Blood Forest Read online

  Titus scowled, but moved away. I moved with them.

  The boy’s pale face stretched with agony as he screamed. A comrade was holding him from above, his arms under the victim’s shoulders, trying desperately to stop the soldier from sliding further on to the stakes.

  I knelt by the pit, seeing how one shaft had gone clear through the flesh of the boy’s thigh. Another had penetrated his lower back.

  ‘Get an arm!’ Titus ordered. ‘We’ll lift him out!’

  Chickenhead stopped him. ‘Don’t. The stake’s packing the wound. We lift him off it, he bleeds out.’

  The boy let loose another chilling scream.

  ‘He’s gonna bring every tribe in the forests on to us.’ Titus cursed, taking the boy’s neckerchief and tying it about his mouth. The screams continued, muted, but still loud enough to announce our presence.

  ‘Why haven’t you taken him out?’ Pavo snarled, arriving at the pit. ‘Or shut him up?’

  Chickenhead’s milky eyes met Pavo’s glare. ‘We move him, he dies.’

  ‘So move him. You see a surgeon with us? He’s already dead, and if he keeps screaming, then so are we,’ the young centurion coldly explained.

  For a moment, the only sound was the hammering rain and the victim’s panted gasps beneath his gag.

  ‘He’ll die,’ Chickenhead stated finally, and Pavo had the decency to meet his eyes, and then to look at the soldier he was condemning.

  ‘Pull him out.’

  We did, the soldier coming free with agonized screams and wet sucking sounds as his body pulled clear of the trap.

  We laid him out in the mud, his head in the lap of a crying comrade, no older than his friend. As Chickenhead had predicted, the wounds now leaked blood at an alarming rate; the mud beneath our sandals was soon stained red.

  Free of the stakes, the screaming had stopped.

  Chickenhead knelt by the boy’s side and pulled the gag free. ‘Let’s give him some fucking decency.’

  And perhaps it was a sense of decency that kept us rooted to that spot, unable to take our eyes off the dying teenager, an honour guard all that we could offer his departing spirit. Perhaps that was it, or perhaps it was because the manner of his death terrified even the most experienced of us to our core. This was not how a soldier was supposed to die.

  The boy began to mumble, pushing the last of his fleeting strength into his words. ‘Mother,’ he sobbed. ‘I want my mother.’

  Chickenhead tried to soothe him. ‘Hush now, lad.’

  ‘Mother,’ the boy cried again.

  ‘You’ll see her soon.’

  The torrent of blood became a trickle. The boy died. His friend wept, tears splashing down with the rain on to his young comrade’s face.

  ‘Make a litter for the body,’ Pavo ordered the section.

  We went deeper into the forest.

  Every action became automatic, and yet it required a total dedication of the senses. A foot couldn’t be placed without scrutiny. A branch couldn’t be moved without inspection. Soldiers followed my example, and took to sweeping and probing the ground ahead with their javelins.

  Even without the rain and the buffeting wind, the work would have drained a man in hours. With conditions as they were, the century was soon hollow-eyed and gaunt, very different from the troops who had re-entered the forest that morning. We were tired, yes, but the picture of the boy’s death was enough to keep us focused – automatic, total dedication to survival.

  The track had yielded surprises, and yet the greatest shock of all was that the enemy had not attacked us directly. Why this would be, I didn’t have time to speculate, only to offer a quick thanks for small mercies.

  ‘Another log on the track,’ I noted to Pavo. ‘Looks like a big one.’

  ‘Work party up,’ he ordered.

  Titus appeared on my shoulder, the axe he carried looking like a child’s toy in his huge hands. ‘Go on, then, lucky one.’ He smiled sarcastically.

  I left my shield with the section, using my javelin to test the way ahead of me. The track seemed solid. So, too, from a distance, did the fallen tree.

  That was strange. Where the other obstacles had been rotting and wilting, this fallen oak seemed to be in prime condition.

  Something was wrong. A familiar tingle began to creep up my spine. The log was the presence of the abnormal. It was a combat indicator. It took me a few more paces before I could see the evidence through the rain.

  Saw marks. The oak had been cut.

