There is a dark place where men go at times.
For some, it begins when you are eight years old, and there is blood on the hide tent you used to sleep in. You want to call out for your father but feel as if he will not hear you. A man in deep crimson crouches next to you and offers his hand.
"Come willingly," he says, "or be buried next to your savage whore of a mother, whichever one she is."
Everything is different. The food you eat. The words you are meant to use. They are foreign and unfamiliar to the ear and on the tongue, but when you say it better than the child next to you, a man in a large headdress smiles.
The clothes are stifling, and hot, and itchy. Shoes feel heavy on your feet. At night, you hear some of the others crying quietly into their pillows. They are from other places. One was from the tribe upriver that used to harass your cattle. When you sleep, you hear the shaman singing in the old tongue.
Without needing to be told, you know not to cry when another boy splits your brow open with a club in the practice arena. He is a good year or two older, taller, wider. The blood runs into your left eye, and the instructor does not tell him to stop. Instead, he tells the boy to crush your skull.
He hits you again, and you catch yourself on the arid ground by your palm. Your fingers dig in and a moment later you've thrown sand in his eyes, and use the moment he's covered them to deliver your fist into his throat. You do not hear the instructor say a word, and he does not tell you to desist, so you pull the club from the boy's hands and bring it down on his knee. The second blow shatters it.
"Stop." The voice holds no concern for the whimpering boy or his lame leg and aching throat. "Drop the weapon." It falls from your hand.
Before, they called you–like the rest of the tribal captures–savage boy. Now they call you something that they say means savage fox.
When you are fifteen, your hand is comfortable around the grip of a machete. Your muscles seem honed so very perfectly for swinging the weapon. Your eyes are sharp and watchful, your mind active and spinning with the details of events around you. So many boys have died in the training camp. You no longer remember their names, if they'd even been given one yet.
Each time one of them falls and refuses to get up, and lies drooling in the sand, the rest are made to kick him. If the instructor does not feel as if you kicked him hard enough, you are whipped. You have never been whipped. By the time it is over, the beaten ones–their stomachs turn a shocking violet and many stop breathing in the night. At dawn, everyone who shares the tent has to carry the corpse outside camp and bury it.
After the first time, it becomes easier. After many more, you find yourself watching the corpses slowly disappear under layer upon layer of dirt, and you know you will not lie down.
By the time you have been raised up from fighting your fellow legionaries to fighting your enemies, you are so used to death that you feel nothing when the young men around you are catching bullets in the thighs, bellies, and heads as you charge the line with nothing but a machete.
When you plant your blade into the shoulder of a boy not so much older than yourself, it feels like sinking it into a hock of meat. Later, you will realize you recognize the feeling from being taught to butcher brahmin as a child. A man had held his hand over yours and showed you how to grip the blade. Maybe it was your father–you cannot remember, but you push the thought from your head.
The boy meets your eyes for a brief moment. He looks scared. You do not feel scared. You do not feel anything. You tear your blade from him, let him fall, and move onto the next. Many have died already. You were not one of them.
Your legs are shaking from fatigue when you finally crouch by a fire after the attack, and you fall on your knees to rest them. There is blood on your face, and you can taste the metallic tang of it along with the salt from your sweat as it all drips down over your lips. There are many less boys that go to sleep in the tents than had woken up in them that morning.
The ache in your muscles drags you into sleep as soon as you've lain on your cot. You sleep, deeply, and for a long time. For your victory, your decanus doesn't wake the lot of you for an extra hour the next morning. When you break fast the next day, you think briefly about the evening before, but find yourself far more concerned with your flatbread and hard-egg than the thoughts of the first men you'd ever killed.
If you ever had notions of keeping track, they were thrown by the wayside in a few short weeks, as the numbers began to climb ever higher. After some time, the older men slap pieces of armor against your chest, clap you on the back and say you've done well. You don't feel as if you've done much of anything except what you were told, but that has always seemed to be exactly what made everyone so favorable.
Piece by piece–a chest-guard here, a pauldron there–your armor grows, and as such, the things you own. In the night, you wake to find another boy trying to slip away with your vambrace, and you have your knife to his throat before he can escape. He drops your piece of armor, but the thought of him daring to take something of yours–one of your only four possessions, one of the only things you ever remember owning in life–it enrages you.
You thrust your blade against his head and slice the upper half of his left ear off. "Since we are taking things from one another," you say.
He yelps loud enough to wake the decanus, and before the night is over, he is whipped for thievery, and he thanks the decanus for his mercy. By week's end, every legionary under the camp's centurion knew not to steal from the one they call Vulpes Inculta.
After some time, you have acquired almost a full set of armor, and they have pulled you to the backs of the squads to make room for the new crop of green boys. Some of them can hardly grow hair on their faces, and though they wear the same familiar frozen expressions, you think they are as strong as saplings in the breeze.
