By Lot

At dusk they brought the sack. Grease-dark and scarred where the cord had burned it, and the mouths of the men closed when they saw it. The hill was raw earth and winterswept grass and the line of the fossa showed like old scars in the stubble. We had dug it and thrown the dirt pile and slept beside both and run from both when our masters' named enemies broke upon us like weather.

The legate's order came down. The tribune stood with his hands folded as if in prayer. He spoke low, and the air took it back. Cowardice. Disorder. Flight before the foe. The words set themselves like stones in a short wall no one would pass. He said the old name.

Decimatio.

No color in it. A word worn smooth by the handling of centuries.

One in ten.

The centurion took the sack and went among us like a man who walks the rows though there is nothing to harvest but breath. Ten to a knot. Ten to a prayer. Eight to a leather roof, but the law counts in tens. His vitis lay under his arm. He did not need it. We had already given him what he came for.

The stones were river stones. Nine pale. One dark. The river that turned them lay far to the west and had no memory of men. When the sack came to our tent in the centurion's hand we looked at one another like men who had been counting their ribs and misliked the sum. Tiro grinned. He could always see what a man meant to do before the man knew it. It put a boy's face on him. He stood easy beside me as the sack's mouth came near like a wineskin and I a thirsty man. The mouth turned a little in the centurion's hand, and my hand went down into the blind throat among the slick shapes. Easy, Tiro murmured.

I drew a white stone and it lay in my palm like a little moon. I was glad. The gladness had teeth. The breath went out of the men around me. Not relief. A shifting of weight from one rope to another. One in ten flowers only in the heart's math. You say it is small. A seam allowance for death. But every seam touches skin.

Tiro reached and brought up the black. He held it to the last light and it did not take it. He closed his fingers. The boar's mark on his thumb from the hunt in the province was a small white eye. He had told that story often and laughed. He did not laugh now. He looked at me with something like pity. He said, well.

We walked him past the ditch to the cutting where the turf was torn and the clay showed like meat. We were nine. Old Rufus wept and tried to hide it by coughing and the cough shook him like a dog shakes a hare. The centurion stood apart as if he watched a pot or counted the hours to second vigil.

Tiro knelt without being told. He set the black stone on the ground as if it were too dear to keep and spread his hands and looked up. Not at us. At the emptiness above our shoulders as if there were a figure there no one else could see. He spoke softly like a man testing a door to see if it will open and then he nodded.

They had given us cudgels. A stick wants to rise and fall. It knows its work. The first blow belongs to no one and to everyone. We raised the wood and looked at one another as if to borrow a share of courage or guilt that no single man could afford and then the sticks fell and the world narrowed till it had one name.

When it was done we stood panting. Bark in our palms. Notches in the grain. Rufus had vomited and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The centurion came down and tapped a shoulder and said barley rations for ten days and said it like barley was a place we had to march to.

We went back to the lines. Watchfires took and the smoke was a dark river along the earth and the stars came out indifferent. A man cannot be counted and then uncounted. Even if he keeps his white stone and sets it under his tongue like a sacrament. We lay in the leather and the walls breathed with the bodies and someone prayed in a tongue from the east and someone said hush. Men turned. Men stared into the dark. No one truly slept. The hours went by, slow and hollow. At first we waited for the second calling, sure it would come at once. Then the night stretched, and men began to think it was done. But the sack had its own mind, and before dawn it remembered us.

The centurion filled the doorway like a post come to life. The sack hung from his fist. He did not speak. He did not need to. We were ten again: the nine who remained and a boy from the next tent to make the number whole. He smelled of wool and tallow and fear. The dark mouth of the sack watched us like a pupil.

He said that in the matter of discipline what is begun must be completed and that the gods love order. The count should be made again. I do not know what the gods love. I know the forms men make to placate them.

One in ten.

We stared and the tent seemed to breathe out. I said why. A small word and the wrong coin for such a purchase. He looked at me for a time with no weight and said the first taking had loosened what was tight, and there were men whose sticks had not truly fallen, and men spared who felt spared and should feel broken instead.

He looked at my hands.

I had thought I swung hard. In the dusk and the shouting and the blind work of it a man cannot take account of his soul. It was nothing for him to see and everything for me not to.

The centurion held out the sack. The boy drew white and his eyes shone as if the stone had a light after all. Rufus drew white and clapped his hand over his mouth like a child. I reached in and felt the smooth work of water. I thought of the river that rounded them and of how a river does not ask to be forgiven. Between thumb and finger I knew already what I held. Not by feel, but by the river’s arithmetic.

Black.

The men looked down. None looked at me as Tiro had looked. They did not have his gift. The sack shut like a mouth on an old secret.

It is a strange thing to be caught by a net you cannot see. Men go on with their names and their duties and their small comforts like dogs that have learned the yard by the length of the chain. One day the chain is not there and they run and it is joy and when they reach the end of their running the chain is there after all and it jerks them off their feet.

The centurion set his hand on my shoulder and it was not unkind. He said come. We went under stars that had not moved. The wind off the low hills smelled of crushed thyme and dung and iron. He had no cudgel for me. I would not have taken it. They put them in the others’ hands and the sticks looked like bones. The boy held his two-handed the way you grip a mattock.

I knelt and set the black stone where Tiro’s still lay in the clay. The ground had kept the shock of him like a bruise. There are places in the world that remember you.

Rufus stood near, his hands shaking the way an old man cuts bread. He had made his peace with many things and here was one more. He said the only word left to a man in a small room. Forgive. It is not a word meant for the living. It is a road sign in a country of the dead.

I raised my head. Do it, I said. There is a distance past knowledge where the next step and the last step are the same and I had come to it. I thought of the river. I thought of Tiro and the boar and his laugh and how he had held the black up to the failing light as if to teach it the way. It came to me he had not drawn that stone by chance. He had watched my hand at the mouth in the centurion’s grip and hinted to set the course of my fingers. So I was spared in the moment and not spared in the sum. A friend’s mercy is sometimes only the long road to the same gate.

Men came forward. The first blow is a teacher. It tells the second what to be. I looked at Rufus and he looked away. The boy closed his eyes. In that breathless interval I felt the camp as if my ear were to the ground: tesserae ticking in other tents, murmurs, a horn beyond the ditch trying a note and thinking better of it, the hollow rattle of barley. The law reached back to the days when wolves hunted men in daylight and men stood in rows, and when the rows broke there was only this.

Someone spoke a prayer and lost the words and what came out was not Latin and not Greek and not anything a god would know. It does not matter. The gods take what is given.

The wood found flesh.

Afterward there is always a moment when nothing knows what to do. The earth does not know. The men do not. The wind moves and then does not. The centurion went up the bank. He might have gone to piss. The others stood as if waiting for an order. There was none. There never is. We settled like leaves.

I was not there to see what followed. Whether the legate took another tenth or stayed his hand. Whether the enemy came again and we met them like men who had learned or men who had forgotten. But the count goes on. It always does. A finger to every tenth shoulder, the mouth of a sack, the river’s work, the breath catching when a man reads the lot he was always going to hold.

When it came again we knew the end. The waiting had finished its work. By next month the camp would tire and forget. By lot, somewhere else, it would be remembered.