Blood Forest Read online

  Into that carnage, we forged ahead.

  Clarity of thought and action was lost. Adrenaline and fear took hold of my body. I shouted, but I could not say what. I do not know where the axe in my hand came from, only that I found myself on my knees, frantically swinging it into the wooden barricade ahead of me, splinters of wood thrown back into my face as my muscles burned with the effort.

  While some of us struggled to break through, others attempted to fight back against those who assailed us from above. It was an impossible task; our javelins were shorter than the Germans’ spears, and any Roman brave enough to expose his body to take aim and throw was pierced by German steel before he could loose his own weapon.

  And that was how I saw Chickenhead die.

  Desperate to draw blood, the veteran had pushed away his neighbour’s shield, which was covering him from above, and was arcing his javelin back to throw when the first spear plunged down to hit him on the armour of his shoulders. The mail held, but a second speartip found flesh between shoulder and neck, driving deep into the veteran’s body. Blood spurted into the air as he cried out in anger and pain. Before Titus could pull his shield over our fallen comrade to protect him, a rock the size of a child’s torso came tumbling across the rampart and crushed Chickenhead’s helmet as if it were made of glass. In a heartbeat, the veteran had been reduced from our beloved comrade to a broken, mangled corpse.

  ‘Leave him!’ Titus ordered, seeing Stumps about to drop to Chickenhead’s side, his own safety forgotten. ‘Leave him! Pick up the tools! Get this fucking wall down!’

  What choice did we have?

  And so we struck the wood of the German defences with axe and pick. Like wild animals, we pulled at it with our bare hands until our fingernails tore away. Spear and javelin stabbed down from above, and the screams of the dying outsung the victorious war cries of those behind the wall.

  How long the attack lasted for, I could not say. Once Chickenhead fell, I was barely conscious of my own part in it. There was the noise, the labour, the feeling of hot blood against my skin. In that scrum against the wall, time lost all meaning. There was no room for fear, only the most basic instinct to draw the next breath, and to live through the next second.

  I did not hear the trumpets or orders that sounded the retreat. Likely I would have remained at the wall, hitting it pathetically with a blunt axe head until I was finished by a German spear, had Titus not dragged me from the carnage.

  Somehow, I escaped the wall intact but for the most minor of injuries. Looking back, I could see that hundreds of our comrades had not been as fortunate – beneath the withies was a red carpet of fallen legionaries. This carpet seemed to rise and fall as the wounded tried to crawl to safety, but they would never be able to escape the Germans who now poured howling through the wall’s sally ports, determined to dispatch the injured and harass the retreat of those that still stood.

  ‘Jog-trot!’ came the order, relayed by voices hoarse from fear. ‘Jog-trot!’

  I flashed my wild eyes about me. Chickenhead was gone, but the other members of the section somehow lived, their faces painted in gore and terror. As a unit now, we shuffled at a trot away from the wall, our muscles beyond fatigue, but carried on by adrenaline. As the German horde poured downhill towards us, the trot became a run, men pushing and shoving their way to escape.

  The army was in danger of becoming a rabble. Retreat was becoming rout.

  Prefect Caeonius recognized it, and knew that there was only one decision to make.

  ‘Halt!’ the centurions called, relaying our leader’s order. ‘Halt, you bastards! Form up! Form up! Battle formation!’

  Somehow, discipline took hold, section commanders and veterans pulling their comrades to a stop, and pushing them into a formation that could face the onrushing tribesmen. They knew that it was our only chance now. A chance so pitiful that to do anything but prepare for the end was foolishly optimistic.

  And so, with shaking muscles and panting lungs, we prepared to make our final stand beneath the legion’s eagles.

  45

  Our army was dying. The Empire was being brought to its knees. The rampart beneath the hill was thick with our dead, across which now streamed a mass of German warriors, flush with the sense of victory. All about us, the jaws of Arminius’s trap were slamming shut.

  Suddenly, the irony of it all hit me like an arrow. I had walked a continent to escape war, and now here I stood, part of a colossal defeat that I knew would echo across the entire world. Despite the death around me, or more likely because of it, I suddenly choked out a laugh.

