Blood Forest Page 25

  ‘Fuckers,’ Titus growled besides me. ‘Come on,’ he urged, pulling at the sleeve of my tunic. ‘No good’s gonna come of standing around here and watching these cunts do themselves in.’

  Equally disgusted, many of the other soldiers began to move away, returning to their centuries, but not all. Some sat back in the mud, or dropped to their knees. Some wailed, while others gave in to despair in silence.

  It was the beginning of the end, I knew.

  As I stumbled along beside Titus, I recognized an old soldier standing amongst the dead of the army’s staff, his worn face twisted into ferocious anger. It was Caeonius, the camp prefect who had found me in the grove with Arminius, and who had saved me from crucifixion. Betrayed by both the German prince and the governor, and now left as the senior soldier in the army, it seemed that the weight of the legions would have to be borne by this man’s wide shoulders.

  I pitied him. This was an unwinnable battle, but what choice did he have but to fight it? What choice did any of us have? We were not blinded by the same shame and honour that had forced the aristocratic leaders to fall on their swords. We wanted to live.

  ‘Felix,’ I heard, and turned.

  The standard-bearer from the parade square, the bearskin over his head and shoulders thick with matted blood. Dirty bandages covered a wound on his arm. Here was a man who had stood in the thickest of the fighting.

  ‘Standard-bearer,’ I greeted him.

  ‘Your friend has come to kill us,’ the man said, though there was no malice in his words. He was resigned to his fate.

  My friend.

  ‘He’s my enemy,’ I said, though I heard the uncertainty in my voice. ‘He lied to me.’ I told him, unable to see my hypocrisy.

  The man turned his head away, looking at the crowd who had gathered about the bodies of the staff officers. ‘Look to your comrades, brother,’ he told me, offering his hand. ‘It’s going to be a long road home.’

  I took it, and then watched as he stalked towards the frightened soldiers. I knew that we would never speak again.

  We left the scene, walking in silence as Titus led us through the lines to our own century, but my mind screaming: Why – how – could Arminius have committed such treason? He had been raised a son of Rome. He had fought for Rome. Bled for Rome. Why this treason? A treason that had clearly been plotted carefully for months: the honeyed words into Varus’s ear; the disturbances that had required the legions’ response, all the time directed into the jaws of Arminius’s carefully baited trap.

  I was no sentimental idiot, and knew Rome’s flaws better than most, but I could not understand how such a passionate, popular prince had been able to plot and deceive while maintaining his charisma and inspiring loyalty in those he sought to destroy. That, to me, was the greatest mystery of all.

  Rumour of this treason had spread through the legions like wildfire, and when we reached the huddled forms of our comrades, Titus and I were assaulted by a barrage of desperate questions, Moonface dropping to his knees in the mud as Titus gruffly confirmed that Varus and his staff were dead.

  ‘Pick yourself up,’ Titus ordered. ‘Varus was a fucking coward and a cunt. Don’t sit crying in the mud for him.’

  It took Stumps and Cnaeus to haul the distraught soldier to his feet. The myth of Roman glory was the air that Moonface breathed, and in a matter of days he had seen the illusion of invincibility and grandeur shattered.

  ‘We’re dead,’ he groaned, and no one disagreed with him.

  I looked over the faces of the section, seeing all hope abandoned. Chickenhead had ceased to function as a soldier and a man, a hollow-eyed ghost clad in armour. Young Micon and Cnaeus were gaunt-faced and vacant. Stumps veered between moments of outlandish optimism and soul-crushing depression.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ Micon stated simply, his blank face showing no sign of emotion.

  But die it was certain we would, for the trap had been sprung and an army was leaderless in the killing ground. With such doom in mind, I remembered something Pavo had said in Minden. Something he had told me before the forest and the bloodshed.

  No one should die amongst strangers.

  He was right.

  I did not want to die an outsider, and so I opened my mouth to speak.

  ‘My name isn’t Felix,’ I told the six soldiers who had become my brothers.

  Their dark eyes widened as I laid bare my poisonous soul.

