David Drake - Ranks of Bronze

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Ranks of Bronze

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

BOOK ONE

THE FIRST CAMPAIGN

BOOK TWO

THE FIFTH CAMPAIGN

BOOK THREE

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CAMPAIGN

BOOK FOUR

THE LAST CAMPAIGN

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RANKS OF BRONZE

DAVID DRAKE

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P. O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31833-0

Cover art by Patrick Turner

First printing, May 1986

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Third printing, August 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

For Jerry Pournelle

For numerous kindnesses over the years —

including one off-hand comment that was worth any number of writing courses.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Jim, who bought the story ten years ago;

to Janet, who reminded me of the BATRACHOMYOMACHIA;

and to Jo, who liked the completed result.

PROLOGUE

On a farm in the Sabine hills of a planet called Earth, a poet takes a stylus from the fingers of a nude

slave girl and writes, very quickly,And Crassus' wretched soldier takes a barbarian wife from his

captors and grows old waging war for them.

The poet looked at the line with a pleased expression. "It needs polish, of course," he muttered. Then,

more directly to the slave, he says, "You know, Leuconoe, there's more than inspiration to poetry, a

thousand times more; but this came to me out of the air."

Horace gestures with his stylus toward the glittering night sky. The girl smiles back at him.

BOOK ONE

THE FIRST CAMPAIGN

Gaius Vibulenus wore a white horsehair crest to mark him as a tribune. Fear turned the dew dribbling

from that insignia into drops of acid on the back of his neck. Dawn was beginning to raise a

bitter-flavored mist from the valley before them, and the occasional serpentine trees seemed to writhe as

they bathed in the thick air.

The enemy was deploying from its camp in the shelter of great basalt pyramids that the sun revealed as a

natural rock formation, not the godlike city which the young tribune had thought he saw against the night

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sky.

"Mother Vesta," Vibulenus whispered as his fingers tightened on the bone hilt of the sword sheathed at

his left side, "let me live to see my hearth again. Father Hercules, give me strength to endure this time of

testing."

A signal began to boom from the enemy camp. It sounded like thunder, a crash which built into a rumble

and did not slacken though the whole valley began to echo with it.

"Mother Vesta," the tribune repeated, "let me live to see my hearth."

". . . ten feet tall," a legionary was muttering to his fellow as the Tenth Cohort lurched towards its

position on the left flank. "And they eat their enemiesraw ."

"No talking in ranks!" snarled a non-commissioned officer — Gnaeus Clodius Afer, the file-closer who

ranked second of the eighty-odd men in the cohort's Third Century. In barracks, Clodius would have

carried a swagger stick, but here in the field he bore two javelins and a shield like any other line soldier.

He rang the butt of the lighter javelin on the bronze helmet of the man who had spoken.

The legionary yelped and stumbled. Dim light and the helmet's broad cheek pieces concealed the man's

face, but the tribune recognized the voice as that of Publius Pompilius Rufus — one of the few legionaries

he actually knew. Rufus and his first cousin, Publius Pompilius Niger, came from farms adjoining that of

Vibulenus' own family, and the three boys had attended school together in Suessula.

"Here, fellow," Vibulenus said in a squeak that was meant to be a growl of warning to the non-com. He

put his arm around Rufus' shoulders and glared back at Clodius. "No need for brutality."

"Sir, that's allright ," the legionary whispered hastily, jumping sideways and hunching as if the tribune's

arm were afire. Rufus collided with the trooper to whom he had been speaking — his cousin Niger, of

course — in a clash of equipment much louder than that of the non-com's blow a moment before.

"No need for little pricks too young to shave, neither," Clodius muttered, enough under his breath that

Vibulenus could pretend the words were lost in the artificial thunder from across the valley.

Vibulenus stepped back, rubbing the lip of his Greek-style helmet, more of an ornate bronze cap than

functional protection like those of the line soldiers. With his hand raised that way, his forearm concealed

the face which he was sure glowed with his embarrassment.