That summer, you crush a farming village that was foolish enough to resist the Legion's advances. Though you are just as tired as you always are, it has become easier to mask it. In the lull following battle, with ashes floating on the air from burned fields, and the smell of death on the winds, the decanus calls you over to cull the wounded savages and round up the survivors. You plant your spear in the hearts of a few men who have had limbs hacked off or have deep wounds in their bellies. Later, you find two small children, a boy and a girl, huddled in the tallgrass. You crouch next to them and extend your hand.
"Come willingly," you say, "or perish like the rest."
In tears, the two obey.
"What happens to the girlfolk?" you ask the decanus on the long march home. You'd never known.
"They take them to the priestesses. Maybe she'll grow up to be one if she's smart." He shrugs. "If not, maybe a whore. Maybe a wife. If she's cooperative when she comes of age, and pretty, maybe she'll get to serve a centurion. If she isn't, they'll rape her as many times as it takes to make her docile and toss her to the footsoldiers."
You nod.
The girl is no more than six, and she looks back at you from her place atop the plodding pack brahmin as it lumbers down the road. You do not feel for her. It is no worse than the boy child will get, though different.
When you have impressed enough men, they give you a decanus helm and control of a squad of your own. As a reward, they toss a girl into your tent that night. She trips and falls when they shove her in, and their laughter fades into the night as she picks herself up. She is older than you, but shorter and much slighter. It looks as if you could break her delicate little fingers in yours.
"You're young," she says as you stare at her. "Most men don't make decanus at your age." By now, you have lost of track when everyone stopped calling you boy and started calling you a man. The girl looks down. Her voice is dutiful. "You must be an exceptional warrior."
You glance at your bed. It is the first time you have a private tent of your own. Her voice again brings you out of the thought.
"How old are you?" She flinches and adds, "...might I ask?
You think. "Eighteen, perhaps."
She nods and pulls her tunic off. "Will you have me now, sir?"
Her body is soft and curved and malleable in all the ways that yours is not, and looking at her, you feel yourself grow hard. When you grab her, you see apprehension in her face, but you do not care. You run your hands in her hair and smell the dull soap scent on her neck, and grab and pinch and feel her in every place you care to touch.
You have never had dominion over something, even if for a brief time. You like the softness of her flesh under your strong grip, and the more she cries out at your touches, the harder you squeeze. You like making her issue out her little noises.
The feel of sinking your teeth down on her neck excites you. You enjoy the feeling of her pulse under your tongue, her living, breathing lifeblood. She is so real, and you feel it implicitly in every strong grasp. You do not remember touching someone whom you were not trying to kill.
"Please," she whispers, so quiet it almost didn't exist, and she closes her eyes.
You stop. "Please, what?" There is no mercy in your voice. You do not know what mercy is.
She shakes her head, and you continue laying bites into her flesh.
You feel something natural and primal stir within you, drawing you to her core, and soon you push into her with abandon. With the force you exert on her, you have the thought that her body is less fragile than it looks. By the end, she is crying, though quietly. It does not bother you. You have never cried, and no one would have cared if you had.
She pulls her tunic back on and leaves. You fall asleep without redressing, and have a night more restful than any in recent memory.
You like having your own tent. You now go to strategy meetings in the centurion's pavilion, eat his good food on occasion. You have young men who look to you to give them orders. This is one of the first times you've allowed yourself to take in your surroundings. You still have orders, but now you must make them as well.
At first, you are quiet. You watch the men go about their days in camp. They are not sure what to make of you for a time. Part of you knows you will be punished severely if you are not a successful leader, but the threat is starting to matter less and less. You have never been punished for failure before. This is where your restless mind is useful.
You begin to ask small questions. "Why does your tunic have an unmended tear in it?" "Why have you let the leather on your belt crack?" "Is this how your time is best spent?"
They do not know what you mean by it all, but they hear stories of the soldier without a left ear, and they start to pay impeccable detail to their things. Your soldiers are never found to have ill-maintained equipment, they are always clean-shaven, and they fall quiet the moment you enter their tent. And you never had to say a word about it to them.
Your eyes seem made for map-reading, you find when the centurion is planning out raids. He talks about flanking, and cover, and high-ground, and other tactics, and it settles into your brain as if you knew this all along. All the pieces he describes fit together easily, and the seeds start growing on their own in your mind, filling in blanks and reaching further out.
After you lead your men in battle, they stop looking nervous when you enter a room and begin looking proud.
Instead of going where someone points, you now understand the strategic locations you are acquiring. You understand the nearby threats and hazards, terrain and territory, and for a long time, everything you have lived within for well over a decade has taken on a new light.
Rather than simply mimic the details you picked up on in your youth, you suddenly know why so many men did the things they did.
You begin to feel like there is direction and purpose in your actions. When you conquer something you set out to conquer, you begin to feel pride. And you conquer many things. After not too long, you can see from a map that you've marched through much of Arizona.
One day, your forces are driven back by a tribe of four times your number. At camp, though everyone is bruised and bloodied already, you make them choose one from among them, and have the rest kick him until his body turns black. In the morning, he is not there, and the rest have dirt caked on their hands.
