Blood Forest Read online

  4

  The tent was bleached by the sun, the thin skin allowing the late summer’s sunshine inside, and saving me the necessity of having to pause at the threshold to allow my eyes to adjust.

  I had expected to find five men within, given that the section was made up of eight, and two were outside, but I found only four.

  Two were lying prone on their bedrolls, one snoring lightly, while another two were playing a game of dice, the pile of coins small, low stakes between friends to pass the time. All four were veterans, evident from the fact that the youngsters outside were cleaning their armour, and by the silver plates stitched on to their legionary belts.

  At first, they didn’t seem to notice me, probably assuming that the movement at the tent flap had come from one of the novice soldiers. Then, when there was no noise and movement to mark my exit, heads began to turn my way.

  I stood there, my equipment in my aching arms, and met their gaze. I held it, feeling the inquisitive hostility for a few seconds, and then casually broke it, casting my eyes around for a place to lay my burden. I found it in the far corner, which meant walking past the veterans. I did so without acknowledging them, and I felt their eyes tracking me as I moved. I expected an assault at any moment, either physical or verbal, but none came. That could mean only one thing: their leader was not present.

  I placed my equipment into the tent’s corner, as gently as if laying down a child. I took great care in rolling my blanket on to the packed-dirt floor, and then, with effort, I forced myself to close my eyes, assuming a look of serene comfort.

  I felt the hard stares through my closed lids, but I heard nothing. I was disappointed. I just wanted it to be over.

  I waited hours and, in that time, I feigned sleep. The act was exhausting, my body tense, awaiting the inevitable. During that time I heard three of the men come and go, while the other snored blissfully in the opposite corner. Outside, I could hear the sound of brushes on metal as the boy soldiers cleaned armour, the cloying smell of their wood-ash polish wafting into the tent.

  It was a shadow that gave away the appearance of their leader. I felt the light above me darken, and I hoped that it was a cloud passing the sun, and not the silhouette of what must be a huge man. From the sound of his voice, steel dragged over gravel, I would be disappointed.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  I deigned to open my eyes, and willed my face to stay neutral. It wasn’t easy.

  His head was grazing the tent’s top, his shoulders as wide as a century in battle formation. I was surprised to see that, despite this mountain of flesh, the man had a handsome face, though one which was now twisting in distaste. I noticed the deep crow’s feet about his bright eyes, and the olive skin, and surmised that this brute was a veteran of the desert legions. How had he come to be here, surrounded by rivers and forests?

  I pushed the absurd question from my mind. I had to concentrate on surviving this encounter with him, not chronicling his service.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he repeated, taking a step closer.

  I saw that his veterans were on his shoulder, waiting to take their lead from this man. The two youngsters were watching at the tent flap, continuing their military education. Besides myself, only one other man was lying down – the sleeping soldier, who was now propping himself up on to his elbows, an amused smile on his pursed lips.

  I decided that it was time for action.

  I stood slowly, giving them no cause to overreact. Doubtless the novice soldiers would have reported that the centurion himself had escorted me to the tent, and this anomaly would be the only reason that I was not currently having my face trampled into the dirt.

  ‘You’re in my tent, you ignorant bastard.’ His voice was low, thunder on the horizon. ‘Fucking answer me.’

  I did, but not in the way he was expecting.

  I planted the crown of my skull into his mouth – I couldn’t reach the nose – and I felt a lip burst beneath the pressure. In the same movement, I reached down for my iron helmet, planning on bringing it crashing into the side of his head – if I could deliver a crushing, rapid assault on their leader, then maybe the others would back down – but he was faster, and harder, than I’d expected, and the helmet was only halfway through its arc when he recovered and threw his right fist into a savage uppercut.

  I half stepped to my left, but even the glancing blow was enough to send my eyes bouncing in their sockets and a jet of blood shooting from my mouth where a rotten tooth was knocked loose.

  The helmet completed its arc, but the power had been taken from my swing and the aim gone awry, so the metal thumped harmlessly into his shoulder, and then he was on me.

