Blood Forest Page 4

  Somehow, the other troops were able to ignore me, while simultaneously using me as the subject of many a debate, the soldiers armed with an endless supply of suspicion and scorn. They talked as if I weren’t there, and in my mind, I was not. I was a continent away, but the men of my section did not need to know that.

  That morning had shaken loose memories that I had hoped forgotten: the tramp of hobnails; the dirt kicked into the air and into my throat; the jingle of equipment; and the bump of shield on javelin. It had brought it all back. I don’t know what I had begun to mutter to myself, but it was enough to convince the more superstitious of my companions that I was somehow possessed by spirits. By now, they had all surely heard how I had joined the legions – the bloody apparition from the grove of the gods – and some were active in their quest to be rid of me.

  ‘Hey, boss,’ Stumps called to Pavo, who was passing by. ‘How long do we have to keep him with us?’ He jabbed his stubby fingers towards me. ‘He’s bad luck.’

  Pavo ignored the soldier, turning instead to Titus. ‘Titus, if I get one more question about this from your section, I swear I will dry-fuck you all with this bastard javelin.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Titus replied absently to Pavo’s back, before resuming his conversation with Rufus. The subject, I was sure, would be me. Choosing to ignore it, I watched instead as the centurion made his way to the head of the short column, the size of which drew derision from the more salted soldiers.

  ‘This isn’t a bloody war,’ Chickenhead complained, speaking through a mouthful of hardtack biscuit.

  ‘Oh, here we go.’ Stumps laughed, before pretending to stifle a yawn. ‘Time for the story ’bout how Chickenhead and General Drusus beat a million Germans and saved the Empire.’

  At the head of the column, Pavo was conversing with a cavalry soldier. The mounted troopers acted as the army’s messengers, and I was more interested to know what orders we were receiving than to listen to another round of endless bickering between the two veterans.

  ‘I didn’t say there was a million, did I?’ Chickenhead retorted, the skin of his neck flapping earnestly. ‘When did I ever say that? Go on!’

  From a cloth sack slung about Chickenhead’s chest, the kitten, Lupus, poked his head out at the consternation and raised voices.

  ‘Get your tunic out your arse, mate, I was only having a laugh with you,’ Stumps protested, wiping at his face. ‘No need to go spitting your scoff all over me.’

  ‘I’d like to hear about Drusus,’ the section’s youngest soldier, Cnaeus, put in, with the eagerness of youth.

  I knew of Drusus, and that he was a legendary commander who had led the legions in Germany almost twenty years before, defeating the tribes in huge, bloody battles. Battles that Chickenhead had evidently been a part of, but now refused to be drawn on.

  ‘No. Not now. Ask Stumps about the time he broke his arm in camp, and cried like a little bitch.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, you grumpy shit,’ the accused man snapped.

  Titus interceded before Chickenhead could follow with his next insult. ‘Shut up. Pavo’s had his orders.’

  I let my eyes wander back to the head of the column. The left lid was still half closed, but my vision had returned well enough for me to see the cavalry soldier spurring his mount away.

  ‘Prepare to move!’ Pavo called, and a ripple passed along the line as men hauled themselves to their feet, the sentries from outside of the main body rejoining their sections. I made an effort to get to my feet faster than the others; childishly, I was desperate to show them that the beating had taken no toll. Titus must have suffered enough of his own hidings to know that I was bluffing, and grinned.

  ‘Ready for another few miles?’ He asked the question to the section, but his eyes met only mine. ‘Only another eight until we make the fort.’

  I refused to give him the pleasure of a rise. We were out of camp now, just eighty men, and I needed only to bide my time, and wait for a chance to present itself. My service with these soldiers would be short-lived.

  Chickenhead was unable to hide his own feelings quite so well, and clucked in disgust at the tiny column ahead of him. ‘When Drusus took us east, you couldn’t see from one end of the army to the other.’

  ‘Probably because you were sleeping, as usual, you lazy twat.’ Stumps laughed, but the exchange was cut short as Pavo’s voice rang out across the German countryside.

  ‘Century, by the left, quick march!’

  I stepped off as one with the other men, embracing the pain in my legs and savouring every mile. I endeavoured to lose myself in the tramp of hobnails against dirt, my eyes fixed on the bundled pack ahead of me. Each step carried me away from what I had left behind. I could only hope that, over the distant horizon, I would find a new beginning, away from war, pain and death.

