Blood Forest Read online

  The quiet and the muted voices pushed the irritated Titus out of his silence. ‘Grow some balls,’ he scolded the older pair. ‘So it’s a fucking forest? So what? A tree can’t hurt you, you fucking idiots.’ The outburst was harsh, Titus’s face harsher still. His comrades reddened and looked away.

  ‘Just think of this place as a city with leaves,’ Rufus said softly. His words were directed at the men of the section, but his eyes were on Titus, letting his friend know that he had spoken out of turn, but Titus’s scowl showed no signs of slipping.

  Not even when a scream echoed through the trees. It was an agonized, rolling shriek. The kind that marked the end of a life.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ Moonface blurted. Up and down the column, hands went to the pommels of short swords. As a reflex, several men tested the fit of their armour, and rolled their shoulders – these were the most salty of veterans. If a fight was coming, they would be ready, muscles loose and limber.

  Titus hadn’t moved. ‘It’s a scream, you tart. Did you think the Germans were going to lie back and open their legs for us?’

  ‘Will they attack the column?’ Cnaeus asked, doing his best to keep his voice flat. I noticed how he clamped his jaw down to hide any tremor of fear, and perhaps Titus saw the same and admired the boy’s effort, for he thawed, just slightly.

  ‘Relax, young ’un, that’s why we have the light infantry out there to screen us.’

  ‘Better they get it than us.’ Moonface shrugged. ‘They’re not real citizens, anyway. Just auxiliaries.’

  ‘They’re still our soldiers,’ Rufus replied coldly. ‘Gods, Moon, you are an ignorant bastard sometimes.’

  I took from his tone that someone close to him had once served in such a unit.

  ‘My father,’ he told me, feeling the question in my gaze.

  ‘Your father what?’ Moonface asked, oblivious.

  Rufus ignored the question, and the section lapsed into a nervous silence that Stumps was anxious to escape. He spoke up, licking his lips. ‘Hey, Chicken. How about you give us a story? Lighten the mood.’

  ‘No,’ the older veteran answered flatly. He’d taken Lupus from his pouch, and was concentrating on nuzzling his nose into the creature’s fur. ‘You’ll only take the piss.’

  ‘Nope. Promise. Come on, mate,’ Stumps urged, putting his hand on a surprised Cnaeus’s shoulder. ‘You’d like a story, wouldn’t you, you fine specimen of a soldier?’

  ‘Yes please, sir,’ Cnaeus eventually managed, his words directed at the gnarled veteran.

  ‘Sir, by fuck!’ Stumps grinned. ‘You can’t let him down now!’

  ‘Fine, a story,’ the elder sweat assented, lowering Lupus from his face. ‘When we campaigned with General Drusus …’ He paused at this point, waiting on the anticipated ambush from Stumps, but despite a grin, his younger friend stayed quiet, and so Chickenhead drawled on. ‘When we campaigned with him, one of our centuries came across a group of women in the forest. They were all beautiful – stunning, really – with long blond hair, and dressed in bright white robes.’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’ Stumps smiled, winking at the blank-faced Micon.

  ‘They were priestesses,’ Chickenhead explained. ‘And they’d been slitting the throats of our men, and collecting the blood in a bronze cauldron. It was almost overflowing.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Chicken,’ Stumps groaned. ‘I said something light-hearted!’

  ‘So you wouldn’t want to hear about how they cut out the men’s tongues, and nailed heads on to trees?’

  ‘Not the kind of nailing I wanted to discuss, mate, but thanks all the same,’ Stumps replied, shaking his head. Beside him, Micon and Cnaeus had turned shades of white and green respectively.

  ‘Look at that!’ Stumps now laughed, pointing at the pair. ‘What’s the matter, boys? Little queasy? Well, listen to this.’ He embarked on a story that I have no doubt was as crude as it was intimate, but I heard none of it.

  My ears were ringing. Blood pounded inside my skull, a tide that I was sure would burst forth through my eyes, such was the pressure. The assault had come without warning, but I expected it was Chickenhead’s talk of sacrifice that had breached the walls of my mind’s defences. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I stayed on my feet. I knew that wouldn’t happen unless I could clear my vision of the sights in the grove: the withered corpses in cages; the staked, disembowelled dead. How had I not heard their screams? How had I escaped the same fate?

