Legion Read online

  LEGION

  ‘Fear the Eighth’

  by

  Geraint Jones

  To the Royal British Legion

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  PART TWO

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  PART THREE

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Pannonia: AD 1

  I was watching my friend die.

  He was slumped back against a slab of rock smeared red with his blood. Right hand held against the torn chain mail and flesh of his stomach, left arm hanging useless by his side. When he pressed against the spear-wound, dark liquid seeped between his weathered fingers.

  I wanted to make him laugh before he left us. ‘You’re doing a shit job of dying, Brutus.’

  ‘Piss off,’ he tried to snarl, but his grey eyes were smiling.

  Alone, we sheltered between rocks in an arid canyon between scorched mountainsides. The stink of smoke, blood and shit teased our nostrils – nearby a small village burned. From the sound of drawn-out screams, my friend was not the only one whose flesh had become a home for iron.

  ‘Haven’t you done this before?’ I tried to joke, desperate to show indifference to the desolation and his wretched state. Desperate to be the warrior that he had taught me to be.

  The old soldier grimaced through what was usually a brilliant smile. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.’

  I wouldn’t have expected Brutus to say any different. Fifteen years a legionary, he was more than just my section commander. To me he was a friend, a teacher, and a father – or at least as close as I had to one.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I confessed. Sorry because my soldier’s mask was slipping – my hands were shaking. I was scared.

  He saw it and shrugged it away. It was as if his own matter of life and death was an afterthought, his sole attention given to the young soldier in his charge. ‘You saved my life.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re dying.’

  ‘Let’s not split hairs,’ the veteran wheezed, and his words caused us both to burst out in laughter. A brief moment of defiance against the absurdity of it all, before the angry red pain in his stomach gripped my friend once more, and he cursed every god that he could name.

  ‘Fuck off before you make me laugh again.’ He winced. ‘Go check on the others.’

  ‘I shouldn’t leave you.’

  ‘I’m still your section commander, lad. Do as I say.’

  I held the man’s iron stare. I wanted to disobey him. I almost did, but then he grinned, and told me, ‘I won’t die without saying goodbye.’

  It was a ludicrous thing to say, and yet I believed him. I stood and turned my back on my friend. I caught the eye of a knot of soldiers. Two were young, eyes wide with shock, but the others were solid, and I knew that they would see to the comfort of the veteran in our ranks. Then I left the sharp rocks where I had dragged my friend to safety, and moved out on to the canyon’s floor, guided to my half-century by the crackle and hiss of thatch as a mountain dwelling burned furiously. A few other huts stood unmolested for now, but they too would be ash before our withdrawal, of that I was certain. First they would be stacked with the dozen local dead, and I watched as Roman soldiers carried the leaking bodies of the enemy to their final resting place.

  Enemy. It was such a trumped-up term, I knew. The people we had killed that day had been thieves and brigands, nothing more, but they had opposed the rule of Rome, and for that they had died. Some had even fallen to my own sword. They had been my first. I was a killer, I now realized. That morning I had just been . . .

  Me.

  I rubbed at my eyes. How had things changed so quickly in just a few hours? The day had begun with peace, a slither of orange light painting the mountaintops with such majesty that no man had spoken as we readied to march. The dawn which followed that natural splendour was cool, at least compared to the oppressive heat of the mountains in summer, and there was no clue in the air that the hours ahead would see blood, and guts, and shit, and screams. But then, as we shouldered our burdens and staggered up into the stony heights, our section had chanced upon the seemingly deserted camp of brigands operating in the area. We had been looking for them of course, but then we were always looking for outlaws, and never finding them. This was their homeland. These were their mountains. They floated in and out of the ravines like ghosts, and we blundered and sweated our way through the passes with the grace of elephants. Simply finding a recently used camp was cause for celebration, and none of us had expected that the mountain-people would be within miles of our small patrol of forty men, let alone a spear’s length.

  That had changed when Brutus had led our eight-man section to look for water. Who knows why the brigands chose to make a stand that day? Maybe they were simply tired of running; maybe they hated the sight of our uniforms so much that they could no longer keep their blades sheathed. Whatever the reason, they fell upon us with spear and sword, and so unexpected was the ferocity that for a moment it had seemed as though we would be overwhelmed through sheer surprise and violence of action.

  One man had saved us.

  He reacted with such force and viciousness that he almost single-handedly beat back the enemy’s first attack. As others had stood wide-eyed and panicked, this soldier had been consumed instantly by a need to kill and maim, and it was with such reckless disregard for legion sword drill that he had even decapitated one bandit with a single wild swing of his blade. In the face of this battle-tyrant the enemy had lost all spirit and fled, but javelins had spitted their exposed backs like game, and now their bodies lay scattered and pathetic, the mountain’s insects swarming on their spilled blood and flesh. Taking in the scene of the carnage, I now wondered at the savage man who had turned the tide. The man who had welcomed the chance to kill. The man who had run to the legions in search of the promise of such brutal death.