  ‘It’s Corvus.’

  I swallowed, sealing my fate.

  ‘And I am a traitor.’

  Part Three

  * * *

  42

  ‘I am a traitor.’ I breathed the words again, as if hearing them myself for the first time.

  The section did not respond; they simply stared. So exhausted and battered were they that my confession bounced like a pebble off the armour of their minds.

  ‘I’m a fucking traitor!’ I shouted into their faces, desperate now to unburden myself before the bloody end that awaited us beyond the ramparts.

  Titus rallied first. He shrugged. ‘This isn’t your first time under the eagles.’ It was a statement rather than question. I knew that Titus had had his suspicions all along, as had the other veterans, and even the boy soldiers. A soldier’s ways were too hard to disguise. From drill, to my movement amongst the trees, I had been betrayed by my experience.

  ‘Just speak,’ he ordered.

  And so I did. ‘Not my first time under the eagles,’ I confirmed, forcing the words out. ‘But my first time on this frontier. My old unit, they were in Pannonia.’

  Pannonia. Just speaking the name of the province was torture. When I had first set eyes on the place there had been no land more beautiful, but I had seen that utopia torn apart by bloody rebellion. Since my desertion, the details of that campaign had been mercifully vague in my mind, leaving me only with the impression of chaos and suffering.

  ‘You were in the war there?’ Stumps asked.

  I nodded, but that was as far as my answer would go. I wanted to tell them more – I was desperate to – but that time was a blur of blood and misery, and if I tried to describe those few vivid memories that I could recall, the words would stick in my throat like hooks.

  ‘I ran,’ I finally choked.

  ‘Why?’ Stumps asked.

  ‘I – I don’t remember. I just ran. It was a slaughter. I don’t remember much, but it was slaughter. Every day, it was … slaughter. I couldn’t watch them die any more.’

  I don’t know what I expected, then. Perhaps it would have been different had we not been on the edge of our own destruction, our leaders having died within the hour by their own blades. Hard to question a foot-soldier’s honour when his senatorial leaders, his supposed betters, had taken their own lives rather than face the enemy. And so, instead of fists and accusations, I faced only questions.

  ‘I was going to Britain,’ I answered several voices.

  ‘Britain?’ Titus asked.

  I shrugged. ‘No Roman law. Across a sea. It seemed as good a place as any, and I had friends. Maybe they’re still alive,’ I added, certain that if they were, then I would never see them. Not now that our head was in the bear’s jaws.

  ‘A long way to walk from Pannonia,’ Titus commented. Pannonia sat against the Adriatic, an entire continent away. I had crossed countless miles of field, forest and mountain range before I had found myself in the sacred grove where I had been discovered by Arminius. I told them as much, my shame-filled eyes focused on the dirt.

  A bark of laughter caused me to look up.

  It was Stumps. He looked at me in pity. ‘You ran from one war, and ended up …’ He let his words trail away, but spread his arms to encompass the misery and squalor of a dying army.

  No one caught the infection of his smile. Instead, Moonface took a step towards me. I saw a flash of something in his eyes. Despite the collapse of Varus’s army, Moonface still believed in the Roman ideals.

  ‘Cunt,’ he spat.

&n
bsp; And then he hit me.

  It wasn’t a good strike, his muscles tired and his aim awry, but I made no move to defend myself, and it caught my cheek, the bone beneath my eye singing with heat.

  ‘Back!’ Titus growled, hauling the soldier away as if he weighed no more than an empty tunic. ‘What the fuck does it matter now if he ran? Have you seen where we are? Have you seen what’s coming?’

  ‘You’re giving up?’ Stumps asked, suddenly sour.

  ‘Fuck you, I’m not giving up,’ Titus declared. ‘I’m going to live through this, and so are you, little pricks. Moon!’ he growled, and Moonface met his glare. ‘Forget your fucking eagles, the emperor and every other thing that they ever told us was important. Look around! Seven of us. Seven of us here to fight our way out of this. If you don’t believe we can do it, then fall on your sword now like that fucking governor and his wet-cunt officers.’