  The ringing in my ears grew louder, until it was all I could hear. My eyesight blurred, and then it vanished.

  But somehow, I stayed upright.

  Chickenhead. As my senses returned, I saw that the veteran had positioned himself behind me, a casual hand on the belt, and a shoulder against my back, enough to keep me straight. He’d done it so nonchalantly that, standing in tight formation as we were, none had noticed my near collapse.

  ‘Thank you,’ I managed, once my muscles would respond.

  He leaned in close, so that his words were for my ears only. ‘Tonight, you get some bloody sleep. Scream all you want. You can’t stand in a battle line like this.’

  A battle line. Would it come to that?

  Perhaps Pavo read my thoughts and was going to give me the answer, because he now appeared from the head of the century. ‘Titus,’ he called with his usual frown. ‘Screening troops haven’t checked in with the legion commander.’

  ‘And?’ Titus countered, his patience in short supply.

  ‘And he wants you to find out what’s happened to them,’ Pavo replied, turning quickly on his heel to avoid follow-up questions.

  ‘Must be nice to have the legate ask for you personally.’ Stumps’s laugh would have been hollow, had it not been filled with sarcasm.

  ‘Strip off your kit,’ Titus ordered us. ‘Short swords only. Take off your helmet.’ He directed the final instruction to the younger soldiers, who looked confused.

  ‘You’ll need your hearing,’ Chickenhead explained as he slipped Lupus inside the cloth pouch that hung from his neck.

  Moonface snorted. ‘Can’t you leave that thing here?’

  ‘I’d sooner leave you.’

  ‘Listen up,’ Titus rumbled, gathering the section about him. Now that danger seemed close at hand, any sign of his introverted reverie had vanished. Here was a man who knew that, in a fix, it took every scrap of sense, every sinew of muscle, to come through alive. ‘No more than ten feet between you. Keep low; try not to make a silhouette. If you see something, make sure you pass it along, but quietly! Keep the line intact.’

  ‘And if something happens?’ Stumps pressed, nervously licking his lips.

  ‘Then we’re probably fucked,’ Titus answered, with no trace of humour. ‘Maybe if you’re fast, you’ll make it back to the column. ’Course, then there’s the chance they’ll execute you for running.’

  And with those words of encouragement ringing in our ears, we slipped off the track and into the long shadows of the forest.

  19

  Beneath the high branches of oaks and sycamores, the leaves still full and green from summer, the forest floor was thick with thriving plant life. Rivulets and gullies criss-crossed the fertile ground – perfect places from which an enemy could spring an ambush – but their random nature made it impossible to methodically search them from one end to the other.

  ‘Keep your spacings,’ Titus hissed to the section. We were only twenty yards into the forest, but already the combination of thick vegetation and steep-sided ditches was forcing the men to break formation. Sound seemed deadened by the trees, and yet the slightest crack of a fallen branch rang out like a ship hitting rocks.

  I glanced to my left, seeing the wide form of Moonface’s head peering anxiously over the lip of a gulley. To my right, Titus was scowling hard. Perhaps he hoped the forest would bend to his whim, as did so many others, and part before him. Dappled light shone through the canopy, the sun painting shifting patterns across the
men’s armour.

  I was not uncomfortable in forests, nor a stranger to them in wartime. I knew that they were not a happy home for the Roman legionary, trained as he was to operate as part of an efficient, brutal killing machine. In situations like this, one had to become an individual, and to rely on the most basic of instincts. Sight would get you only so far in such dense vegetation. Sound, a sense so neglected by the heavy infantry, was your greatest ally here: a rustle when there was no wind; a clink of metal on metal; muted voices, such as Titus’s as he once again ordered the section to hold formation.

  I slid down the bank of a dry stream bed, using my left hand to control my descent, my right holding the sword that I had dulled with mud prior to leaving the track. All but Moonface had followed my example, until Titus had ordered him to do the same.

  ‘Save your spit and polish for when we’re back in the fort,’ he’d growled.

