Blood Forest Read online

  ‘I want you to join me. I want you to join me, Corvus.’

  Corvus. He knew me – he knew me – and as the black closed in around my eyes, and the ringing built in my ears, I knew now that I had known him long before the sacred grove.

  My vision swam, blurs of bodies and entrails stretched out across the ground, but these were not the men of the German legions. This was Pannonia. This was another life.

  ‘Corvus.’ Arminius spoke again, but I could no longer see the man, nor reply – my every sense was focused on the wall of blood that rushed towards me, thousands of corpses churning endlessly in the red froth, screams assailing me from their dead mouths.

  I wanted to scream myself. I needed to.

  But I couldn’t.

  And so the wave of blood hit me, and I remembered it all.

  49

  I hadn’t lied when I told the section that my true name was Corvus. I hadn’t lied when I told them that I was a deserter. At that moment, with our leaders dead by their own hands, and staring at our own end in the morning, I had wanted to unburden myself fully to the comrades I had come to trust and love as brothers.

  I had thought that I had done so.

  Now, confronted by Arminius and my own name, the memories that I had pushed down into the blackest part of my soul came forth like an eruption, the force of it sending me to my knees. Acidic bile burned my throat as my body and mind ached to purge itself. I had once believed that the terrible things could never be forgotten, but I now saw that my mind, so damaged, had tried to save me like blood clotting a wound.

  ‘Corvus,’ I heard from somewhere, the scab tearing free.

  I tried to lift my head. My vision swam as if I’d been kicked by a horse. I saw the form of bodies littering the ground by the hundreds. The details of their faces and uniforms were lost, but I saw the minutest things – the insects hopping on the gore. A woman’s golden hair dancing with the wind.

  ‘Corvus.’

  The name stung me like a whip, because I knew now that Corvus was not an ordinary soldier who had, like so many others, tried to desert his legion during a time of war.

  No. I, Corvus, was my legion. The rising star. The hero. The killer who had climbed from boy soldier to standard-bearer in only five years. I was the guardian of the legion’s eagle, its heart and soul. In Rome’s Eighth Legion, there was no man more admired, no warrior more feared, than Corvus.

  Than me.

  That was three years before I found myself at Arminius’s feet in a German forest. Since then, throughout the Danube legions, the name of Corvus had become a curse.

  Because the hero became a traitor.

  The reason was war, though it all began peacefully enough. I had never forgotten the early days of it. Like Germany, the province of Pannonia was on the fringe of the Empire, and as such its subjects wished to enjoy their own customs and traditions. They asked the Emperor of Rome for a degree of autonomy, but the rule of that demi-god and city was iron, and so peaceful request became bloody revolt. The citizens of the province were tired of being ground beneath the Roman heel, and Roman garrisons were attacked. Politicians were murdered.

  The Eighth Legion, where I carried the proud eagle standard, formed a part of Rome’s response.

  I remember how eagerly I awaited it. Like young Cnaeus, who had died at my feet, I ached to prove myself. Like Pavo, who had been trampled by a German horse, I yearned for glory. I had seen combat against bandits and brigands, but this was to be my first taste of war.

  It was nothing but butchery.

  Our mission to restore order saw us raze towns, enslaving the women and children and executing the men. After only a few days on campaign, I could no longer count in my mind the women I had seen raped, or the atrocities I had been a part of. My conscience was bloodied, and my blade more so. As standard-bearer, I was always in the eyes of my comrades. Respect and esteem meant all to me, and so I had slit the throats of elderly men as they knelt trembling in their own piss.

  It was a mercy when our ‘enemy’ offered resistance and some kind of blood-letting that could be described as combat. I was at the front of every charge against the fortified positions, desperate to lose myself in the chaos. Soon I began to realize that I was hoping for an enemy spear to find its way through my armour and into my black heart.

  None did, my work as a butcher continued, and so it was that I found myself within my campaign tent, resting on my knees, with the point of my short sword pushing between the junction of my ribcage.