  Titus’s words hit home like a war-hammer. I looked at the brute and saw a figure that was so large in life that perhaps death would not have the stomach to take him. Maybe – maybe – here was a man who could pull us through the impossible to safety.

  Stumps snorted, his eyes lively. ‘Nice speech, Titus. At least if I die, you’ll keep me entertained until the end.’

  ‘Are you in this or not?’ Titus demanded, in no mood for jests.

  ‘Of course I am, you soft bastard,’ Stumps told him, spitting for emphasis.

  ‘And the rest of you?’ Titus challenged them.

  None answered with the same enthusiasm as Stumps, but a grudging nod was enough for the big man. Only Chickenhead stayed alone, mute and unmoving.

  ‘I’ll get him to the Rhine if I have to carry him,’ Titus promised, glancing at the veteran, and I had no doubt that he meant it.

  That left only me.

  ‘I’m a traitor,’ I told him again, as if that explained everything.

  ‘You’re a soldier,’ Titus snorted. His open palm hit the side of my helmet, and with that blow I knew that I would die for him. I would die for a man I had planned to kill, and I would kill a man that I had adored.

  Arminius.

  We sat huddled like sheep, a sodden blanket held over our heads. Without warning, it was tugged back.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Stumps moaned, his eyes closed.

  ‘Get up,’ a voice commanded.

  Pavo. I looked up at him, silhouetted against the grey skies. The striking centurion had been smiling in the hours following the death of our legion’s commander, knowing that the man’s end had increased the chances of his own survival. There was no smile now. Only the two words that every tired soldier dreads to hear.

  He spoke, his words clipped. ‘Work party.’

  And so, with every sinew of our bodies aching, using hands and weapons to push ourselves up from the mud, we struggled to our feet and followed behind Pavo with the rest of our depleted century. Looking around, I sensed that our numbers had thinned further still since we had made the marching camp. My suspicions were confirmed as I overheard two veterans talking – three men in the century had taken their own lives. Another had died from exposure.

  They would not be the last. Arminius could sit back in the trees and watch us wait and bleed our way to oblivion. We would have to break out, I knew; it was our only chance. A small, terrifying chance, but one that would have to be taken, and soon.

  But before that, there was a task to be performed. A task that our section had been assigned to. We needed to bury the dead.

  ‘Mass grave,’ Pavo informed us. ‘Just dig.’

  We did. It was slow work. Miserable work. The ramparts that day had been agony enough, and that was before our leaders had abandoned us to our fate.

  ‘I bet they’re not going into a mass grave,’ Stumps said, and he was right. A veteran of the Nineteenth Legion, a friend of Titus, explained that Varus and his staff officers had been cremated before their individual burials so their bodies could not be desecrated by the Germans.

  ‘But the lads got sick of waiting for the fucker to burn,’ the veteran spat. ‘So they just filled the hole in once his hair had been singed off.’

  ‘Better resting place than he deserves,’ Titus opined, and his friend agreed before going on his way. Watching the men exchange goodbyes, I knew that neither of the veterans expected to see the other again in this life.

  The mass grave was only knee-deep before a call came from the centurions that put a stop to the digging. We were then ordered to begin filling it with the dead of the common soldiery.

  ‘I fucking hate this!’ I heard Stumps call out. Looking at him, I saw that he held an arm in his hand, the shoulder joint ragged with flesh.

  ‘It came off when I lifted him,’ he explained, half smiling as tears flowed over his cheeks.

  Many more of the bodies showed wounds from the morning’s fighting, but dozens were intact and unscathed. Often these were the youngest soldiers, the boys having succumbed to a combination of terror and exposure. Not all of the wax-faced corpses were soldiers, and amongst the red-tunicked bodies were dozens of camp followers – women and children of all colours and ages.

  ‘I knew him,’ Titus grunted, referring to a veteran who had died from a chest wound. ‘Good bloke.’

