short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Centurions' Rhythm

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The dust on the Appian Way held the print of sandals — not the heavy, measured tread of a legion on the march, but something lighter, hesitant. Three centurions stood at the crossroads outside Capua, their vine-staves planted in the earth, watching a column of slaves move north toward the silver mines.

The optio, a man named Vorenus who had wintered in Salona twelve years past, spat into the dirt. "They walk like the Dalmatae," he said. "Not broken. Not yet."

His companions glanced at the shuffling line — men, women, children, the old man carried on a litter — and saw only property moving to market. But Vorenus heard the rhythm beneath the chains: the pause every seventh step, the way the younger ones matched the elders' pace without looking, the silence that was not fear but a kind of holding.

"In Salona," he said, "the Dalmatae sang while they buried their dead. Three days. Three nights. The Romans waited for the attack that never came. They were not waiting for us. They were waiting for each other."

The column passed. The centurions did not raise their hands. Did not call the cohort. Did not scatter the escort and claim the cargo for Rome.

Later, when the quartermaster asked why the patrol had returned empty-handed, Vorenus only shrugged. "Nothing to report. Just slaves walking."

But he kept a shard of pottery from the roadside — Dalmatian ware, fired in the kilns near Salona, its pattern a spiral that turned back on itself. He carried it in his pouch for the rest of the campaign, and when he died in a ditch near the Rhine, his fingers were still curled around it.