  I expected an instant onslaught of lead slingshot and spears, but nothing changed. The rain beat on my helmet. The wind shook the branches. I quickly moved back to Pavo to make my report.

  ‘Get up there and clear it,’ he ordered Titus.

  ‘What? You heard what he said! They put it there. It’s a trap!’

  ‘This whole track’s a trap,’ Pavo replied icily. ‘And we’ve got to clear it, so get up there.’

  For a moment, I was certain Titus would plunge the axe into the centurion’s neck. Instead, it bit into the fallen oak with a savage rage. Whatever had been building inside the man since we departed the summer camp at Minden came forth in a flurry of blows.

  ‘He’s not goin’ to stop until I’m dead,’ he panted. ‘He’s not goin’ to stop until I’m dead.’

  ‘Pavo?’ Rufus asked. As Titus’s closest friend, he was the only one in the section who could ask personal questions.

  ‘Of course fucking Pavo!’

  ‘Why?’ the ruddy-faced Gaul asked, doubtless on behalf of the section’s veterans as a whole.

  ‘Dice.’ Titus cackled, pausing to inspect the damage wrought with his axe. ‘Day we got paid, he lost every coin he had to me and the QM, and then some. He figures the slate’s wiped clean if I’m gone, but fuck that. You promise me, Rufus. You promise me that if I die, you’ll get every coin owed to me out of that cocksucker. Get every coin, and then pay some drunk bastard to stick glass in his pretty face. Cut it up like a puzzle, but leave the eyes. No, leave one eye! Just enough so he can see what a mess he is.’

  The violence of the words shook most of the men to silence, young Cnaeus open-mouthed at such blatant hostility towards a superior, but Rufus merely shrugged. ‘Fine. You feel better now?’

  ‘A little,’ he admitted, the axe biting down again.

  The oak was thick and strong. I worked a two-ended saw with Cnaeus, Titus’s aim being to split the log into sections that could be manhandled on to the track’s verge.

  ‘Now, I don’t pretend to be Julius Caesar,’ Stumps began, panting from the labour, ‘but it seems to me that there are a lot of trees in this forest, and not so many tracks. Either Varus is plannin’ on opening a lumber business, or we’re goin’ to have to just make our best effort through the trees.’

  Moonface disagreed. ‘The baggage train’s struggling enough as it is. No way it can make it off the tracks.’

  ‘So maybe we leave it behind?’

  ‘Not going to happen. Too much of an embarrassment,’ Moonface concluded, and Stumps kept silent in agreement.

  With the sound of their conversation, and the ever-present tempest, it was a moment before I noticed a change in the forest’s symphony – the sound of something small, and hard, striking wood.

  ‘Is that …’ Titus began, pausing as something struck a resting shield with an angry thwack!

  ‘Slingshot!’ came from several voices.

  Almost instantly, adrenaline-fuelled calls echoed from the far end of the century.

  ‘Enemy rear! Enemy rear!’

  We weren’t the only ones under fire.

  ‘Get the tools. Let’s go!’ Titus ordered, and we sped with him back to the remainder of the century, the air by my head creasing as a slingshot zipped by. Ahead of me, I saw a man go down, his helmet sent spinning into the air by the impact of a lead weight.

  It was Cnaeus. The young soldier staggered to his feet, and began to search for his helm.

  ‘Leave it!’ Chickenhead roa
red, pushing the youngster back towards the century.

  The troops on either side of the track were hastily overlapping their shields as lead shot bounced from the protection like angry hail.

  We collected our own shields and filed into ranks two deep. I found myself at the front, crouching, my shield covering from the floor. Behind me, Rufus held his shield aloft, raising the height of our barricade. In such a formation, the shot could do little damage to us, but I remembered the legate’s words from the orders group, and how the Germans had used the defensive posture of the legionaries in their favour.

  ‘Watch for spearmen!’ I shouted, the confidence in my voice causing the call to be picked up and passed along by others. Sure enough, the Germans adopted the tactic.

  ‘Enemy left! Spearmen!’ a section commander called.

  ‘Javelins!’ Pavo ordered, and behind me the shield wall lowered so that men could hurl the weapons into the onrushing enemy, a half-dozen screams echoing in reward, some of them ongoing from strikes that had not proved immediately fatal.

