Blood Forest Read online

  What could Varus want with me? Had this something to do with the night on the parade square, where I had intervened to save Arminius’s life? How had the governor discovered my identity? I had shared my name with the standard-bearer, but Felix was not an uncommon name in the legions. Would Arminius himself have spoken of me? I couldn’t think of a reason why he would.

  Shit. Hadn’t I spilled my guts when I made my report, blade to the prince’s throat? With adrenaline pumping, I hadn’t thought to invent a new unit for myself, but surely Varus would have forgotten my words the moment I’d spoken them? The governor didn’t strike me as the kind of commander who wished to know the details of his lowliest soldiers.

  No, it couldn’t have been the night at the square – the centurion had asked me if I was the soldier found in the woods. The grove. Tracing me to my century would have been easy enough. I was the only battle casualty replacement to arrive that day, and the quartermaster’s records proved my existence, as did my later drawing of pay. Yes, they could work back and discover my identity, but only as far as the grove, so why the sudden interest?

  With a tightening of my stomach, I pictured the centurion and the two dead legionaries that we had pulled from the manure in Minden’s streets. I had thought my secret died with them, but had they shared it with others before their throats were slit?

  The thought turned me cold. Blood began to pound in my ears. I thought about what they would do to me. It would be crucifixion, and I had seen enough men and women die that way to know how my end would come. I would scream. Piss and shit would run down my legs. I would leave this world disgraced, in agony, and a momentary distraction for others.

  Fuck that.

  So what to do? I had my blades on my belt, but a section of eight soldiers behind me. They being of the First Cohort, there would be no dull-witted Micons in their ranks. These men were handpicked, and lethal. Cold steel would plunge into my back before my own had even cleared the scabbard. At best, I could hope to take the centurion with me, but what had that man done to deserve death in this muddy avenue between tents? I wasn’t afraid of killing my kinsmen, but I had to draw a line between the deserving and the innocent. Wasn’t that how I’d come to be here?

  And with that thought, it was as if a heavy black cloak had settled over my mind. I knew that I could not resist. Whatever was coming, I would have to face it.

  Of course, it was no black cloak but a heavy cloth sack that had been pulled over my head. As its cord was drawn tight about my neck, I heard the rasp of metal as my blades were pulled free of their scabbards, but not by my own hands.

  The First Cohort were good. They’d waited to get me clear of my own century, fearing their loyalty, before showing their true hand. Exhaling strongly, I prepared for the blows. As I sank into the cold mud, the kicks rained in.

  From the chill beneath my arse, I was sitting on the ground. From the absence of rain on my hood, I was within a tent. I licked my lips and gums, finding my teeth where they had been, and no blood. The First Cohort’s section were good. My body ached, but nothing felt broken. They had done enough to subdue me, to show that resistance was pointless, and nothing more. If it wasn’t for the fact that their professionalism killed any chance of my escaping this situation, I might even have applauded it.

  There were voices about me. Numerous voices. Their tones were deep, and rich. Men trained for command and public speaking. Members of the senatorial classes. The army’s staff officers, I assumed.

  The hood was pulled away.

  A half-dozen men stood in front of me. Varus was at their centre, flanked by men in white tunics. Some had broad purple stripes adorning their sleeves, others narrower bands of the same colour. These were Varus’s tribunes – the young aristocrats who oversaw the organization of his army.

  ‘Arminius found you in a grove,’ Varus stated simply.

  I was aware of a looming presence behind me. I was more aware still that the shadow would strike me if I bit back my answers.

  I saw no profit in taking further punishment. From the certainty in the governor’s words, I would only confirm what he already knew.

  ‘I was, sir,’ I answered as respectfully as I could, despite the aching in my ribs.

  ‘And where did you come from, before that?’ a broad-striped tribune asked, his aquiline nose twitching with impatience.

  ‘I – I don’t know, sir,’ I stammered, bracing myself for a blow.

  It didn’t come.