  I wondered about myself.

  I was broken out of my painful thoughts when a hand landed on my shoulder, heavy as a bear’s paw. I turned and looked up into the face of my comrade Varo, his older features as blunt and forbidding as the terrain in which we had fought that day. ‘Come with me.’

  I followed.

  He led me to a legionary laid out on his back, stripped of his chain mail. Beside the wounded man, two soldiers offered water and comfort. One was Priscus, a kindly veteran with as many years’ service as Brutus. The other, Octavius, was a handsome youth who had come through training beside me. I looked at him, and saw that I wasn’t the only one with shaking hands.

  I turned my eyes to the man in their midst. He was a young soldier of our section, Fano. He’d taken a spear-point in the initial attack. The Italian’s skin looked waxen and the colour of dried ash. He was nearer to death’s world than
our own. I knew in that moment that he would die far from the coastal town that had given him his name. A town that he had spoken of with love, and pride. He would never see the sea again. He would never see his mother. Fano had told me that she had cried when he enlisted. How would she weep now?

  ‘Thought you would want to say goodbye,’ Priscus offered, ever wise.

  ‘Goodbye, Fano,’ was all that I said. What else was there?

  Priscus looked at Varo, and motioned to Octavius and myself. ‘Take these two and put the rest of the bodies into the huts.’

  We moved away. Varo sensed I had a question burning.

  ‘Why doesn’t he look to Brutus?’ I asked.

  Varo made no reply. Instead he pointed to a young brigand who lay in a pool of dark blood. A handful of guts protruded from the dead man’s stomach. His eyes were open and staring at an empty blue sky.

  ‘Yours, wasn’t he?’ Varo asked me.

  He was. My blade had gone clean through him. I could feel the resistance of it now, and recalled the heat of the man’s blood on my hand, and his choked breath on my face.

  ‘Your first?’

  I nodded. ‘Then another two.’

  The lump grinned, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘If you didn’t kill anyone before you joined up, how did you know that you’d like it?’ Growing up a big lad in a big city, Varo had come to violence early.

  I said nothing, and looked at the lifeless corpse at my feet. Had I enjoyed killing him? I certainly hadn’t hated it. Looking at the body caused no emotion in me, either good or bad. I was simply numb. In the moment of killing him, all that had existed was rage, and the desire to protect Brutus.

  ‘We walked into a trap here.’ Octavius shrugged, looking at the steep-sided hills and rocky outcrops that scorned our well-drilled tactics. ‘We’re lucky we’re all not like Fano.’

  ‘That’s because this lot are nothing but criminals,’ Varo scoffed, grabbing my kill by the hair and dragging him towards a hut; the dusty ground was streaked red in their wake. ‘Not warriors. Just thieves. This was a tavern brawl on a mountainside, lads. It meant nothing.’

  It meant something to Fano.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Priscus told us after we’d put the last of the Pannonian bodies inside the hovels, and set them alight.

  ‘What about Brutus?’ I asked.

  Priscus said nothing. Varo put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You did well today,’ the older soldier told me.

  ‘What about Brutus?’

  The veterans looked at me with patient eyes.

  ‘You did well, Corvus,’ Priscus said. ‘Let’s get that blood cleaned off you.’

  And then he led me away from the smoke, from the shit and from the bodies. He led me away from the place where I killed for the first time. Where I lost a comrade for the first time. Where I fought like a dog in a pit for the first time.

  Had I known what was to become of my life, I would have lain down and stayed with the dead.

  PART ONE

  1

  Five years later

  There was a rumour of war.

  It was a breathless rumour, carried by merchants, spread by whores and whispered by slaves.

  It was a guarded rumour, hushed by officers, denied by diplomats and savoured by soldiers.

  Savoured by us, because it was a rumour of our war.

  ‘We need to celebrate,’ Varo declared, the slur in his speech announcing that the big man’s celebrations had begun hours ago.

  ‘I’m not objecting.’ Priscus shrugged. ‘Octavius?’

  ‘I’m up for it. Can’t take it with us, can we? If it’s time to die, then I want to leave some rich whores behind. What do you say, Corvus?’

  What did I say? Not a lot. I was known for my temper, not my tongue, and my head was full of war. I didn’t want rumour, I wanted battle. Real battle, against a real enemy.

  ‘He’s got that look again.’ Varo pointed an accusing finger at me. ‘Brooding bastard.’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I replied.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘How long it would take to dig a grave for your fat arse.’

  My companions laughed, and the thinnest of smiles crept on to my face. Octavius saw it and feigned falling from his stool.

  ‘Did you see that, lads? Did you see that? A little more and I’d have worried his face was going to tear in half.’

  ‘Makes a change from worrying about your arsehole tearing.’

  ‘Gods.’ Priscus shook his head. ‘You really are in a good mood. What’s up?’

  I shrugged as if it were obvious. As if there could be no better explanation for smiles, laughter and an excited anticipation for tomorrow.