  ‘Get the shields back up!’ a voice shouted, for the Germans’ slingshots had pelted the lines as soon as the defences had been lowered.

  A legionary stepped back from the rear ranks, clutching his face and groaning in agony. I was close enough to see Pavo pull away the hands to inspect the wound.

  ‘Shut up! You’re fine! Hold the line!’ he told the man, whose eye was mashed to jelly.

  The two-high wall of shields was intact once more and, not wanting to waste their shot, the slingers in the undergrowth held their aim. A weary lull settled over the skirmish.

  This was Pavo’s moment. He had to seize the initiative from the enemy. He had to clear us from the killing ground. Right or wrong, he had to make a decision.

  ‘What the fuck is he playing at?’ Stumps hissed when no orders were forthcoming. ‘We can’t just sit here.’

  But that is exactly what we did. Occasionally, a German light spear would come sailing over the shields, but the enemy were weary of our tight formation, and held back. Crouching and cold, my legs began to cramp. With something of a happy revelation, I realized that I needed to piss. I relished the warmth that spread through what was already a filthy loincloth. Soaking wet as I was, and surrounded by enemies, what difference would pissing myself make?

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Chickenhead, working his gums. ‘They’ve probably sent runners to get their friends. No one’s coming for us.’

  Stumps poked me. ‘This is where your mate, the prince, is supposed to ride up the track and save us.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll see him soon,’ I answered. ‘In the afterlife.’

  It took the soldier a moment to decide if I was joking, unused as he was to hearing humour pass my lips, no matter how dark. ‘You’re a strange one, you.’

  I took the lull as an opportunity to look at Pavo. He stood in the formation’s centre, his eyes on the three dead men that had fallen foul of the enemy’s traps.

  ‘He’s shitting himself,’ Moonface sneered, seeing the same.

  ‘No,’ I told him, certain it was not fear that was paralysing the centurion. ‘He doesn’t want to leave them behind. He knows what will happen to them.’

  A German light spear eventually interrupted Pavo’s silent debate with the dead, the weapon arcing over the line to graze the thigh of a soldier in the opposite rank, the man’s flesh opening in a wound soon washed bright by the rain.

  ‘We leave the dead,’ Pavo ordered, his words hard now that his mind was made up. ‘Take their weapons. Leave nothing for the goat-fuckers. We’re going back to the camp.’

  Those were his orders, but their execution would have been difficult enough with only the weather and the glutinous mud of the track to contend with, let alone the enemy that now dogged us as we began the slow march. For the most part, the Germans stuck to the forest’s cover, picking at us from a distance with sling and light spear, but occasionally a cloaked warrior – doubtless keen to make a reputation for himself – would charge our shields with his heavy ash spear. Locked in formation as we were, we were unable to reply in kind.

  ‘Bastard!’ Titus spat when a German’s spear found a soft spot between shields, the iron head slicing across his thick forearm. ‘That’s fucking it!’ he growled, and issued his own, private orders to the section.

  The next time a German charged, Rufus and Moonface dropped their shields unexpectedly so the spear passed harmlessly through open air. Titus snatched at the shaft, yanking it forward, the German’s momentum carrying his shocked face straight into a thrust of the brute’s short sword.

  ‘Shields back up – fuck!’ Rufus exclaimed, struck in the shoulder as the lead rain began once again.

  ‘You OK?’ Titus asked.

  ‘I think so. Arm’s dead, though. Can’t raise my shield.’

  ‘Just stay behind me.’

  Rufus wasn’t the only man hurt; a steady chorus of yelps and shouts came from the century as lead shot found its mark, or a spear slipped between shields.

  Suddenly, the retreat came to a shuddering halt.

  ‘Trees on the track!’ The call came from the head of the formation.

  The enemy had bided its time, dropping obstructions behind us. They’d toyed with us on the path, but now they’d get what they really wanted.

  ‘Break track!’ Pavo ordered without hesitation. ‘Find a way around!’ He pushed his way into the leading rank so that he could look for the course himself. No doubt he did his best, but the undulating ground, waterlogged gullies and thick vegetation soon did to our formation what the German warriors could not.