  ‘We’re fucked.’ I smiled at young Cnaeus beside me.

  I knew it was a hollow smile. The smile of a man who had one foot in the earthly realm and one beyond. But, surrounded by death, I had the choice of laughing in its face, or shitting myself at its touch.

  And so why not die with a smile on my face?

  The Empire meant nothing to me. Enlightenment? Romanization? They were fancy words for corpulent politicians. My world was the section, the mates on my shoulders. My world was now nothing more than the few yards to my front, seen over the axe-ravaged horizon of my shield’s lip. It was a small world, and one full of terror.

  My smile dropped as I heard Pavo shout, ‘Here they come!’ The warning was redundant. A wave of screaming Germans sprinted towards us, a solid mass of shield and spear.

  These were fresh troops, unbloodied, their eyes still sparkling with life. They hadn’t fought in the forest. They hadn’t bled on the wall. I hoped that their inexperience would allow me to see a few more seconds of this grey morning.

  ‘Brace!’ Pavo called, and I overlapped my shield with Cnaeus’s, putting the pathetic weight of my body behind my front leg. My limbs were weak, dying, and yet they obeyed. Adrenaline had fed them to this point. I felt the slip of the mud beneath my sandals, and ground them in deeper, knowing that every inch of push and shove would be a matter of life and death.

  With a sidelong glance, I caught Cnaeus’s eye. Three days ago, this comrade had been a young warrior. Now, he was an old man. Even the stubble on his unguarded throat had grown white. He had done his duty, and showed the promise of a fine soldier. In another life, he could have risen far. In this one, he seemed certain to die on this track.

  I pushed such thoughts from my mind as I turned my eyes back to the front. The Germans were now a few paces away, their faces screaming, cursing, twisted by both hatred and the scent of victory.

  We clashed. It was shield on shield, grinding, creaking and splintering. It was metal into flesh, the resistance of bone, the break in through ribs, and the suction as the blade was drawn free. It was gnashing teeth, spitting faces and eyes dead with resignation or ablaze with defiance.

  It was battle.

  Once again in the face of death, time became meaningless. I measured life in breaths and sword strokes.

  Beside me, young Cnaeus screamed like an animal as he thrust his blade into a German’s body. Pulling his sword free sent a cascade of hot blood spurting into the air and across my own skin. I tried to call out, more beast than man, as my own steel tore open a stomach, conscious of the hot entrails that fell across my sandalled feet.

  ‘Die!’ I screamed into the bearded faces of my enemy. ‘Die!’

  And die they did. How many on my own sword? What does it matter? Only survival was important, and for that we needed victory.

  But victory belonged to our enemy.

  I stood, but hundreds had fallen. The line finally broke, Germans pouring into the breach like an infection, the fight of ordered battle lines descending into a melee of individual skirmishes.

  Warrior after warrior came at me. Most were a blur – cut, parry, thrust and move on – but some details fought their way through the carnage to etch into my mind, destined to dwell there until my own final gasp: a legionary staring quizzically at the stump of his arm, hacked off by a German axe; a woman, a whore from the baggage train, holding spearmen at bay with wi
ld swings of her own staff; a mule, thrashing in agony, eyes bulging from its skull in terror.

  ‘Rally, rally, rally! Form on me! Form on me!’ I heard the harsh call for order pierce the riotous cacophony of battle, and saw the broken line of soldiers fighting their way to my side. I did not know it at first, but the barking voice had been my own. Like the well-drilled strokes of a sword arm, my tongue had acted on its own initiative.

  ‘Kill them!’ Stumps screamed, blood pouring down his skull from a half-severed ear. ‘Kill them!’ he demanded of us.

  We tried. Cut, parry, thrust: the endless repetition of death’s machinery, broken only when I felt a hand grip my sword arm.

  I turned, and saw young Cnaeus falter.

  The boy buckled to his knees, one hand desperately fighting for my attention, the other pressed to a wound on his neck that spewed crimson like a grotesque waterfall.

  I knew that he was a dead man. His wide, terror-filled eyes told me that he knew the same.

