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dark-complexioned, wiry man of few unnecessary words, simply nodded. Marcus Tulius was that rarity, a twenty-year legionnaire who had taken five years to make centurion and seven more to rise to command of a legion. He was an exemplar of the Roman professional soldier, and therefore a special favorite.
    It also made him the sort of general you could assign necessary but inglorious or even odious tasks and know that he would get them done. Which was more than you could say for Titus Labienus, Caesar’s second-in-command, a greater leader of men and tactical thinker by far, but one who fought for the joy of glorious battle alone, like a Teuton or a Gaul.
    “Sort out Roman swords and armor and the Gallic swords, and leave the rest to rot,” Caesar ordered. “It wouldn’t fetch enough to justify the bother of hauling it away.”
    Tulius nodded again.
    “Slaves?” inquired Caesar.
    Tulius’ shrug may have been all too eloquent, but Caesar pressed him for more detail anyway. “How many?”
    “Fewer than two hundred able-bodied ordinaries,” Tulius told him. “They
do
find it difficult to surrender in a condition suitable for mines or quarries.” His expression brightened somewhat. “But the same will to fight to the death does make these Teutons great gladiator material when you can capture them intact. I’d say we have twenty or twentyfive, three or four of them potential favorites in Rome itself.”
    Caesar nodded without any great enthusiasm, saluted, then rode slowly toward his own field headquarters to be alone with his own thoughts.
    Teuton gladiators did command handsome prices, but he had counted on taking many more slaves during this phase of the war. Thus far the war was running at a loss, for the slave trade was not covering the difference between what the more and more reluctant Edui were paying him to support his expanding army, and his own mounting costs.
    Worse, by now Caesar had learned enough to know that able-bodied warriors in the prime of life would never be plentiful slave material here. Both Gauls and Teutons preferred fighting to the death even to a chance to fight their way to a retirement of riches, fame, and Roman citizenship in the arena. Odd, since, if one was going to fight to the death anyway, one had nothing to lose by giving a career as a gladiator a try.
    Indeed, the Gauls and the Teutons, though both would slit your throat for saying so, were really cousins in the same family of peoples. Both had arrived as marauding bands of nomads from the endless eastern plains. The Teutons kept mostly to the north and west of the Alps. The Gauls had pillaged their way through Italy all the way to Rome under their so-called King Brenn. But once they were driven back here by Rome, Brenn’s “kingdom” had degenerated back into a collection of tribes, each ruled by a vergobret, leaving “Gaul” a nation that really only existed on Roman maps.
    Yet, whereas the Teutons had remained much as they had always been, the Gallic tribes had become more civilized. They farmed, were husbandmen, mined, and smelted ores. They were excellent smiths and produced jewelry as good as most in Rome. They guarded the secrets of dyes whose hues no one else could yet produce, and they built rude but usable roads and cities of a modest kind; some had even learned to write their language in the borrowed Greek alphabet.
    Give them a coherent system of government, and you could fairly deem them civilized. Indeed, they were already beginning to copy the style of the Roman Republic. Vergobrets, although they weren’t yet called “consuls,” were elected by tribal councils for short fixed terms; a few such councils had begun to call themselves “Senates.”
    What made the Gauls different from the Teutons?
    This was a conundrum that Caesar knew he would do well to fathom before he turned his attention to them. Which would have to be fairly soon. He was running out of Teutons. Already there were mutterings to be heard