  I laughed.

  The march was not an enjoyable experience for me. Not because of the agony of my muscles, or the eye that began weeping again as kicked-up dust clogged the corners, but because of the reason I had crossed a continent alone. The reason that I wanted to be away from these soldiers while they were still soldiers and not brothers.

  It was my secret. The dark infection that gnawed its way through my core.

  I drove the heels of my palms into my eyes, focusing on the pain and little else. Eventually, the darkness faded.

  We arrived at the fort with a few hours of daylight to spare, having pushed the pace beyond the regular marching speed. From my own experience of officers, I expected that came down to Pavo being in a sour temper. He certainly had that look about him: what should have been a handsome face twisted into a sullen snarl. He’d likely pushed the pace hard, willing some man to fall out and give him the excuse to vent his spleen, but though a few had faltered, none had crumbled, and now our column drew level with the River Lippe.

  ‘They call this a fort?’ Moonface spat in derision.

  He had a point. The outpost was little more than a shin-high earthen rampart, with a tangle of withies forming a barricade along the top. There were no towers to speak of, and the outline of sentries was visible behind the makeshift barricade. From the shape of their oval shields, these guards appeared to be Roman auxiliary troopers, men recruited from provinces under Roman control, but not themselves citizens of the Empire. That title would be bestowed upon them should they survive the twenty years of their enlistment. A quarter cohort of these auxiliary infantry, some hunderd and twenty-five men, held this bastion beside the waters of the River Lippe.

  Moonface grimaced, unable to resist a further insult. ‘They couldn’t keep a German’s fart out with that barricade.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Titus countered, stifling a yawn. ‘That wood’s as tough as your mum’s tits. Bastard to try and break through. It’ll take the wind out of any attack.’

  ‘It wouldn’t stop disciplined troops,’ Moonface snorted, unable to back down, but not willing to confront the bigger man about the insult to his mother’s bosom.

  Chickenhead smirked. ‘Well, what a good thing I don’t see any around.’

  ‘Century!’ Pavo called from the head of the column. ‘Halt!’ The halt was ragged, doing its best to prove the veteran’s point. ‘Section commanders on me!’

  Titus acknowledged Pavo’s call with a grunt, and trudged wearily in the centurion’s direction.

  ‘We’ve spent all summer on our arses,’ Chickenhead mused, returning to his subject. ‘We’re the rabble around here, not the Germans. It’s bloody embarrassing.’

  ‘Oh, tell it to your old mate Drusus,’ Stumps teased.

  ‘I think he’s buried somewhere along this river, isn’t he?’ Rufus mused in his usual hushed tones.

  ‘He is,’ Chickenhead answered with a reverence that made him forget Stumps’s jibe. ‘At the fort of Aliso.’

  I listened to that piece of information with some interest. As a boy, yearning to be at war, stories of the campaigns of Drusus had rung in my ears.

  ‘Didn’t
he fall from his horse?’ the youngster Cnaeus asked, hoping to be included in the conversation between veterans.

  ‘Why are you talking, you snot-faced shit?’ Moonface snapped, but Chickenhead was keen to talk on the subject of his esteemed former commander.

  ‘He did. No foe could take him in battle, and the gods were anxious for his company,’ he said, head nodding vehemently. Moonface, if nothing a servant of the gods, added his own violent head movements.

  ‘You mean he got pissed and fell out of the saddle?’ Stumps asked, managing to maintain a straight face. Before the pair of believers could fall upon him with their bile, Titus returned.

  ‘Whatever it is, shut up, and let’s go.’

  We followed him, tramping through a gap in the fort’s defences, and into our temporary new home.

  As we went, I cast my eyes to the river.

  My escape.

  The most menial and least desirable jobs in the legions fell to the newest troops, and so I found myself with Micon and Cnaeus, the two boy soldiers who were ten years my junior. The age mattered not, only that the veterans in the section considered the three of us outsiders, and so we were handed the burdensome task of erecting the section’s tent, while the veterans used their javelins to spit chickens that Titus had sourced from the locals.