  The Germans gave me no time to delay the inevitable. No time to assure him that all would be well. No time for goodbyes. All I could do was cover the boy with my shield, fighting off attackers as he whimpered and choked to death on his own blood. Finishing off a swordsman with a thrust into his stomach, I finally had a chance to look down between my feet. Cnaeus lay there, his eyes open and unblinking.

  The boy was dead.

  I had no time to mourn him. Our small knot of men had to stand firm as the tide of German warriors swirled around us. Other groups of soldiers closed ranks, shields overlapped, swords and javelins held in shaking hands.

  Here was the lull in the battle. Such hostility could not be continued indefinitely, and now was the point where men collapsed from exhaustion, or backed away to fill lungs with air and stomachs with wine. Men still died, but the initial clash of forces had dissipated into a handful of stand-off skirmishes and the dispatching of wounded. Tortured cries for mothers rang out in every language of the Empire and the German tribes. I knew battle, and recognized this lull as an inhalation before further exertion. The fight was not over. The forest seemed to hold its own breath, waiting for the next move.

  ‘Felix, are you all right?’ I turned, seeing Titus. He held a German longsword in one hand, an oval auxiliary shield in the other.

  ‘Cnaeus is gone,’ I managed, after spitting to clear my throat.

  Stumps and Moonface were still with us. Micon too.

  ‘Stop crying!’ Titus shouted into the boy soldier’s face.

  ‘Cnaeus,’ the boy sobbed.

  ‘Do you want to join him, you tart?’ Titus challenged the youth. ‘Or do you want to live?’

  ‘I want to live,’ Micon finally stammered.

  ‘Then pick up your fucking shield,’ the man growled, and the boy did so, coming to stand beside me.

  ‘This isn’t over.’ Titus spoke confidentially into my ear, though any man could see that truth.

  We cast our eyes over the German ranks opposing us, a mass of men that swayed with anticipation.

  ‘They’re waiting on something,’ I agreed.

  It came a moment later from the head of the track: thunder – the thunder of hooves.

  Titus spat. ‘Cavalry. Fuckers.’

  Stumps grimaced. ‘See you on the other side, boys.’

  The horsemen burst forth like blood from an artery, pouring into the narrow space between the trees.

  ‘Shields!’ Titus called. ‘Hold! Hold!’

  The irrepressible flow of the cavalry swept up those Romans who did not hold their formations, men dying as they were trampled beneath hooves or spitted on the end of cavalry spears.

  Other knots of soldiers broke in the face of this brute force, discipline replaced by animal instinct to flee for the illusion of safety in the trees.

  Some men resisted this urge. Forced it down with clenched teeth and empty stares. They were the backbone of a legion, but the spine had long since snapped.

  ‘Get back, you cunts! Get back!’ Pavo called at the soldiers who ran for their lives. ‘Get fucking back here!’ This was the moment he had longed for: glory-drenched battle. The chance to carve a name, reputation and career.

  It all came to an end in a clatter of hooves. I saw the centurion disappear beneath the trampling steed of a German nobleman, the shorn-crested helmet tossed into the air as if it were an afterthought.

  ‘Pavo’s gone!’ a veteran of our own century called.

  And so it was that our own band split apart, soldiers I knew by sight bolting for their supposed salvation. Only the survivors of our section held together. We were blood-brothers who had slept, ate and shat together so often that we were almost of the same organism. By some mercy, our solidarity bought us a moment of respite, the cavalry mounts swerving around our unyielding shields, leaving the diehards to go in search of easier or more glorious prey.

  And there was nothing more glorious than a legion’s eagle. The silver totem was the heart and soul of a legion, and as the soldiers of Rome died in the dirt, or fled for the trees, the eagle wavered. The standard-bearer whom I had met on the parade square was forced by wounds to his knees, the bearskin cloak about his shoulders thick with matted blood.