  I let my weight move forward, slowly, and felt the blade pierce skin. I held it there, savouring the balance of life and death. I knew that with one sudden movement I could end it all. I could remove myself from a world that had shown itself to care only for death and darkness. I could stop myself being a piece of that macabre machinery.

  But I did not.

  I did not, because I had already seen too much. I had already done too much. Before my death could come, there had to be some repentance. Some way to give peace to the men that I had killed.

  I would find it.

  The campaign continued. My search to bring balance was fruitless. Like a coward, I took to finding excuses to avoid the bloodshed. I explained to my commanders that, rather than be in the thick of the fighting, I wished to study it from a distance. My courage was famous by this point, my leaders eager to groom me for future appointments, and so it was that I found myself on the crest of a low-slung ridge, watching the town below as our troops pulled screaming families from their homes in the dawn’s light.

  It was there that Arminius found me.

  He wore the uniform of a cavalry officer, though there was no sign of his mount. His face was open and whimsical, as if the tortured screams of rape and murder below us were a prelude to a joke. The handsome man’s cavalry squadron was attached to my own legion, and I had seen him often. Often, and never comfortable with what was unfolding.

  ‘Corvus, sir,’ I greeted him.

  ‘Arminius.’ He offered his hand, man to man, forgetting rank and the privilege of noble birth. I took it, and in that moment I saw the confirmation in his eyes that he loathed this campaign as much as I did. Loathed an empire’s organization that relied on butchery to survive.

  ‘Those are our own citizens we’re killing,’ Arminius observed, his tone low. In the closest street, a man was being hacked apart by inexperienced boy soldiers. It was a bad death. A long one.

  I turned my eyes from the sight, not in disgust but because I wanted to take the measure of this man before I uttered words that could condemn me to an end on the cross should he betray my trust.

  I do not know how he gained my confidence, but it was given to him as easily as a babe loves its mother. Perhaps it was because I had developed such contempt for my own life that I no longer cared for its preservation. I simply needed to unburden my soul.

  And so I spoke.

  ‘I can’t serve an empire that does this,’ I heard myself confess.

  Arminius considered my words. Beneath us, the man in the street had ceased his screaming. Other citizens, found cowering in their hiding places, were beginning theirs.

  ‘I look to my own people,’ the German said, and gestured to the death in the town. ‘When they feel as though they deserve a voice in the running of the Empire that they are told they are a part of, will this be their reward? Will I be asked to carry my sword against those of my own blood?’

  I said nothing. We both knew the answer.

  ‘Rome is a light in the world.’ As Arminius spoke, I could feel his love for that place, and its principles. ‘But the torch is carried by the wrong people.’

  ‘How do we change that?’ I asked suddenly, needing to know the answer, certain that this man possessed it, and anxious to play my part.

  ‘What are you willing to do?’ he asked me, his blue eyes burning into mine.

  I placed my hand on the pommel of my sword.

  And so, as the screams of Roman justice echoed beneath us,
Arminius told me how we would defeat an empire.

  War is expensive. Neighbouring kingdoms must be bribed to either interfere, or not. Armies must be provisioned. Soldiers must be paid.

  It was this last reason that gave me the chance to hurt Rome. As standard-bearer, the legion’s coffers came under my watch. I was supposed to be scrupulous, and incorruptible.

  But I was set on my path to become a traitor.

  And so, one night, I deserted my dear comrades, and fled my legion with those pay chests, taking them into the hills where the rebels were mustering to form a resistance against Rome’s iron fist. It is enough to say that I was distrusted at first, but chests full of gold did much to persuade. The final act of my confirmation into the rebel ranks left me with shaking knees and a belly of acid, and yet I did what needed to be done. The details of that act can wait in my soul’s black pit with all the others.

  I was an accomplished warrior, known throughout Pannonia, and so I was placed on the staff of the rebel generals. It would not be unjust to say that my expertise was a large part of the reason that the war then dragged on for two blood-soaked years. It was only when Rome dispatched an army of unprecedented size that we finally became trapped in the harsh mountains.

