or charged it. Neither seemed survivable, but of course you tried to cut the other guy’s throat before he finished you.

I can’t even reach his throat, Corylus realized. The thought made him grin.

The Cyclops strode forward, preparing to throw. Corylus stepped on a human arm bone. His foot flew out from under him and the bone—it was just the upper joint; the shaft had been cracked for marrow—sailed skyward.

The Cyclops gave the stone a savage push with both hands, not so much hurling it as snapping it forward in a straight line as though the springs of a catapult were driving it. Corylus landed on his back with a clang, skidding feetfirst toward the monster. He had lost his helmet and there were certainly dents in his thin bronze back plate.

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