After fourteen years in his Legion, you finally meet Caesar on the day of your execution.
Your men follow you without hesitation, and you took them right through a hole in the enemy's line, against your centurion's orders. He wants you dead for it.
You don't know what you expected of Caesar. Some kind of shimmering god, perhaps, for all the talk. He is just a man, as real as you. He has a deliberate way about him. There is no mystery to his feelings on things, and he is more crass than anyone you'd known above a high legionary. You like this about him. There is no hesitation in him when he speaks.
Your centurion condemns you, his frustration growing with Caesar's smile.
"I like his way," Caesar says at the end. "It takes brains and balls."
You smile. "Thank you, my lord."
Your centurion frowns. "He disobeyed orders. In battle. I want him on a cross."
"Not today, I think," Caesar says.
"All due respect, my lord, I don't want him back under my command."
Caesar waves his hand. "Fine. I have something else in mind for this one, then."
And your execution inexplicably becomes a promotion.
You learn much from Caesar in the week you spend in Flagstaff. He means to send you to train under another frumentarius in Colorado. You think you might never have been so far north, or at least, not since you were a child.
"This is not always fighting," he says about it. "Call it diplomacy."
You think on that. "That is a new concept."
"I expect you to find many things, but two at the core. One, those who are exceptionally useful. Two, those who are exceptionally dangerous. Do you think you can do that?"
You remember many years of careful observation. "Yes."
"Good. Those who are useful ought to be recruited to help us, through any means necessary. If they are dangerous, we need information, and we need them distracted, delayed, and demoralized. I need you to become completely adept at this."
"They are meager tribes."
"They are practice for the real war." He looks out at the horizon. "We have not even met the real enemy, and there's much ground to cover before we do."
You nod.
"Learn them," he says. "Learn them and what they are. So well you can walk right past them and they won't even look up."
You are quiet for a moment. This will take a great deal of work. You smile. "As you command, my lord."
You meet the frumentarius in Colorado. You're still unsure what to make of your new role here. You are used to battle and command, and a thousand other intricacies of a life you've lived since you were eight.
"Have you ever walked straight into a tribe without going to war with them?" he asks you when you arrive.
You shake your head.
The man smiles. You find yourself on a ridge overlooking a town in the distance. He tilts his head toward it. "I mean to go in there, make friends and promises, gain their trust and loyalty, and they will listen."
"Is it that simple?" you ask.
"Only if you're intelligent enough." He looks at you with an appraising gaze. "This is far more dangerous than combat, more delicate and vital, and reserved for only those with a sharp mind. Either Caesar sent me someone who can do it, or you'll end up dead soon enough."
You meet his gaze. "Is there a secret to it?"
"When it comes to what to say? Pay close attention, figure out what someone wants most in life, and promise them that, with compelling evidence, manufactured or not."
You sit in thought. "Some would say it's more honorable to meet a man in battle than whisper behind his back."
The frumentarius laughed. "Dull-minded men say that when they are afraid of their own ignorance. They want their enemies to call out where they are because they cannot spot them by their own wits."
Your brow furls in thought, then you smile. "I never thought of it that way."
After not too long, you are on your own, running your own gambits. One time you lead a pack brahmin into a village and act as a lost trader. From this, you become familiar with the layout of the place, their approximate number, and the type of weapons they carry.
Another, you find a war tribe made almost entirely of men. If you help us fight, you tell them, we have many women to give you. Their interest is piqued.
And so go more years in this way. After a time, you start to enjoy the confusion, anger, and sorrow on their faces when they realize your betrayal. You think sometimes it's one thing to grasp victory with the strength of your hands, and another, sweeter thing to coax it out with a silver tongue.
You start to like it when they've heard of you but do not know your face. You like when they turn pallid at the mention of your name.
Their hands do not shake at the mention of battle-hardened centurions. Yet they pass along quiet, fearful whispers of the fox who toasts the village at a feast, and laughs when they all fall poisoned. The man with a smile on his face and a dagger behind his back.
After many years, and many deceptive smiles, empty promises, and countless disguises, Caesar names you leader of the Frumentarii. Soon the scope of your influence is so great that you have to look at a map to plot out all the events that are happening.
You read endless letters from spies around the Four States territory on the state of affairs in their jurisdiction. You send Picus here and Alerio there because you cannot be in so many places at once. You no longer simply work on a task. Now you are creating them.
Now you understand so implicitly how to manipulate. You have studied the NCR dogs for over four years. You understand them like they understand themselves and also know what they really are–the plague rats that are cascading across the west, pushing farther out than they can manage and bringing dissolution as they go.
You can walk among them with many names and faces, and see the things they do.
You have never known anyone to work against each other so often and so easily. Offer one a handful of caps and they'll sell their own sweethearts for a payday. Greed. Money, a high, a fuck. Whatever their vice is, they lose their sense of loyalty for the chance at getting theirs. Animals.
This is the darkness that you live in, so deep and thick as pitch that you've forgotten you've sunken into it. It is very possible you will never emerge from it. In fact, it is probable you will die in it.