Anyway, it wasn't true. Hehad shaved, and that first beard had been dedicated in a golden casket in the

temple of Juno of Suessula which his father had refurbished for the occasion.

And would that the gods had struck him down in that moment. Then his family could mourn the ashes of

Gaius Vibulenus Caper, and he himself would be spared all this.

Whateverthis was.

How could General Crassus have bungled so badly at the end of a brilliant career?

Because of the noise around him, and even more because of the turgid echoes of his thoughts, Vibulenus

did not hear the sound of the horse approaching until a legionary's curse was answered with, "Watch

yourself, dog!" in the nasal bray of the rider, Rectinus Falco — another of the legion's six tribunes.

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Falco was the last person Gaius Vibulenus wanted to see right now, but even that had its advantages:

Vibulenus' shoulders straightened, his face became a mask of cool disinterest; instead of roiling with fear

and embarrassment, his mind focused on the fact that he did not have a horse and that bastard Falco did

because of the way he had made up to the Commander.

"Our commander sends me to check on the progress of the left wing," Falco said. His accent implied

that he was born and bred in a townhouse in the wealthiest section of Rome. In fact, he was country

gentry from Campania, just like Vibulenus himself; and the Vibuleni could have bought Falco's family

three times over.

Not that questions of birth affected where the two tribunes stood, right now and for the foreseeable

future.

"Not the level of progress one might have expected," the horseman went on, raising himself a trifle in the

saddle by pressing his hands against the double front pommels.

"Tell the Commander that he needn't concern himself with this flank," Vibulenus replied in a tone of

vibrant haughtiness that surprised him and would have surprised his declamation instructor in Capua even

more. He had never shown signs of oratorical power. This was a hell of a place for it to turn out that he

had talents in that direction after all. "Though I would have expected more cavalry to support us."

In all truth, this was a Hell of a place.

"Vibulenus, you'll go further if you learn to tend to yourown affairs," Falco snapped angrily. He raised his

torso higher with his hands and clamped his knees near the top of the saddle to peer at the cohort from a

slightly better perspective. No doubt about it, the man was a natural horseman. "Which," he went on in

his nasal sneer, "you seem to be doing a very bad job of, as ragged as these lines look."

"Then if you'll get yourself and your animal out of the deployment area," Vibulenus responded with

ringing clarity, "we'll proceed with our business."

Falco might have continued the wrangle — which was not about war but rather status, and therefore of

much greater importance to him. One of the line soldiers — was it Clodius Afer again, watching the ranks

quick-step past — muttered, "Wonder how he'll ride with a spear up his bum?"

The horseman dropped back into a full seat with an alacrity that proved he considered the threat from

the ranks more than rhetorical. The sun had risen high enough to clearly limn the anger on Falco's face as

he tugged at the bridle and spurred his mount's right flank to twist it into a tight pivot. He continued to

kick the horse as he rode back toward the command group at a twitchy canter.

Vibulenus drew a deep breath, obscurely thankful to Falco. Nothing like anger to drive out . . . weaker

emotions. And he'd been worse places, they all had — trapped without water and without shade, facing

Parthian arrows that could punch through shield and breastplate alike if a man's luck were out.

Abandoned by their allies, abandoned by Rome, and utterly abandoned by hope.

Though it was doubtful that any of the three elements were closer to them now than they had been that

terrible day in Mesopotamia.

The tribune had a better view of the enemy across the valley than he did of his own men; but the enemy

was not his job, not yet, and he determinedly concentrated on the deployment of the legion's left flank.

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The legion had only a hundred and fifty attached cavalry at the moment, and horses were in even shorter

supply than trained riders. There was a tiny squadron of blue-plumed helmets bobbing in the sunlight

ahead of the deploying infantry. Weeks before, or what seemed like only weeks, Gaius Vibulenus would

have been too ignorant to be bothered by the lack of cavalry. Nobody who had survived the disastrous

advance from Carrhae could ever again be complacent about unsupported infantry. The tribune froze as

his mind flashed a memory of Parthians riding out of the dust, the sun glinting like lightning on the steel

heads of their arrows. . . .