  ‘What was his name?’ Cnaeus asked.

  ‘What’s it matter?’ Titus shrugged, suddenly prickly. ‘What the fuck does it matter,’ he repeated to himself.

  There were other familiar faces. Moonface was grieved to see his favourite whore amongst the dead. Stumps buried a comrade from his days as a recruit. As he had done when digging the rampart that day, the man wept silently to himself. Chickenhead sat alone and undisturbed. Like the dead in the grave, he had no further interest in this world. He was a shell now, already resigned to death. I suspected that, when it came, he would welcome it, and that pained me, for the man had shown me kindness and comradeship. I struggled to think of a way to bring him back, but failed. How do you tell a man that life is worth living, and all is good, when you are standing up to your knees in the corpses of those who had been your friends and comrades?

  ‘We need another grave digging,’ Pavo ordered, seeing that the first was full and bodies were still stacked above ground in the mud.

  And so we dug.

  The skies were dark before the final body was dropped into the dirt. Then began the task of covering the fallen with soil, condemning them to a grave that would surely be dug up by the Germans as soon as we departed the marching camp. Our enemies would be keen to make sport of our dead by desecrating their bodies.

  I cannot tell you how long the task took. Only that, at times, I was at peace with my place in the world, feeling not a care for my past, or my future. At other moments, I felt as if a boulder were on my chest, crushing me with the weight of my depression. Then at other times I simply wept, and I could not have told you whether it was from joy or grief.

  If not already broken, I would say that my mind was breaking.

  I was not the only man on the edge of insanity or, more truthfully, with a footstep inside its boundaries. Some men fled the camp in the darkness. Others took their own lives. Some, however, held their nerves in an iron grip. It was down to these men that we were still an army, and not a rabble.

  One of these men was Caeonius. The man had served long enough to have stared disaster and death in the face many times, and though nothing could have compared in scale to the tragedy in which we now found ourselves, Caeonius was undeterred as he took control of the army.

  ‘We’re going to form two battle groups,’ Pavo informed his huddled century. We were at full strength now, our depleted ranks merged with another unit that had lost their own centurion. ‘Prefect Caeonius will lead the first, and we’ll be in there with him. When dawn comes, we break out.’

  Despite his best efforts, Pavo’s words sounded hollow, but no one could blame him. We were an army of exhausted, starved men, battered by nature, and surrounded by a ferocious enemy that hated us. What chance could there be
of our successful escape?

  None.

  But what other choice was there?

  And so we would fight.

  43

  The hours of darkness passed in misery and squalor. As a section, we sat huddled and shivering beneath sodden blankets, our breath thick and stinking beneath the wool. From somewhere, Titus produced a handful of hardtack biscuits, which he rationed out amongst our seven. No one asked where, or how, the big man had come by the food, but I had little doubt that we had his scarred fists to thank for it.

  We took our turn on the rampart, too tired to care if the Germans should attack. In darkness or in the dawn, we would have to face their spears eventually. Some men decided to take their chances and deserted during the night.

  ‘Best of luck to them,’ Stumps said with a shrug when we heard that a pair from our own century had run. The news earned nothing more than a nod or an empty stare from the other veterans – let them take their chances, was the muttered opinion. If our leaders would not stand for us, then why should the rank and file stand for them?

  I wondered if my former comrades had been as understanding of my own abandonment of them. Perhaps Varo and Priscus would have forgiven me, but despite my best efforts to convince myself, I knew that I was forever damned in the eyes of my oldest friend, Marcus. Perhaps he watched me now from the afterlife, eager to see my end.

  I spoke to the wind. ‘Not long, Marcus.’

  I saw echoes of past battle-brothers in the men who sheltered with me now. Priscus and Stumps would have become great friends, I was certain. Varo and Titus would have clashed at first, but I could envision the pair of brutes ruling the army’s black-market trade with an iron fist. Marcus and Moonface could have fawned together over the grandeur of empire and the nobility of conquest.

  I shook my head in grief for the comrades I had lost, and the ones I was certain would follow.