  We went down into the dirt, and his comrades, their courage found and blood up, dived down with us. On the floor it was a blizzard of punches, kicks, elbows and bites. It was hard to know who hit whom, a friendly elbow no less damaging than an intentional one, but I caught enough that were aimed for me. I managed to get my teeth into the flesh of somebody’s ear, but before I could tear it away, I felt something crash into the bone beside my eye socket, and I slipped into the black void.

  My unconsciousness was a short one, for when I came to I could still hear the panting of the men I had brawled with. I was in that beautiful moment where my body was so traumatized that the pain had not yet materialized, and so I kept my eyes clammed shut, marvelling at the copper tang of blood that ran over my teeth and dripped into my throat. Evidently, the big man had noticed that red liquid, and didn’t want me to die.

  ‘Roll the bastard on his front before he chokes.’ I felt rough hands grip me and turn me over. My nose pressed into the dirt, and I cheered inwardly to know that it had somehow escaped the fight unbroken.

  I heard the tent flap being pulled open and the light increased. A familiar voice came with it. Centurion Pavo.

  ‘What the fuck have you done to him, Titus?’

  Titus. So the big man was Titus, the soldier the quartermaster had been so interested in.

  The man shrugged. ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘He went for me. The other lads saw it.’

  To this, I heard an echo of agreement.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Pavo asked them.

  ‘No,’ Titus replied, his tone betraying a little disappointment.

  ‘He didn’t forget how to fight, then,’ Pavo mused out loud. He then raised his voice, addressing the tent’s occupants as a whole. ‘Look, he’s in your section, so you’d better make it work. Titus, my tent. The rest of you, sort him out.’

  Pavo left, the big man in tow. The other veterans lifted me on to my blanket while I mumbled incoherently, not entirely out of deception. I was badly hurt from the beating, shapes and colours drifting in front of my eyes. I would have happily dropped into unconsciousness again, but now the pain had arrived, a burning column of agony that marched the length of my body.

  It didn’t desert me for the next two days, during which I drifted in and out of sleep, soon to be woken by sharp pains in my skull, my eye feeling too big for its socket. In this time I heard the men talk, my ‘comrades’, and I was often the subject of discussion.

  ‘He’s mad. He’s tough. He’s a bad omen.’ So, they had discovered where, and how, I had been found. That could work in my favour. If they were superstitious men, they would be more likely to leave me, and my past, alone.

  On the second day in the tent I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer. I felt pus weeping from one of them, a fact confirmed when one of the veterans – a real ugly bastard with pockmarked skin and a sagging neck – began wiping at the corners. From the rough strokes, it was evidently a duty, rather than an act of charity.

  ‘Will he lose the eye?’ I’d heard Titus ask, a knot in my stomach. The other veteran had mumbled, ‘I’m no surgeon,’ which told me nothing.

  ‘It would be good if he did,’ the section commander had added. ‘Can’t have a one-eyed bastard in the fighting lines. Pavo’d ha
ve to move him to the baggage train or something.’

  ‘If he loses it, he loses it,’ the ugly veteran had replied, in a tone that indicated he would not hasten my blindness.

  I learned a lot about the section during my few days in the blankets.

  The leader, Titus, was absent much of the time. The others didn’t seem to know where he went, usually, only that he came back with coins, and shared a few with his comrades in return for them covering his duties within the camp. Pavo often called the man into his own tent, but no one was aware of the nature of their conversations. Likely, however, it was tied into those same coins.

  As my eyes recovered, I was able to put faces to the names and voices I had become acquainted with. Lying on your back for days, and in search of any distraction from pain, you can learn a lot about people.

  Titus’s four friends and followers were veterans, known as salts, or sweats, throughout the legion. The most outspoken of this clique was Stumps and, like most comedians, the twenty-something-year-old soldier was a sullen pessimist at heart. He had lost a couple of fingers during a skirmish with German tribesmen the previous summer, and from the way that he went on, it was he who was bedridden with injuries.