  ‘You don’t know?’ the tribune pressed, eyes narrowing in distrust.

  ‘Prince Arminius found me, sir. I don’t know what happened before that. He found me, and all my friends were dead.’

  This time, the blow did fall. It was a short, sharp punch to my kidney. I hissed in pain.

  ‘Your friends,’ the tribune mused, stepping closer. ‘And what legion were they?’

  ‘The First, sir,’ I answered quickly.

  ‘Ah, so you remember that?’

  ‘I was told, sir. By the prince.’

  ‘Convenient.’

  I said nothing. Varus was watching me closely. The governor had not cut an impressive figure the night before. Now he looked as though he’d aged a further ten years.

  Something had happened.

  I took a chance. ‘The prince, sir. He lives?’ I delivered the words with an anguish that was not altogether theatrical. The uninvited words earned me more pain, as I knew they would, but I’d also landed my own blow.

  I saw the governor’s chest swell as he took a calming breath against his grief. ‘Arminius is not with us,’ he answered cryptically, taking a step forward and grasping my chin in what had been a manicured hand. The fingernails were now dark with dirt. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

  One did not become the Governor on the Rhine without a keen intellect, and after a few moments of brief contemplation, Varus had dragged the memories from the depths of his mind.

  ‘It was you. On the square. You saved him, didn’t you?’

  Now was the time to lie. ‘Sir?’ I asked, frowning.

  There were no punches. No kicks. Instead, Varus’s fingernails dug a little deeper into the flesh of my jaw.

  ‘It was you,’ he concluded, stepping back.

  The strikes were hard, fast and vicious. I toppled forward, my teeth scraping across the mud, and I gagged against the cold slime. Eventually, strong hands gripped my shoulders, and held me up on my knees.

  The broad-stripe tribune stepped forward. ‘You’re a spy, planted by Arminius,’ he asserted with far from absolute certainty. ‘He killed those men in the grove, and used it to bring you into the army. Why?’ he shouted.

  His logic was sound, given the coincidence, but I could see that the ‘why’ bothered him. A spy on Varus’s staff would be invaluable. A well-placed centurion would be useful. But a common soldier in the ranks? What use was that?

  I didn’t think it absurd, however, that they would suspect an ally of planting spies amongst his friends. There was no better way of keeping someone close than knowing their secrets. I would have been deeply shocked if Varus did not have his own moles in the court of every tribal chieftain that claimed fealty to Rome.

  ‘You’re an assassin,’ the tribune stated, though it was clear that even he doubted this. No assassin worth his blood price would have allowed himself to be meekly led before the governor.

  The tribune was grasping at straws, I realized. That was why I was here. There was no evidence to condemn me, only the anomaly that I had been found in the grove and brought into the army, so what had made these men clutch at me?

  Arminius. He was the connection. What had happened today to have caused this sudden anxiety? Yesterday, Varus had mourned, but the army’s commanders had been confident. Now, I could see the first traces of uncertainty, almost panic, in their eyes.

  I looked at Varus. His eyes were haunted. I had seen it in men who suffered from battle-shock, but the governor had not drawn his sword. Had the loss of men from the work par
ties shaken him so deeply? Impossible.

  ‘You were brought into the army by Arminius,’ he now accused me with quiet detachment. ‘Why did you not ride away with his scouts?’

  The scouts. So I wasn’t the only one troubled by their disappearance. The question had circled in my mind on how they – and the few horsemen who had summoned them – had somehow passed unmolested through the forest that teemed with enemies. I had come to the conclusion that they had bribed their way through, maybe even reasoned with their countrymen, but now I saw that there was something more sinister behind their recall. Had Segestes ordered that his Cherusci be allowed to pass, knowing that they would not be able to resist riding to their prince’s aid, and leaving Varus and his army blind and fixed in position?

  ‘Sir,’ I began, my tone pleading, ‘I’m just a soldier.’

  ‘You’re a spy,’ the tribune spat, answering for the governor. ‘And you’ll tell us what you know.’