  ‘War,’ I told them. ‘Our war.’

  We walked into the town with puffed-out chests and raised voices. We were confident bastards, soldiers in our prime. In the years since I had first killed, my friends and I had grown into new positions, but we had not been separated. We each commanded a section in the Second Century of the Second Cohort of the Eighth Legion, which we whittled down to the Second of the Second of the Eighth when talking to those in the know – soldiers and camp followers alike. The century of eighty soldiers was our family, the cohort our village, and the legion our tribe. Priscus, Varo and Octavius were my brothers, and we formed a tight band. Not without pride: we knew that we were good soldiers. The opportunity to fight in a war had eluded all of us except our oldest comrade Priscus, but, none the less, we were trusted by our commanders and respected by our fellow legionaries. When battle did come – as it seemed that it soon must – we knew that other men would look to us when it was time to hold the line, or lead the charge.

  ‘It’ll be Tiberius who commands the army,’ said Priscus as we negotiated the town’s streets, the white walls reflecting the sun into our narrowed eyes. Like many settlements across the Empire, this town had sprung up alongside a fort built to house a legion, the site strategically chosen to best support the imposition of Roman law and order on to a new dominion. The province of Pannonia was a recent addition to the Empire, and Priscus had fought as a boy soldier in the final months of the campaign to claim it. We loved and looked up to him for it.

  ‘He’s a great general,’ Priscus went on, still referring to Tiberius, careful to step over a pile of horse dung on the dirt street.

  ‘What makes him any different?’ Octavius asked, his eyes trailing a slave girl who walked by with her master.

  ‘Well, he loves us for a start,’ the older man mused. ‘He’s not like other aristocrats. He walks and rides with his men. He eats at the table with them.’

  ‘I don’t care where he eats,’ Varo put in. ‘He can feast with the shithouse rats as far as I’m concerned, just so long as he wins.’

  ‘He does that,’ Priscus confirmed with the confidence of a man who had seen that victory first hand.

  Personally, I knew little of Tiberius, and nor did I care. What I did know was that the general had proven himself in battle, that he had at first been a stepson to the Emperor Augustus, but a few years ago had been adopted as a true son in order to provide Augustus with legitimate heirs. Men such as Priscus, who had served under the general, and so had some bond of shared valour, seemed to to follow the developments in his life with some interest, as these pieces of information slowly and surely made their way out from Rome, via both official and unofficial channels. For the majority of the soldiery, however, our biggest concern in times of peace was not who would govern over us, so long as they were paying us. If the pay chests arrived on time and brimming, we cared little whose face was stamped into the coin.

  ‘Today’s on you,’ I told Octavius, with such thoughts in mind. ‘You owe me for the other night.’

  A scowl crossed his handsome face. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Exactly. You were shitfaced and kept dropping your drinks. I probably had to buy three for every one you managed to get into your mouth.’

  Priscus and Varo laughed at t
he memory, and Octavius shrugged, admitting his likely guilt.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ said Varo then, grinning as he spotted ahead of us the vines that marked out the Black Sheep Inn, favoured watering hole of our brotherhood and the cohort at large.

  ‘All right, lads!’ a veteran greeted us by the door. ‘Heard the news?’

  Varo held up his huge hands in protest. ‘I told your wife already: it’s not mine.’

  The old soldier laughed, and the tang of the wine on his breath slapped me in the face and made my nose wrinkle. ‘Not that, you prick. The news about the war! Tiberius is coming, and he’s going to gather the biggest army in a generation!’

  I looked at my comrades. I imagine what they saw in my eyes was the mirror of what I saw in theirs – unbridled excitement, like a child seeing his first toy.

  ‘Where’d you hear this?’ Varo asked, sceptically, knowing how prone soldiers were to inflating numbers.

  The soldierlegionary jabbed his thumb behind him into the inn. ‘There’s a couple of clerks in there from the legion staff. They’ve been spilling their guts for a drink.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘North, across the Danube! King Marabodus is due a good Roman shafting!’

  I watched Priscus’s face as he absorbed the news. For the first time, I saw a little hesitation amongst the jubilation.

  ‘He’s King of the Marcomanni,’ our old head finally ventured. ‘That’s a big tribe.’

  ‘Exactly!’ the veteran slurred drunkenly. ‘Enjoy your night, boys! We’ll either be rich or dead by the end of summer!’

  ‘I know which I’ll be.’ Octavius smiled as he pushed his way to the bar and waved for the innkeeper’s attention.

  ‘You could find King Maro-what’s-his-name’s own horde and you’d still owe us money, you tight bastard.’ Varo smirked. ‘So what you think, Priscus? You’ve gone quiet.’

  ‘It’s a big tribe,’ repeated the old soldier.

  ‘Who did you think we were going to invade?’ Varo shook his head, irritated that his friend’s mood had slumped. ‘Not gonna get rich turning over a couple of farmers, are we?’

  Priscus held his tongue, instead helping himself to a cup of wine that Octavius held out.