  I saw the man sag, a witness to the last stand of the infantry who fell in defence of the eagle. Only when the standard-bearer made no further move to fight did I realize that the man had died with his hand on the sacred staff. That decorated warrior had told me it was better to be lucky than brave, and now his words were proven as the boot of a German cavalry soldier pushed his limp body to the dirt, a rush of blood pouring from his open mouth. The wild-maned German warrior then hefted the totem into the air, cheering himself hoarse, and his countrymen broke from their slaughter to revel in the capture of one of Rome’s most sacrosanct possessions.

  It was the final blow. The last cut. Seeing the symbolic eagle fall into the hands of the enemy, the minds of Rome’s soldiers turned to their own survival.

  They broke.

  ‘Go. Run!’ Stumps screamed into my face. ‘Get to the trees! Fucking run. Run. Go. Run!’

  I looked down and saw Cnaeus’s lifeless face. The wound to his neck was as raw and open as his dead eyes – they told me to run.

  And so I did.

  I crossed the open ground littered with the dead and dying, my eyes focused on the forlorn sanctuary of the woods. I ran like an Olympian, and as I hurdled a fallen cavalry mount, I saw a ward of the legion that had slunk, unnoticed by almost all, into the deep green shadow of the forest.

  It was a mule, and I knew what was contained within the boxes on its sweat-shined flanks – they were the legion’s pay chests, and in this forest of ghosts, they offered me the promise of being reborn.

  I intended to take it.

  46

  Branches whipped across my face as I rushed into the treeline, desperate to leave the sound of the tortured screams behind me.

  Clear of enemies – at least for a moment – the ruined muscles of my legs finally buckled as my sandals hit a tree root, and I collapsed to the floor like scythed wheat.

  I lay there panting, spittle dripping between my teeth. Like a baby, I tried to regain my feet, frantic to find the mule that I had seen disappear into the forest with the legion’s pay chests on its back.

  Instead, as I pushed myself up with shaking arms, I found a blade pointing at my throat.

  ‘You ran,’ the man accused me, and I swallowed at the sight of him.

  His huge frame dripped with gore. His eyes burned with hate. He was a vision of nightmare.

  ‘We all ran,’ I forced myself to say.

  Titus lowered his blade. ‘We need to keep going,’ he told me, offering his hand and pulling me to my unsteady feet.

  He was right. We had to keep running. The unending chorus of screams told us as much. And yet …

  ‘There’s a mule,’ I told him. ‘I saw it come in close to here.’

  ‘We don’t have time to fuck around—’ he began.
r />   ‘The legion’s pay chests are on its back,’ I finished, and Titus’s eyes grew wide.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  I nodded, and I knew that there was no way Titus would run with the promise of riches so close at hand. The man was a survivor, but deep down his soul was touched with greed. He had risked much in his sale of arms with the quartermaster. He would risk much to come into possession of a pay chest.

  ‘Show me where the mule came into the forest,’ he ordered, and I did, taking him the short distance to the edge of the track and a break between the trees. From there, finding the beast was a simple enough task, the mule having followed the path of least resistance through the trees. Avoiding our enemies was not as easy, but Titus was a god of war, and he cut them down as if they were children. Some almost were.

  ‘There!’ He pointed. The mule made no effort to avoid us, and as I took hold of the loose reins about its neck, Titus hungrily tore open one of the chests on its dirty flank.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he whispered, his eyes wide as they took in the mass of coin. ‘Something brought us to this point for a reason, Felix. We can take this. You can go to Britain – I’ve got the connections. With this coin, we can do it.’

  Britain – the land I had striven for with every torrid step across a continent. The land I had dreamed would offer me redemption. The land I had dared hope would offer me sanctuary from ghosts.

  This was it, the moment I had been waiting for since Arminius had first found me in the sacred grove. I was free of the army, its discipline and its punishments. I had coin – more coin than I could have ever imagined. I even had a warrior and a comrade with whom to share the road.

  And yet.

  ‘We can’t leave without the others,’ I heard myself say.

  It was a moment before Titus spoke.

  ‘You saw what happened back there. They’re dead, Felix. The others are dead. It’s just you and me now.’

  ‘Did you see them fall?’ I pressed. ‘Cnaeus is dead, but Micon? Stumps? Moonface? Did you see them fall?’

  Eventually Titus shook his head.