  I expected that meant further beatings, and questions at the hands of these men.

  I was wrong.

  ‘Take him away,’ the tribune ordered the men behind me. ‘Find out what he knows, and then send his head to his friends in the forest.’

  ‘Any preference, sir?’ a dark voice boomed.

  The tribune thought over the question as if it were a mathematical problem; his answer was empty of emotion. ‘He’s a spy,’ he condemned me. ‘There can be only one punishment.’

  Kneeling in the cold mud, I struggled to choke back a rising tide of vomit, knowing now what my fate would be. The fate I had always feared above all others.

  ‘Crucifixion.’

  29

  The hood was pulled back into place, dampening my senses, and I was dragged from the tent.

  The pounding rain was cold against my flesh, but it did nothing to revive me from the numbness that now gripped my mind and senses. Knowing what my fate would be – the most ghastly fate I could imagine – my wits had tried to take leave of my body. Yet they were trapped as if in a cage, and so they rattled the bars of their confinement instead. My muscles shook uncontrollably; my teeth chattered; the sound of blood pounded in my ears. I would have pissed myself, I’m sure, but dehydration saved me from at least that one indignity.

  I was dropped to my knees and pushed face down; a few half-hearted kicks fell on to my prone form, just enough to advise me to stay in that position. Prostrate in the soaked hood, I gasped in breaths of wet air made musky by the thick sacking. Incredible what small details you notice, as the end of your life is moments away.

  I heard the sound of men’s voices; the details were lost in the howling elements, but there was no mistaking the tap-tap-tap that announced the construction of the crucifix. I pictured the hammer, and how it would drive the cold steel of the nails through my flesh. I knew I would scream. I screamed in my dreams, for fuck’s sake; how could I hold them back under torture?

  I don’t know how long I lay there, a pathetic worm in the mud. Like the boy soldier who had bled to death on the stakes – had that truly happened this same day? – all I could think of now was my mother. I hadn’t seen her in over a decade, and even as I ached for her comfort, I couldn’t picture the details of her face. I became consumed with the need to recall her image, and angry that I couldn’t. So angry that by the time I was hauled to my feet, my self-pity had been melted away by fury.

  I struggled, shrugging off the blows that landed in my stomach. My hands were untied and pulled apart. I felt the skin brush against wood, and threw my head forward, feeling it connect with another man’s skull. A curse and a savage blow was my reward.

  ‘Behave yourself, you cunt!’ was shouted into my ear, with more punches landing as exclamation.

  I wouldn’t. Rage had taken over my body now. The human, reasoning side of my mind had departed. All that was left was animal instinct, the need to survive at any cost.

  Rough cord was looped over my wrists, finally binding my thrashing limbs to the wood. Inside my hood I snarled, preparing for the bite of the nails.

  Instead, the hood was pulled away.

  Sometime during my confinement, darkness had come and, shadowed by flickering torches, my captors’ faces were black masks beneath steel helmets.

  They stood back now, catching their breath, their victim tethered, if not subdued.

  One of the men took a step closer. A trickle of blood ran from a nose many times broken. I expected violence, or anger. Instead, the executioner spoke with quiet detachment.

  ‘Look, mate, this is nothing personal, all right? Why don’t you stop making a scene, and just tell us what you know? Me and the boys don’t really want to be out in the rain, so the longer you keep us out here, the more pissed off and inventive we’re goin’ to get, yeah? Spill it now, and I promise we’ll knock you out before we do anything nasty. You’ll go to sleep, and there’ll be no pain. Trust me, I’ve done this a few times, and it’s not something you want to put yourself through.’

  The placid tone of the words was soothing. For a second, I could almost have forgotten that he was asking me to roll over and die.

  I tried to speak, but my mouth had become ash. I ran a dry tongue about my lips, and the soldier got my meaning.

  ‘Give the man some wine.’

  I drank greedily from the offered skin, enjoying the rich flavour of the grapes.