A trumpet blew three short blasts, answered almost immediately by three thinner, piercing notes from a

curved horn. The sound recalled Vibulenus to a present which, bad as it might be, was better than that

past in Mesopotamia. The right-hand pair of the cohort's six centuries had reached their proper spacing,

and their centurions had signalled a halt.

Like a bullwhip, the tip continued to move for some moments after portions further back had stopped.

Vibulenus heard the centurion of the Fourth Century give an order to his trumpeter, followed at once by a

two-note call and shortly later by the whine from the Third Century's horn. The legionaries closest to the

tribune, three ranks ahead of him and as many behind, clanked and rattled to a halt.

Without a horse, the young tribune couldn't see a thing, not adamned thing, of the legion except the

mail-armored torsos of the nearest soldiers. He strode between files, the alignment perpendicular to the

legion's front, pausing as each man of the century dressed ranks by rotating one of his javelins sideways

and horizontal. "Hey!" snarled a trooper whom Vibulenus jostled with his round shield in brushing past,

but the man recognized him as an officer and blurted an apology even as the tribune stepped beyond the

ranks and became, for a moment, the Roman closest to the enemy.

"Sir?" said someone in a concerned voice.

Vibulenus turned and saw, to his surprise, that Clodius Afer had spoken. They were all nervous.

Perhaps the file-closer was as embarrassed at clubbing a man with his spear as the tribune was at butting

into cohort discipline for purely personal reasons.

"It's all right," Vibulenus explained, "I'm —" To his amazement, he then said what he suddenly realized:

"I'm less afraid out here. I think it's because — the arrows you know? We were all packed together, and

the arrows kept falling. So in ranks I, I expect the arrows."

Clodius blinked in total non-comprehension. Several of the front-rank legionaries looked at one another

with expressions which were too clear to permit doubt as to what they were thinking.

"Carry on," the tribune said sharply, flushed again with anger at everything but himself and the tongue that

kept blurting things it should not. "I'm attending to the dress of this flank."

Well, that was the conscious reason he'd had for stepping out of ranks.

The legion was in fully-extended order, all sixty centuries in line with nothing held back for support or

reserve. That gave them a frontage of almost a mile, a considerable advantage in keeping the enemy from

swarming around both flanks — but it provided no margin for error, either on the flanks or in case an

attack penetrated the thin six ranks into which the troops were stretched.

Perhaps the new commander knew what he was doing. Marcus Crassus had not. That was a certainty

to the gods and to everyone who had served under that hapless general in Mesopotamia.

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For all that, the ranks of bronze and iron and leather-faced wood had a look of terrible power. They

made Vibulenus shiver with joy that he was on this side of the valley and not the other where the enemy

fell to with the disorder of grubs spilled from rotting wood.

The ranks twisted like serpents crawling, for the slope across which the legion deployed was too

irregular to accept the straight lines of the parade ground. These even curves had the sinuous power of a

living thing, however, and within them the five-foot spacing between individual troopers looked flawless

to Vibulenus despite the searing curses of non-coms who felt it could be improved. The First and Second

Centuries locked into alignment with a final shudder, trumpet calling to horn. The sun behind threw the

legion's long, spiky shadow across the grass toward the enemy.

A legionary — it should have been a mounted man — jogged across the front. He was coming from the

pilus prior, the cohort's senior centurion. "Ready as ordered, sir," the man muttered as he passed

Vibulenus, but he was on his way to the Commander waiting among his terrible body-guards behind the

center of the legion.

The tribune nodded and tugged at one end of his sash, a token of rank like his trailing horsehair crest.

Empty rank.He didn't command anything. It required a minimum of ten years' bloody service to become

senior centurion of a cohort, and at least that — plus family and connections — to become the legate in

charge of a legion.

