"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 16 - Other Times Than Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

from pulling it out and maybe throwing it back at you. After you hurled your javelins it was work for the
sword, and Froggie's troopers were better at that than anybody who'd faced them so far.

Slats stood on his two legs with his four arms crossed behind his back. He'd travelled in the same ship as
the legion for the past good while. Slats wasn't a Commander any more than Froggie was, but he seemed
to have a bit of rank with his own people. Like all the civilians who had to deal with the barbs, Slats wore
a lavaliere that turned the gabble from his own triangular mouth into words the person he was talking to
could understand.

"The bug's been around a while, right?" murmured Glabrio, a file-closer who could've had more rank if
he'd been willing to take it. Though Slats looked a lot like a big grasshopper, he had bones inside his
limbs the same as a man did.

"Yeah, Slats was in charge of billeting three campaigns ago," Froggie said. "He's all right. He'd jump if a
fly buzzed him, but seems to know his business."
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Glabrio laughed without bitterness. "That's more'n you could say about some Commanders we've had,
right?" he said.

"Starting with Crassus," Froggie agreed.

Froggie'd stopped trying to get his mind around the whole of the past; time went on too far now. Little
bits of memory still stuck up like rocks in a cold green sea. One of those memories was Crassus,
red-faced with the effort of squeezing into his gilded cuirass, telling the Parthian envoys that he'd explain
the cause of the war at the same time as he dictated terms in the Parthian capital.

The Commander's flying chariot came over a range of buildings. The guards in the gate tower here, a
squad from the Ninth Cohort, leaned over the battlements to watch. One of them made a joke and the
others laughed. Glad they weren't going, Froggie guessed.

The Harbor, the Commanders city across the river from what had been the barb capital, had started as a
Roman palisade thrown up half a mile out from the huge metal ship from which the legion had landed. The
open area had immediately begun to fill with housing for civilians: those from the metal ship and also for
barbs quick to take allegiance with the new masters whom Roman swords had imposed.

Glabrio must've been thinking the same thing Froggie was, because he eyed the barbs thronging the
streets and said, "If anybody'd asked me, I'd have waited till I was damned sure the fighting was over
before I let any of the birds this side of my walls. The men, I mean. They strut around like so many banty
roosters."

"Next time I'm having dinner with the Commander," Froggie said sourly, "I'll mention it to him."

The flying chariot settled majestically onto the space left open for it beside the gate. Froggie felt the hair
on the back of his arms rise as it always did when the machines landed or took off nearby. This was a big
example of the breed. It carried the Commander and his driver; two of the Commander's huge,
mace-wielding toad bodyguards; Pollio, the legion's trumpeter; and five of the male barbs who'd joined