  It was then that I ran. I had already abandoned one set of comrades, though I knew that my reason for that desertion had been just. Leaving the hilltop fortress as the legions swarmed over the mountainside like lava, I had no such justification. The rebellion seemed lost. Rome had won. I simply wanted to live. When Marcus took his last gasp, I ran.

  I ran. I ran northwards, because Britain was the only place where I – maybe – still had a friend.

  I could not tell you when my mind ceased to function as Corvus the traitor. One moment I was running from the flames, the next I was alone in the mountains – it was only when I slept that the memories came back to me, but they began to grow distant, individual horrors replaced by the wall of blood that would wash over me and wake me screaming. Like a fort besieged by catapult and ram, my mind had crumbled in war. Now, on a battlefield a world away, it had been rebuilt by the man who had cut down an army.

  Arminius.

  I felt his hands on my shoulders, and opened my eyes.

  It was then that I screamed.

  50

  I screamed.

  I screamed again, and again, and again. Screams of frustration. Of hate. Of self-loathing.

  Arminius pulled me to my feet and held my face tight in the iron vice of his hands. ‘Corvus.’ He smiled. ‘Stop this shit. Look around you.’ He gestured. ‘We’ve won.’

  I did look around me. I saw bodies on top of bodies. I saw the ruin of an army. I saw an end to the ambitions of an empire. Three legions destroyed. Could Rome ever recover?

  ‘I did this?’ I managed to mutter.

  For once, Arminius let a prideful smile play across his handsome features. ‘This was my work, Corvus, but the gods had their hand in it too. Why else would I have found you in that grove? They sent you to me.’

  ‘Why didn’t—’

  ‘I tell you?’ He smiled again. ‘Tell you what? That you were a traitor? A turncoat? Why? So that you could have been put up on a cross, and taken me with you?’

  ‘You should have killed me,’ I murmured.

  ‘I thought about it,’ Arminius admitted, still holding my face. ‘But the gods spoke to me in that place, Corvus. They told me that you would play your part in this, and you did. You saved me on the square. When my uncle wanted me imprisoned, or dead, you saved me. And so, yes, you made this possible.’

  I looked about me at the bodies that would soon be flyblown and bloated. I wanted to throw up.

  Arminius recognized my weakness. ‘I know an ally when I see one, Corvus. You showed your true heart in Pannonia. It is a good heart. The heart of a man who cares for ordinary people, and not the pampered life of a senator half a world away. I have seen broken warriors before, and I just had to let you come to me in your own time. Until then, I watched you. My men watched you.’

  I looked up from the carpet of corpses.

  ‘The two legionaries and their centurion, buried in the manure,’ I realized. ‘They knew me. They knew what I had done. That was you.’ I meant that Arminius had killed them to keep my secret.

  ‘Berengar,’ Arminius confirmed, with a nod towards the giant bodyguard who now walked into my eyeline, his thick muscles painted with Roman blood. ‘Berengar took care of you, Corvus, because you’re one of us. You’ve seen the rot in the Roman Empire. Together, we can stop it spreading.’

  ‘We can,’ I heard a voice say, stunning myself as I realized that it was my own. ‘We can,’ I said again, and believed it.

  For what was Rome?

  Seeing the purity in Arminius’s eyes, I knew exactly what it was. It was a bully that masqueraded as a teacher. It was a tax collector that disguised itself as a philanthropist. It was a bloodthirsty executioner that paraded as a guardian.

  Rome was poison.

  ‘Rome’s poison,’ I said aloud, as more wretched memories came rushing back, and I knew that I spoke the truth.

  Had I not deserted the Eighth Legion in sound mind, desperate to prevent – or at least delay – the atrocities committed against the people of Pannonia? It was only bizarre fate that had seen me once again clad in the red tunic of the legions and marched off to war on Rome’s behalf. It was only the bonds of brotherhood to a few men that had kept me in the armoured ranks when the chance to escape had presented itself. The shared ordeal was the fabric of our binding, not the notion of Rome, or empire.