  I lay flat on the bank, peering ahead, working my eyesight methodically over what lay ahead of me – first the foreground, then the middle ground, and finally the far ground. Once I was satisfied – or as near satisfied as I could be – that there was no German spear waiting in my immediate path, I would resume my crouched advance, cover another short distance, and then repeat the process. No one, no matter how skilled, can concentrate on maintaining their own stealth while uncovering another’s, and all while on the move. It had to be broken down.

  ‘You move well,’ Titus whispered, joining me in the next gully and lying beside me.

  I nodded. Now was not the time for unnecessary words. I put a finger to my lips, and Titus took that as a signal to hold up a hand. From the absence of rustling in the undergrowth, it seemed as though the section had successfully been brought to a halt.

  Titus didn’t ask me why I held my tongue, or why I stared into the undergrowth like a hunting hound with a scent in its nostrils. He may not have known me, he may not have liked me, but he had seen enough of me to know that in situations like this my instincts were worth heeding.

  ‘Something shining,’ I told him finally, so quietly that I saw his thick eyebrows knot as he strained to hear.

  ‘Twenty yards, two knuckles to the right of the oak with the snapped lower branch,’ I answered the question in his eyes, and Titus held out his arm in the direction of the tree. Clenching his fist, he used the tree as a marker, and counted two of his scarred knuckles to the right of it. There, certain enough, something was shining, and nature is rarely responsible for such things.

  Titus used the flat of his palm to urge me to stay in position, and moved out of the gully. For a big man, he moved well, light on his feet. Little wonder he was a good fighter. He returned swiftly from ordering the others to stay in position, then gestured that he and I should lie down at the bottom of the ditch. It was a good idea. The closer to the ground, the deader the sound of our necessary conversation – or at least, his imparting of orders.

  ‘You move us to it. I’ll be a few feet behind you. We get attacked, don’t hang around. Just put them down if you need to, then run.’

  He must have seen the surprise in my eyes that he had bothered to contemplate my survival, should there be violence. The big man smiled, but offered no explanation. Perhaps he simply reasoned that he could outrun me, and that I’d do enough to distract any pursuit long enough for him to get clear. It was hard to feel optimistic about a man who had nearly killed me on our first meeting.

  Titus rose, sitting back on his haunches, and waited for me to climb over the lip of the gully. Instead, I traversed ten feet along its length. I felt his gaze burning into my back, but he didn’t push for the explanation, which was a simple one – if someone had seen me slide into that ditch, then they’d be watching the same spot for me to re-emerge. I didn’t expect that a few feet would render me invisible, but perhaps it would be enough to force them to shuffle and thus betray their own position, giving me a few seconds to save my skin.

  Out of the ditch now, I let my shoulders go loose, but my hand stayed firm about the pommel of my sword. I had my arm half-cocked, the point of the blade angled forward. If an attack came, I would get one chance to drive the iron home.

  I stopped to listen, hearing only the shallow breathing of Titus behind me. In the distance, I thought I caught the echo of trumpets and drums, but it was gone before I could be certain. A trick of the mind, perhaps. I stepped forward.

  Whatever had been shining was no longer visible to me – the angle of light had changed from my vantage in the ditch – but I had marked the spot well, and was close enough to peer through the branches of the wispy shrub, and to see that it was too thin to hide an ambush. Either that, or its occupants had moved – but to where?

  I stalked to the oak, the closest hard cover, Titus moving automatically to the other side. We rounded the ancient tree, blades up and ready, but the only foe we found was one another.

  ‘I was wrong.’ I sighed, noticing now the adrenaline thumping through my veins. It is only when the sense of danger recedes that one becomes aware of the body’s overactive impulses.

  ‘No.’ Titus shook his head, and gestured that I follow him. He moved to the wispy shrub and bent his knee, coming up with something in his hand – a ring. ‘Bronze,’ he announced, holding it up for my inspection. He was smiling, the owner of the jewellery by default. I was not.

  The ring was attached to a finger.

  Searching the area nearby, we soon found the traces of more blood, and the signs of struggle – snapped branches and divots in the earth – but Titus was loath for us to wander too far.

  ‘But we haven’t found the auxiliaries,’ Moonface protested feebly, caught between his desire to fulfil his duty and fear of his section commander.