When his newly-formed legion had marched away from Capua with its standards sparkling, the horns

and trumpets calling triumphantly, Vibulenus had believed that he was part of Rome's splendid conquest

of barbarians. Mesopotamia and the gilded armor of the Parthian cataphract horsemen had cured him of

that mental posturing; and disaster had left nothing behind but his youth, and the empty "oversight" of the

left flank which his breeding gained him.

He could probably manage to die heroically, but it was clear that the new commander would care even

less about such a death than Crassus would have.

Three cavalrymen trotted from the left flank, their shields slung and their reins spread wide in both hands

against the chance of horses slipping and throwing them down between the lines. Vibulenus stamped his

right boot to test the footing himself. The hobnails grated a little, but the grass rooted the surface into sod

and there was no evidence of shingle to make a horse or armored soldier skid.

But the riders were scouts, not fighters, and they were understandably skittish about the potential

problems which they were sent to search out. In battle mode, these men would gallop across the same

terrain with shrieking abandon, each of them trying to be the first to come to grips with the enemy. They

and their fellows had done just that under the leadership of Crassus' son, disappearing in pursuit of

Parthian horsemen who fled until the Roman squadrons were out of touch and support of the infantry.

It was soeasy to blame others for the fact that Gaius Vibulenus Caper was here. And it did so little

good.

There was a series of horn and trumpet signals from the right flank, distorted by distance and possibly

multiplied by echoes. The thunder from the hostile encampment continued, but it was supplemented by

deep-throated shouting.

A pair of vehicles drove from the mass of the enemy. With two axles apiece and a flat bed laden with

warriors, the vehicles looked like wagons, but their drivers lashed them on like racing chariots. They

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were drawn by teams of six beasts which looked more like rangy oxen than like anything else in

Vibulenus' experience, two pair pulling in yokes, and a beast attached only by hames to either side of the

yoked leaders. They made for the scouting horsemen with the singleminded determination of gadflies

seeking blood.

Mingled horns and trumpets from the command group called the advance. The signallers of the individual

centuries picked up the concentus, until the massed call had spread past Vibulenus to the horn of the

cohort's First Century.

"Cohort —" called the senior centurion, his voice audible because he had raised it more than an octave

to pierce the bleating signals.

"Century —" the other centurions echoed with greater or lesser audibility, depending on their experience

with getting real power behind a shout that was above their normal range.

"Advance!"

Raggedly, because some men did not hear the command and responded to their comrades' motion, the

legion began to stride forward. Most of the men gave a shout, and a few clashed the javelin in their right

hand against their shield boss.

The three horsemen were cantering back to their fellows, the task of scouting the intermediate ground

accomplished by the enemy. The war carts bounded over irregularities, hurling the half-dozen warriors in

the back of each into contortions as they clung to ropes looped around frame members. The vehicles

lurched awkwardly where the opposing slopes met at the valley bottom, but there was no gully there and

not enough of a bog or watercourse to affect the advance of the legion.

A warrior in the back of either cart was banging a mallet against a sheet of bronze slung from a pole. The

rumble of changing harmonics explained the greater thunder emanating from the enemy camp.

"Ware!" called Clodius, and the tribune skipped aside as the legion rejoined him at the rate of two paces

per second.

There was a slight gap in the frontage between the Third and Fourth Centuries — inevitable because the

units dressed ranks within themselves, and useful because it provided a narrow aisle in which the

non-coms could scurry between the six ranks for which they were responsible. Vibulenus fell into step

between the Third Century file-closer and the centurion of the Fourth, a dull-faced veteran named Vacula

whom the tribune had never heard speak a word which was not an order or the response to an order.

"How many do you think there are?" Clodius asked. "Sir?"

Vibulenus was trying to position his round shield. It was lighter and easier to carry than the big oval

scutum of the line troops, but a similar piece of equipment had seemed horribly inadequate against the

sleet of Parthian arrows. Startled by the question, but openly delighted that someone was treating him as

if he had some purpose, he squinted across the valley at the army toward which they strode.