  ‘It’s good,’ I told them, my voice and calm restored.

  ‘So you’ll talk?’

  ‘I’ll talk,’ I began. ‘But you may want to do this inside. It’s a long story.’

  ‘Nice try.’ He laughed before reaching into his pocket, and pulling out a long iron nail. He stepped forward, tracing the point of the metal along the skin of my right arm.

  ‘Last chance to do things the easy way.’

  What did I have to lose? I was tied fast to the wooden beams, and even if I wasn’t, there were four of them, and they hadn’t spent the night getting the shit kicked out of them. My only hope was to talk. Maybe the Germans would be good enough to attack the camp and slit my throat, but until then, I would talk, and these men would hear a lot more than they expected to.

  I’d give them a fucking story.

  ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ I offered, ‘but it really is a long story.’

  The soldier smiled in the torchlight. ‘Go on.’

  Instead, I held my tongue.

  Maybe it was being so close to death that aroused my senses to heights beyond their usual sensitivity, but I saw movement beyond the flickering torches, and before my captors could land a blow on me for delaying my confession, a commanding voice barked from the darkness.

  ‘Stand down, Hadrian.’

  The owner of that voice came to stand before me, and I forgot all about trying to picture my mother. No face could have been as beautiful as this: Caeonius, his hooded eyes and bulbous nose wrinkled with discomfort.

  ‘Get him down.’

  The men knew better than to delay, and within moments my bindings had been cut.

  ‘I’ve cleared it with the governor,’ the prefect explained to the soldiers. ‘Put him in that tent.’

  The soldiers made to pick me up, but stubborn pride compelled me to wave away the help of men who had been about to kill me. The relief of my escape made me weak, and I stalked to the tent like a newborn foal, almost collapsing on the bench within.

  ‘Wine?’ Caeonius asked, and I latched on to the skin like a babe to the teat.

  ‘What is it with you and trouble?’ he asked in some wonderment. ‘Forty years I’ve done with the eagles, and every now and then, some unlucky bugger like you will come along, and get a legion’s worth of shit on his own head.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I mumbled, wiping away the wine from my chin.

  ‘Sorry for what? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

  The prefect must have felt the question in my eyes. My need to know why I had been moments away from a horrific death.

  ‘It’s been a bad day,
lad, and on bad days, commanders need scapegoats. Unfortunately for you, Tribune Paterculus came up with a theory that Arminius had a spy in the camp, and after a bit of head-scratching, they came up with you.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything, sir,’ I protested.

  ‘You were out of the ordinary. That was enough for them. Like I say, they needed a scapegoat.’

  His tone told me that they’d found another. I asked him who.

  ‘The Germans aren’t the only ones who can hide in the woods,’ Caeonius answered proudly. ‘I took out some volunteers from the Nineteenth. We ambushed a group of them, brought a few back to get answers.’

  As if the prisoners had been waiting for the prefect to mention them, an agonized scream pierced the night.

  ‘The tribune is a real bloodthirsty bugger.’ Caeonius got to his feet and placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder. ‘Spy my arse.’ He smiled. ‘I told them that you were more dead than alive in that grove. Now that the tribune’s getting his fill, he’ll forget you ever existed, but it’s best if you don’t hang around the headquarters area. I’ll have a couple of blokes make sure you get back to your unit.’

  ‘Sir.’ I stopped him as he turned to leave. ‘There’s something I don’t understand.’ I hoped that I held back the desperation with which I needed to know the answer. A twitch of bushy eyebrows told me to proceed. ‘They brought me in because Arminius found me in the grove, but the governor said that the prince is no longer with us? It doesn’t make sense, sir. If Arminius is dead, then what does it matter if he did have spies? It’s embarrassing, yes, but nothing more.’

  Caeonius paused before he answered. His forty years of service had taken him through countless desperate moments, and forged within him a constitution of iron. His words confirmed that the same could not be said of the army’s younger, politically appointed commanders.