  And now those battle-brothers were gone. Dead, deserted or missing. My ties to Rome were cut.

  ‘Follow me,’ Arminius offered, taking his hands from my face.

  And so I did, and when I followed, it was not as a prisoner, but as an ally of the German prince.

  It was as such that Prefect Caeonius now saw me. He had cast his hollow eyes back to take in the sight of the man who was his victor, and now the sole determiner of his fate, and by his side he saw the wretch that he had rescued from a tortured death on a cross. A man who, it must now be clear to him, had been a traitor all along.

  I expected some fire in his eyes. A curse.

  There was nothing. He had seen too much. Endured too much. I was simply one more blow in the barrage of deceit and misery.

  ‘What will you do with him?’ I asked Arminius, and the prince tracked my eyes to the leader of the Roman army’s remnants.

  He did not answer. It was the first and only time I ever saw indecision cross his face.

  I did not press him, my mind still swimming from my own revelation.

  We followed the sorry survivors of Varus’s army through a gap in the ramparts of the final marching camp. Within the raised dirt walls, hordes of German tribesmen and camp followers picked through an army’s litter, searching for anything of value.

  ‘Stop your men there,’ Arminius called, and Caeonius ordered a halt at the camp’s centre. Men came to a stop as if in a dream, bumping and shuffling into each other’s backs.

  Arminius walked forward and, given an encouraging push in the back by Berengar, I assumed that I was to follow on behind. So it was that I found myself within a javelin’s length of the Roman commander.

  Prefect Caeonius had no words for me. I, though I tried, had none for him.

  ‘What now?’ He spoke instead to Arminius.

  ‘Show me where Varus is buried.’

  Caeonius shrugged, as if he had been expecting the order, and led off.

  Berengar called something in German, and a dozen of Arminius’s household warriors ran off, quickly returning to their leader’s presence with picks and shovels.

  ‘Here.’ Caeonius pointed to the earth, the position seared into his memory through shame and anger.

  It took only moments for the strong German warriors to dig up the corpse. As we had been told by Titus’s veteran comrade, Varus should have been cremated, but only his hair w
as singed, his lips twisted from the heat. There was no mistaking the man.

  Arminius now pulled down his breeches and, to the cheers of his followers, pissed all over the charred face of a governor who had been amongst the most powerful men in Rome.

  Caeonius said nothing. Nor did he protest when Berengar stepped forward and used the edge of a shovel to brutally hack the governor’s head from his shoulders in a series of wet slaps. He held it up for Arminius’s inspection, the prince’s eyes flashing with venom as he spat into the dead face.

  ‘Send it to King Marabodus,’ Arminius ordered, translating for the benefit of myself and Caeonius.

  ‘Why?’ I found myself compelled to ask.

  ‘His tribe are the Marcomanni. You won’t find any of them on this battlefield, Corvus. It’s time for everyone to choose a side,’ he finished ominously, and from those words, I knew that the bloodshed would not end here, in this forest. This was only the beginning of Arminius’s rebellion against Rome.

  ‘What now?’ I asked him, picturing those future battlefields.

  Arminius did not direct his answer towards me. Instead, his eyes stayed fixed on the headless corpse of Varus. Perhaps it was his hatred for the man, and all he embodied about Rome, that caused the answer that Arminius snarled.

  ‘Kill all of the officers,’ he ordered.

  51

  Caeonius made no attempt to dissuade Arminius from the sentence of death that the prince had proclaimed. He did not beg for his life, or beseech him for mercy. He simply held back his shoulders, his weathered face a blank mask as he awaited the inevitable. Perhaps it was this stoicism that compelled Arminius to speak.

  ‘You are a good man, Caeonius,’ he offered to the soldier he had condemned to die. ‘Too good to be left alive. This will be a long war.’

  The Roman veteran nodded. ‘It will.’

  But his part in it was over. Berengar’s blade hacked into the prefect’s neck with such force that Caeonius’s spine was severed instantly, his head flopping forward uselessly as an arc of blood gushed into the air.