  Titus snatched the severed finger from Stumps, who had been giggling as he held it in place of his own missing digits, and made as if to poke Moonface in the eye. ‘This didn’t fall off on its own, did it? Now, Pavo said to find out what happened to the screening troops. He didn’t say we actually had to find them, right, Chicken?’

  Chickenhead shrugged. He was long enough in the tooth to know that orders could be twisted in more than one direction.

  ‘We found out what happened to them,’ Titus asserted, wagging the finger. ‘So let’s get back to the column before the same thing happens to us. Single file: it’ll be quicker. Let’s go.’

  The men turned back into the forest, Rufus taking the lead, Titus trusting his friend’s sense of direction.

  ‘Wait.’ It was Chickenhead who called a stop to the withdrawal before it could truly begin. ‘Where’s the young one?’

  Quickly searching the faces of the section, I realized he was referring to Micon. So quiet and unassuming, the young soldier had not been missed, and now no one could be sure when he had last been seen.

  ‘This is fucking great,’ Titus snarled. ‘I’m going to look like a right cunt if we go back one short. Who was next to him in the line?’

  It had been Stumps.

  ‘Just leave him,’ he protested, angry at his own mistake. ‘I told him to stop. It’s his own fault if he kept bloody walking.’

  ‘And have Pavo hold this over me?’ Titus snorted. ‘No. We find the stupid bastard.’

  ‘I’ll find him,’ I offered, but my words earned only a look of disdain from the big man.

  ‘Get into formation, and remember whose section this is. The rest of you, spread out. Extended line.’

  I took my position to Titus’s left. I had wanted to be alone, for more reasons than one. True, I fancied that without the noise and distraction of the other soldiers, I could have found the wandering Micon fast enough – and the sooner he was found, the sooner we could rejoin the relative safety of the column – but the more pressing reason was that I needed to test myself. I needed to know what was in my mind. Left alone in the forest, knowing that my absence would be attributed to death and not desertion, would I run, or would I find my way back to the column, and my section?

  I needed to kn
ow that answer.

  Instead, I moved across the dense forest floor with the other soldiers, trying to take myself out of my own mind and into Micon’s. Realizing I had been separated, what would I do? If the boy had any sense, he would go to ground, wait and listen, emerging only when our search party approached.

  But Micon was not known for his wisdom.

  ‘Cnaeus!’ echoed through the trees in the boy’s dull monotone. ‘Cnaeus, where are you? I’m on my own!’

  ‘Jupiter’s hairy balls,’ Stumps groaned. ‘The lad must be tired of livin’.’

  ‘Quiet,’ Titus ordered, attempting to discern the direction of the voice from the echo in the trees. ‘This way.’

  ‘We’re not actually going after him, are we?’ Moonface spoke up, alarmed.

  ‘Stay here if you like,’ Titus snapped. ‘Close up,’ he ordered the section, and we came together, an arm’s width between each man, swords poised and ready.

  ‘Cnaeus!’ the idiot kept calling as we advanced. ‘Cnaeus, is that you?’

  ‘He’s too far away to hear us,’ I whispered to Titus, who nodded.

  ‘Trick of the mind,’ he grunted, though I could see by the way his hand gripped the pommel that he expected otherwise.

  ‘Cnaeus!’ the boy called again.

  I could see him now, standing on the raised lip of a ditch, his usually blank face etched in confusion, sword hanging limp by his side.

  ‘Cnaeus!’ he shouted, looking over his shoulders in search of his rescuers.

  ‘We go get him,’ Titus hissed at me, loud enough so that the others could hear.

  We worked as before, myself in the lead, Titus at my back.

  ‘Cnaeus!’ Micon hollered.

  ‘Shut up, you idiot,’ I shushed him. The young soldier was looking at me as if our situation were the most natural in the world. I took a hold of him by the shoulder, and twisted him back in the direction of the section.

  ‘Everyone went,’ he told me matter-of-factly.

  And that’s when they attacked.

  You had to admire their patience, waiting quietly for bigger prey while unwitting bait had bleated in their grasp. From the blur of motion, I knew that there were at least a dozen of them, coming over a gulley’s lip like a wave over a breakwater. I had the vaguest impression of spears, bearded faces and a charging war cry, and then I was running, Titus ahead of me, the big man barrelling through the undergrowth like a chariot.