  Rufus was of Gaul, a red-headed Celt who kept an unofficial family on the camp’s outskirts. He was a quiet man, which I took to mean that he was an unhappy one. He was also a duplicarius, meaning that he received double pay. To be the beneficiary of this award, he must have pulled off some heroic deed.

  One of the younger veterans was a fanatic, worshipping both the legions and the Roman deities. During some of his sermons on the enlightenment that Rome was bringing to the barbarian people, I wished that my ears would give up as well as my eyes. I had heard that shit too often in my past, and knew where it led. The uncompromising soldier had been named Moonface for his pale skin and wide, oval visage.

  The veteran who wiped the pus from my eyes was known to his fellow veterans as Chickenhead, for his pinched face and the sagging flesh of his neck. He was eight months short of completing his twenty years’ service, and so he was exempt from most duties. He’d put in the miles and the fights, and so Pavo seemed happy for him to see out his remaining days from the relative comfort of the tent.

  The two younger soldiers were Micon and Cnaeus, but I saw and heard little of them, as they were essentially the slaves of the section, usually burdened with cleaning, cooking and completing any unsavoury duties that came along. As always with young soldiers, it was hard to gauge their true nature, as they were awed into silence and obedience by the veterans, whom the boys looked up to as demi-gods.

  The section’s final member was unofficial, but held a higher office than all. He was Lupus, a grey-haired kitten, ward of Chickenhead in particular. During the veteran’s regular dozes, the cat would curl up alongside him, or in the ugly man’s iron helmet. In the evenings, Chickenhead would feed it with slivers of meat bought from his own purse.

  ‘I’ll move back to Italy when I muster out,’ he told me as he wiped at my eye. ‘And Lupus will come with me. He’ll have a whole farm to roam then, won’t you, Lupus?’ Chickenhead beamed. He was referring to the plots of land given to soldiers on their retirement, often barren tracts on the fringes of Empire. ‘Think of all those mice!’ the soldier teased. ‘Think of all those mice!’

  On my third day in the section I was at last able to prop myself up on my elbows, the aches still present, but subsiding. The swelling around my eye had reached its climax, and though it was still shut from the puffy skin, the weeping had begun to slow.

  The veterans were playing dice when Titus entered. He cast me a desultory look before turning to the sweats, his open face betraying conflicting emotions: excitement and angst.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Chickenhead murmured, reading the signs.

  ‘What is it?’ Stumps pressed, before groaning when he got his answer.

  ‘War,’ Titus told them flatly. He seemed unsure of how he should react to the news. ‘It’s going to be war.’

  5

  Where Titus had come by that information he did not share with or in front of me, but it seemed as though there was something to it, as for the next two days Pavo had the century brought together for drill.

  Still invalided out from my beating, I was excused the first day’s manoeuvres, but on the second, Pavo put his head inside the tent to see me.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he asked with a little delicacy, still unsure of my relationship with the evidently powerful Arminius.

  Despite the ache, I got to my feet to show that I could. It wasn’t out of bravado that I did so, but because I knew my best chance of slipping away from army life was in the field. To get there, I would have to show that I was fit for duty.

  ‘I can walk, sir.’

  He made a noise that didn’t sound at all convinced. ‘Just your tunic. No armour. We’ll see how you go.’

  I got on well enough. The purpose of drill is that the movements of battle become as ingrained in your mind and body as breathing, and battered and bruised though my muscles were, they remembered the moves as well as those of the other soldiers. We practised as a century only, simple manoeuvres such as going from column to extended line, or facing attacks to our flanks.

  Half of the eighty men of the century seemed to be seasoned veterans, men in their early thirties with ten years’ or more service under their belts. Now clad in their war gear, many of these sweats displayed decorations on their armour, Titus, Chickenhead and Rufus amongst them. The Gallic redhead had been awarded the Gold Crown, which explained his status as a duplicarius, and the subsequent double pay.

