Princeps’ Fury

The taurg most closely resembled a bull, Tavi had decided. It was a bit bigger, and considerably humpier about the shoulders. Its rear quarters were much more heavily muscled, as well, and its legs were longer, springier, more in proportion to a hare’s than to anything so large as it was. The beast was covered with thick, curly fur that ranged from deep grey on its blunt muzzle to blue-black on its shoulders and haunches. Its neck was thick, its head was rather tiny, and its brow was half-encircled by a massive, bony ridge that was capable, so the Canim claimed, of smashing through stone walls. Its eyes were tiny and pink and hostile, its wide nostrils drooled a constant stream of slobbery mucus, and its cloven hooves struck at a speed that rivaled that of any warhorse in Alera-and hit with several times the power.

Anag raised a hand and signaled for the group to halt near a circle of standing stones beside the road-the campsite for the night. Forty taurga drew off the road at their long-legged, swaybacked walk, in a maneuver as familiar to them as making camp was to any legionare, and began filing into a circle within the standing stones, three beasts to each. Three blued-steel rings had been set into each stone, each to tether a single taurg.

Tavi slid down from the saddle, keeping a hand on it to control his descent to the ground. He winced at the shock to sore muscles as he landed. The first couple of days in the strange saddles, made for large Canim riders, had been nightmarish, but his body had finally begun to adjust.

The taurg promptly whipped its head at Tavi in an effort to crush his windpipe with the heavy ridge of bone on its skull.

Tavi ducked the attempt without really thinking about it and slashed at the taurg’s vulnerable nose with the ends of his reins, still gripped in his hand. The taurg jerked its head away and tried to kick him with one of its rear legs, lashing a cloven hoof forward in an effort to disembowel him, but Tavi had already slipped forward, alongside the taurg’s head, slipped the reins through the ring in its slimy, sensitive nose, and tied them securely through the ring on the standing stone.

Thus secured, the taurg settled down placidly onto its belly, as most of the rest of the riding beasts were doing.

“Crows take you, Steaks,” Maximus snarled from the far side of the taurg beside Tavi. The beast was dancing in place, shuffling its mass left and right, evidently trying to kick at Max with the rear leg on the far side of its body. “One more kick out of you and I’m walking the rest of the way with a full stomach.”

Tavi stepped forward, slapped the other taurg’s ear to startle it, then seized its nose ring with his hand and jerked firmly. The taurg let out a startled little bawl of basso discomfort, and Maximus appeared, stuffing the reins through the ring and securing the beast as Tavi had, muttering a dark string of curses beneath his breath as he did. “Roasted. Spit on a nice long lance and roasted over a roaring fire. Then boiled. Boiled in a pot big enough to fit your entire lazy, ornery, smelly ass.”

“You’re taking it awfully personally,” Tavi murmured. “I think Steaks and New Boots is probably treating you the same way he does everyone else.”

“It isn’t that’s he treating me badly,” Max growled. “It’s that he’s too stupid to understand something everything with brains enough to see the sky should know.”

Tavi found himself grinning. “What’s that?”

“Legionares are not afraid of dinner,” Max growled, giving the taurg a dire glare. “Dinner is afraid of legionares.”

Steaks and New Boots returned Max’s glare with a placid stare, and began chewing cud where it lay in place.

“Bastard,” Max muttered, and began unfastening the straps of the high-cantled saddle. “Spends all day trying to murder me, and still gets to sack and chow before I do.” The pace and volume of his complaints began to increase steadily. “If I didn’t need his legs, I’d carve them into steaks and serve them up with a nice red wine. Though I’ll bet he doesn’t taste any good, when you get right down to it. Why, I’ll bet you could…”

As Max’s complaints grew steadily louder and more outrageous while he tended to the taurga, Tavi gathered the saddles from his beast, Max’s, and Durias’s, next to Max’s, and began brushing them down from the day’s use.

“Well?” he asked Durias quietly, under cover of Max’s noise.

The Free Aleran centurion was a rather short man, with shoulders so wide that he almost looked deformed. His neck was thicker than a lot of women’s waists, his blocky face plain and scarred here and there with the irregular, fine, jagged cuts of a life spent under slavery, where the lash had wrapped around. He had dark, very intelligent eyes, and thick-knuckled, capable hands that immediately set to the task of cleaning and coiling the saddle straps.