Death by Greek Fire
By B.R. Stateham
Death comes in the deepest portion of the night. Suddenly and without warning. Especially here. Deep in enemy territory, surrounded by sullen mountains shrouded in dark forests underneath low-lying carpets of icy fog. Unseen death stalks the careless. An arrow from out of the darkness. The sudden thud of a hurled javelin cracking into one’s lorica segmentata. The unexpected surge of a black figure rising out of the darkness was followed by the swift stroke of cold steel across yielding flesh. In the night, death comes suddenly, swiftly, and indeed.
Especially here, on this strangely quiet, foreboding night in Dalmatia. The promise of death so near in the darkness made the entire legion nervous and fidgety. From his long experience soldiering, he knew what fear could do to a legion. A legion spooked and restless the night before a possible battle contained all the ingredients for disaster. Fear could make a legion, led ineptly, to bend. To yield ground. Eventually, it shatters like cheap pottery thrown onto a cold stone floor.
Not that the commander was inept. Inept was a harsh descriptor. Inept connoted incompetence and a casual disregard of assigned duties. Young would be a better description. Inexperienced. Thrust into the command of a legion long before he was ready for it. The young Gaius Cornelius Sulla was just old enough to be elected into the Roman Senate. Old enough, but contrary to tradition and Roman law, the young Senator had never served in the army and never held one of the minor political offices which were typically prerequisites before running for a Senator’s seat. Money and his father’s reputation allowed the boy to bypass mere formalities. He was suitably impressed with the duties of being a legion commander. He wanted to prove to his father he was the man and son his father wanted. It was just that … well … the lad was but a boy. A boy given the command of a Roman legion, which was sorely below nominal strength in manpower, was hurled into the depths of enemy territory without proper training and equipment.
Genre: Mystery/Detective
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B.R. Stateham
Biography.
About the author – My name is B.R.Stateham. I am a seventy-four-year-old kid who never grew up. I write dark noir police-procedural and even darker fantasy sci-fi. And although I look like a second cousin to Frankenstein, I’m just as stubborn. Over the years, I’ve tried to do two things with my writing. First, I want to clarify and make my imagination more visual as it is transcribed onto the written page. I do not like the ‘bare bones’ approach to writing fiction. Just telling a starkly plain story with no visual cues to stir the reader’s imagination seems akin to a scam perpetrated on the reader.
The balance between too much imagination and too little is a battle that is always constant in a writer’s efforts. But, as in almost everything else, years of experience help tremendously in finding that balance. Secondly, telling a story with short, clear sentence structures is another nut to crack for any writer. The natural tendency for a writer is to write long, meandering, complex-compound sentences that stretch on forever and seemingly never end (like maybe this one?). Too long a sentence, and the reader becomes lost. Too little in a sentence or too stark in its construction, the reader is like a man in a small boat out on a storm-tossed sea bobbing up and down and distinctly ill at ease.
Well . . . so much for a writer’s woes. I plan to keep on writing what I love to read. Since I can’t find the writing style I like to read–I might as well write it. Maybe you might find that you want this particular style as well. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
B.R. Stateham