  It began to come apart.

  The gaps were small, at first: a dropped shield as a soldier slipped; exposed shins as they crested a mound. Inevitably, however, the gaps widened, men so focused on making headway that the integrity of the whole suffered. Cries of pain echoed from the ranks. I stepped over our first dead of the retreat, the man unmarked but for a small divot in his forehead.

  ‘Maybe he’s just stunned?’ young Cnaeus pleaded, unable to take his eyes from the body.

  ‘Leave him,’ Titus growled. ‘Keep that fucking shield up!’

  As our retreat began to show the first signs of desperation, nature decided to heap on further misery. The downpour increased, the wind howling in huge gusts that shook the tree trunks. We forged on into the storm – and our enemies closed about us.

  We saw them in numbers for the first time, now. They sensed our weakness, but held back in the shadows, trailing us as a hunter would track a wounded boar. They knew that we were still dangerous, and none of them was eager to die. The fact that they were so patient in their stalking worried me.

  ‘There’s more of them ahead,’ Chickenhead prophesied, but the veteran was wrong; there were more of them everywhere, and as the evermore numerous host appeared out of the trees, they pushed closer.

  Cnaeus began to shake, almost uncontrollably. ‘It’s just the cold. It’s just the cold,’ he repeated, desperate to convince himself.

  Spearmen began to rush forward in knots. They did not throw their weapons, but used them to jab and stab at the space around our shields.

  ‘They’re not throwing them,’ Chickenhead noted, as if it were of importance.

  ‘So fucking what?’ Moonface snapped, angry that a spear had slipped by his guard and into his mail. The armour had stopped the blow, but he was still panting from the impact.

  ‘So they’ve got a limited supply,’ Chickenhead explained. ‘They’re not happy with just seeing us off and going home.’

  I grasped his meaning. These tribesmen were preparing to fight a campaign, not an isolated skirmish.

  I stepped around another of our dead, his legs coated with bright red blood. Steadily, the number of casualties grew so that I did not note their details.

  A blond-haired brute led a charge at our own flank. We braced, as spearheads hammered into our raised shields. Behind the protection, Titus and Cnaeus counterthrust wi
th javelins.

  ‘Put some fucking anger into it!’ Titus ordered the youngster, who then screamed defiance into the enemy’s bearded faces, his voice cracking and breaking with the effort.

  Some of the Germans abandoned their spears, leaving them embedded in our shields, which were already heavy from the rain. Now they came with daggers and short swords, and I drew my own, beating aside an eager thrust, and crunching an elbow into the man’s face. Stepping back, I whipped the tip of the blade across his throat. The cut wasn’t deep, but he sank to his knees, blood bubbling. He’d die a long death.

  Good.

  Time lost all meaning as the enemy came against us. At first the withdrawal had been a series of short, sharp engagements, a few men involved at most, but now the Germans battered our lines from all sides. Some began to use stones to crash our shields apart, their comrades pouring into the gaps with spear and sword. The screams of the wounded drowned out the wind and the rain.

  I glanced at the wild-eyed legionaries about me. I knew that it would take only a single man to run, and the others would follow; and once we ran, we’d die.

  I wasn’t the only one to see it.

  ‘Hold the line!’ Titus bellowed. ‘I see your back, I’ll gut you and fuck your corpse, you cunts!’

  A spear darted towards my face. I twisted, ducking beneath the attack, driving my sword up into the guts of the enemy. Hot blood cascaded over my hand as I struggled to pull the sword free of his sucking flesh.

  The action left me momentarily outside of the line, and as I rushed to rejoin them, I saw what remained of our century – maybe sixty men – a tight knot of red amongst the dark-cloaked enemies.

  ‘My family are in the camp!’ Rufus suddenly shouted above the din, his words shocking his comrades even in the desperation of battle. ‘If I go down, keep them safe!’

  ‘You stupid bastard!’ Titus barked at his friend, pulling his sword free of a German chest.

  ‘Keep them safe!’

  ‘Keep them safe yourself! Stop fucking distracting me!’

  Titus bent to the ground, freeing a short sword from a German’s dead hand and pushing it behind the leather belts on his waist.