It was like trying to guess how many roses bloomed in the fields beneath Vesuvius, and an honest guess

would have been in horrifying contrast to the five thousand, more or less, legionaries bearing down on

those opponents.

So instead of blurting, "Thirty thousand, maybe as many as fifty" — the figures that clicked through his

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mind — the tribune said, "They look like they're all naked, and only the ones in the chariots have shields."

They also looked like they were ten feet tall, just like Rufus had said. Well, maybe eight feet tall.

"Yeah, well. . . ." said the file-closer. "At any rate, they aren't shootin' arrows over their backs as they

ride away, this lot."

With no more organization than water bursting a dam, and with the suggestion of equally overwhelming

force, hundreds of additional war cars charged from the enemy line without appreciably diminishing the

mass that remained. The rumble of flexible bronze as they approached had an omnipresence that horns or

even proper drums could not have equalled. It was as if the legion were approaching a swarm of bees,

each the size of an ox.

The warriors were shouting as their vehicles galloped onward, but their cries were surprisingly

high-pitched for all the breadth of their torsos. Plumes of single feathers or perhaps blue-dyed plant fibers

trembled stiffly from the sides of each warrior's helmet.

The naked mass of infantry which remained on the hillslope seemed, when Vibulenus squinted, to be

armed with clubs or maces. The warriors in the cars, however, each carried a long spear tipped with the

black glint of iron. Some of those who clung to their vehicle with their spear hand brandished huge

shields, allowing glimpses of breast-plates and swords or daggers in belt sheaths.

"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.

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There were so many of the cars that they were jostling for position as they neared the legion. The

unyoked draft animals fouled their opposite numbers in neighboring teams, and one vehicle upset because

its driver did not have enough room to maneuver around a tree.

"Charge!" shouted Clodius Afer, a fraction of a second before Vacula shrieked the same command in a

carrying falsetto. Both non-coms and their fellows from the opposite flanks of each century in the line

began to run toward the chariots only two hundred feet away.

For a moment, the centurions and file-closers were alone, a ragged scattering ahead of the legion like

froth whipped from the tops of waves. Then the whole legion broke into a run as the right arms of the

two leading ranks cocked back, preparing to hurl the lighter of the pair of javelins each legionary carried.

Gaius Vibulenus began to run also and tried to draw his sword for want of a javelin to throw. He had to

catch up with the centurions because he was an officer and if he could do nothing else, he could set an

example . . . but it wasn't that simple, except in the part of his mind which refused to think and which was

in control now.

Because he was young and fit, for all his relative inexperience with the weight of his armor, Vibulenus

was beside Clodius Afer again when the file-closer's arm shot forward and sent his javelin off in a high

arc toward the enemy. Clodius' heavy shield swung back around the pivot of his firmly-planted left foot,

balancing the heave of the missile.

The advancing line stuttered as each man lost a step when he launched his javelin. The tribune, who had

finally gripped his flopping sword sheath with his left hand so that he could draw the weapon with his

right, found himself once again in front of the remainder of the legion.

The war cars were drawing up, apparently according to plan rather than in reaction to the legion's

advance. Drivers swung their teams to one side or the other in a scene of utter confusion, but with fewer

real collisions than the dense array had suggested would result. The enemy were, after all, practiced at

their method of warfare even if they made no attempt at discipline in the Roman sense. The warriors were

springing from the vehicles even as drivers sawed back on their reins as if to lift the teams' forehooves off

the ground.

Some fifteen hundred javelins rained down onto them in a space of less than two seconds.

"Rome!" cried Gaius Vibulenus, while the legionaries behind him were shouting that and a thousand other

things as they ran toward the foe.

The warriors' shields were big, even by comparison with the bodies they had to cover, and they were

solid enough that even hard-flung javelins penetrated only to the barbs of their heads. The teams had

been in confusion before the missiles gouged many animals into rearing agony. Now they were in chaos.

Several teams raced off in whatever direction they were pointing, spilling their drivers and occasionally

dragging an overturned car like a device for field-levelling.