  Perhaps two dozen of the faces in the ranks had barely begun shaving, and it was these soldiers that caused Pavo and his second in command, the optio Cato, to go red-faced in rage.

  The usual subject of their ire was Micon, of my own section. The spotty, gormless youth seemed unable to tell his left from his right, his wrong-footed actions causing the same chaos in the ranks as Hannibal’s elephants had inflicted on our forebears.

  ‘Micon, you little prick!’ Pavo roared. ‘The next time you fuck up my formation, I will track down the whore who gave birth to you and shove you back inside that mess between her legs!’

  During breaks from the drill I sat by myself, but I was not forgotten. Titus was clearly as popular in the century as he was in the section, other veterans looking my way as they asked the big man the inevitable questions. They didn’t know how to take me, but I was happy enough to be left alone. The beating I’d endured had been worth it, and they knew I wasn’t one who could be walked over. Easier for them to save themselves the trouble and forget about me, unwanted though I was.

  I listened casually as they swapped stories of past conquests, both military and sexual. Beautiful women were described in intimate detail. Former comrades were discussed with hilarity. Combat was spoken of with narrow, faraway eyes. Throughout the army, and throughout every legion of the Empire, this ritual would be repeated daily. It was more than simply a way to pass the time – it was the mortar that bound the troops together. I recognized it. I missed it.

  At the conclusion of the second day of drill, Pavo had us formed into two ranks, forty in each, with the front rank kneeling. He liked to see the faces of his men when he addressed them, whether because he enjoyed talking man to man, or because he did not trust his men to listen, I did not know.

  ‘Is it going to be war?’ Chickenhead blurted out before Pavo could begin. The centurion bit back irritation. Clearly, here was a man who commanded on sufferance of the veterans in his ranks.

  ‘Not as you’d know it, Chicken,’ Pavo told him, attempting to take back the initiative. ‘We’re going back to the Rhine forts, and—’ He stopped at the loud chorus of groans and raised his hands for quiet. ‘We’re going back to the Rhine forts! From the march, raiding parties will be dispatched against the tribes that haven’t paid tribute this summer.’

  ‘And what about us?’ a veteran called. From overheard t
ales, I knew that the man had campaigned against the German tribes before. ‘Are we in these parties?’

  Pavo shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So there’s no bloody loot?’ Stumps grumbled, the sentiment echoed by several other voices.

  ‘I told you, I don’t bloody know,’ Pavo protested.

  ‘So what do you know, boss?’ Titus asked him with dripping sarcasm.

  Pavo visibly bit back a retort.

  ‘Tomorrow, as a century, we march out to the River Lippe. We’re to join a detachment of auxiliaries already there, and hold a bridge on the river. Repair it, if necessary, so that the army can use it on its move back to the Rhine.’

  ‘If we’re holding a crossing on the river’ – Titus spoke again – ‘then we’re not going to be in any raiding party, are we?’

  Pavo was forced to shake his head. ‘It doesn’t look like it, no.’

  And at this, the veterans in the ranks let loose a hail of abuse at the army, Germany and the goddess Fortune. With no prospect of pillage and plunder from a whole summer’s campaigning season, the men’s patience was at an end.

  This was the true face of Rome’s glorious legions.

  I was alone again, sitting on the dirt of a track that ran through open countryside, the fields grazed low by cattle. At this time of year the beasts were as fat as they were going to get. Most would be slaughtered and salted before the lean season of winter began to eat into their meat, with a few held back by the tribesman for breeding.

  We’d left camp at dawn, marching out as a century, and now I yearned to rub at shoulders pinched by armour, but I refused to show weakness to those who sat apart from me, no matter how blistered and raw my skin. It was down to their indifference that the armour had become a burden. Without a second man to help me dress in the protective steel, it sat loose and awkward on my shoulders, the edges of the plate rubbing at the skin beneath my tunic. My campaign kit, a burden far heavier than my banishment, was piled alongside me, shield held upwards by my heavy javelin. A javelin that I dreamed of ramming into the guts of my ‘comrade’ Titus.