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The man from Prynesty was afraid.

Terror gripped his heart like a closed fist. It squeezed his lungs,

making his breath shallow and rasping. The sweat pouring from his armpits and down his back soaked the tunic underneath his thick linen corsolate. The bellowing of the elephants was getting louder,

though it still echoed through the valley at a distance,

and he felt his guts constricted the sound. He had run the last time he heard that noise,

on the battlefield of Oskillum four years earlier. The beasts had gourd and trampled men he had known all his life, fine warriors who had survived Samnite ambushes and howling gulls. For a moment, the shame of the memory nearly overwhelmed him.

But then he felt the two jablons in his hand.

The wood of the shafts was smooth and familiar.

He took a breath and sucked air deep down into his belly.

His heart slowed.

Looking left and right, the man from Prynesty saw friends and neighbors,

and mounted on a horse behind them, the judge, whose estate sat on the hill overlooking his

small farm, his armor glinting in the sun. The judge's right arm hung at his side,

useless after a wound inflicted by a Samnite years before, and his voice, familiar from a dozen

campaigns, gave the Prynestian heart. He wouldn't shame himself again, the soldier thought, and his voice, familiar from a dozen campaigns, gave the Prynastian heart.

He wouldn't shame himself again, the soldier thought, and gripped the javelins tighter.

A wall of spears came into view ahead of them, pointing upward toward the blue summer sky.

These Greeks liked their spears absurdly long. That was how they did it in the East, he'd heard,

but they seemed a bit

ridiculous to him. Still, he'd learned the hard way that the soldiers of King Pyrrhus of

...