Most of the warriors were unharmed, though a few had been caught as they jumped from their vehicles

and now sprawled or staggered. Their chest armor, even when studded with metal, did not turn or stop

the missiles the way the heavy shields had done. The weight of the javelins stuck in the shield facings, half

a dozen in some cases, was an awkward additional burden. Many of the warriors were trying to tug the

javelins clear when the second flight, from the third and fourth ranks of the legion, hit them.

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Vibulenus was running downhill, though the slope was no more than an inch in twelve. When a Roman

javelin sailed over his shoulder, missing the back of his neck by no more than the blade's width, his

bloodthirsty joy and feeling of invulnerability washed away in a douche of fear. The young tribune tried to

stop. His hobnails skidded out from under him, and the long spear the warrior thrust at him gouged a

fleck of bronze from Vibulenus' helmet instead of plunging in through his mouth and out the base of his

skull.

The spearpoint's ragged edge was the result of forging at too low a temperature rather than deliberate

serration, but the difference to Vibulenus would have been less than academic had the blade sawn a

hand's-breadth slot through his face. As it was, the tribune's shin hurt more where his shield banged it

than his head did from what would have been a deadly thrust.

The warrior who was trying to kill him had two feathery plumes that were part of his head rather than

clothing as Vibulenus had assumed from a distance. He was lifting his spear again to finish the job with a

second overarm thrust.

In panic that froze the events around him down to gelid detail but did not make them more soluble,

Vibulenus swatted at the spear as he would have tried to bat away a spider which was leaping toward his

eyes. The sword he held forgotten in his right hand clashed against the warrior's weapon. The iron

spearhead shattered, victim of the best blade of Bilbao steel which Vibulenus' father could find for his

boy to carry to war.

Something drained from the tribune at the shock — fear or weakness or concern for anything save doing

the best job that could be done with the business Fate had handed him. He started to get to his feet.

Clodius Afer thrust his remaining javelin into the center of the warrior's chest until a foot of the point and

metal shaft stood out through the back of the fellow's ribs.

"Eatthat , pig-fucker!" screamed the file-closer as he released the javelin shaft and tried to draw the

sword sheathed on his right side. Vibulenus jumped forward, his shield in front of his body as much by

chance as skill, and blocked away the spear with which another warrior was stabbing for Clodius' life.

Close up, the warriors were half again as tall as the five-foot-eight-inch tribune, and their blue feather

plumes waved a foot or so still higher. They gave off a smell like something chitinous and dead.

Vibulenus cut at the warrior whose spear he had just brushed aside. It was his first conscious attempt to

use his sword, and he was clumsily ineffective: the blade chopped into the framing which supported the

multiple layers of hide, scarcely making the heavy shield quiver. As the warrior tried to recover his spear,

Clodius ducked under the shaft and hacked at the fellow's leading ankle with the skill of a butcher jointing

a rabbit.

The warriors had howled as they came on, but when they were wounded they did not scream with pain.

This one twisted silently, trying to brace himself with his spear and the shield whose lower rim he had

slammed against the ground an instant too late to protect himself.

You're either lucky or you're not. You know that youare lucky from the fact that it's the other guy

sneezing blood and bits of lung tissue onto the spear in his chest.

"He's got it!" Vibulenus shouted, as if he were a spectator at the arena instead of a participant in a

full-scale battle. He was premature as well, because the warrior did manage to hold himself upright. The

tribune tried a finishing blow at the feathered skull and only notched the shield rim again. Then Clodius

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head>RanksofBronzeTableofContentsPROLOGUEBOOKONETHEFIRSTCAMPAIGNBOOKTWOTHEFIFTHCAMPAIGNBOOKTHREETHETWENTY-SEVENTHCAMPAIGNBOOKFOURTHELASTCAMPAIGNhead>RANKSOFBRONZEDAVIDDRAKEThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelyco...

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David Drake - Ranks of Bronze.pdf

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David Drake - Ranks of Bronze

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