  Out of earshot from the sweats, the youngest members of the section were unsure how to behave around me. Yes, I was an outcast like them, but for different reasons. Micon’s head might have been full of air, but I could see that Cnaeus was an astute youth. He watched my practised motions in setting up the campaign tent, the gears of his mind evidently clicking. What did he see? A veteran, or a man who was simply used to working with his hands?

  I felt the unspoken questions, but I had no desire to answer them. Talk leads to friendship, and I didn’t need friends. I didn’t want them. Why? Because friends die, and you live. It’s the cruellest joke in the world, and I had had it played upon me enough times that I was sick of the punchline.

  No, I’d grown used to living within my own mind. Sometimes I didn’t like what was in there, but it was familiar, and familiarity was always comfortable, no matter how disturbing.

  I stood back, my good eye appraising the construction of waxed goat-hide. Titus would find no legitimate fault in it, but he sauntered over to try, lips greasy from the chicken in his hand.

  ‘The lines aren’t tight enough.’ The big man gestured, using a chicken bone to point out a rope under perfect tension. ‘Here.’ He handed me a pick from a basket of engineering instruments. ‘We need a shit-pit. Chicken’s delicious, but it won’t want to stay inside forever.’

  I kept my face neutral, but an image swam into my mind of the pick ploughing down between Titus’s amused eyes. I savoured it a little too long.

  ‘Try it.’ He smiled, knowing what was going on inside my bruised skull.

  I did not, but instead walked away to complete the task. The weight of the pick felt good in my hands. My muscles ached, and I welcomed that pain as I brought each swing hard into the dirt, picturing the smashed skulls of Titus, Moonface, Rufus, Stumps and that hideous bastard Chickenhead. At a moment like this, I knew it was best not to fight it. Just let the anger take over. I brought the pick down, over and over, picturing other faces. Other men I yearned to kill. Before I had worked my way through all that hate, the pit was deep enough to hold the shit of the entire army.

  Bile spent, I felt the familiar hollowness. I made my way back to the section’s tent. They’d held back no food for me, as I knew they would not. I was too exhausted, too beyond caring, to make my own, and so I collapsed on to the dirt, spurning my bedroll. Around me, the men of the section snored on, for once silent and oblivious to the stranger in their midst.

  I closed my eyes, and within moments fell into my own black void.

  6

  I woke to a kick in the ribs.

  Titus, of course.

  ‘You’re waking half of Germany,’ he told me.

  The lump looked prepared to deal me another kick, perhaps expecting that I wouldn’t have taken kindly to his methods of waking me, and so my words took him aback. ‘Thank you,’ I told him, meaning it.

  I wasn’t thanking him because he’d kicked me in my chain-mail coat rather than my exposed head, but because he had broken me out of something that I could not escape myself.

  I knew that I’d been screaming.

  ‘There’s a spirit in him,’ I heard Moonface whisper to Titus, deep-rooted fear in his voice.

  The section commander ignored the superstitious soldier, keeping his eyes fixed on my own. ‘Get out to the rampart and take over watch from the young one. Maybe the rest of us can get some sleep.’

  I made my weary muscles move. There was no way that I could sleep again now, and I would not want to in any case. The nightmare had taken as much of a toll on me as the march, and I felt empty, my bones grinding against joints, pestles in mortars.

  Picking up my arms, I found Cnaeus on the rampart; the keen young soldier challenged me with the first part of the night’s watchword. ‘Three.’

  ‘Bears,’ I answered, completing the security measure.

  ‘It’s an inn,’ Cnaeus told me, not that I had asked. ‘All the sweats go there.’

  ‘I see.’

  It was the longest conversation I’d ever had with him, but even that small exchange was enough to spur him on towards comradeship. Bollocks.

  ‘I heard screams. Did they wake you?’ he probed cautiously, having no idea it was my own nightmares that had curdled his blood.

  ‘They did,’ I answered, turning my gaze out into the black of the night, and hoping that would be an end to it.

  ‘It’s been quiet,’ Cnaeus pushed on. ‘Haven’t seen a thing.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ I replied, offhand. I noticed Cnaeus sagging a little at the implied criticism. ‘None of us would. This is their land.’ I pulled at the armour on my chest. ‘And they’re not weighed down with this. They can slip around like ghosts.’

  I instantly regretted using that last word, and we fell into a void of silence which the young soldier hesitated to climb out of. Eventually, he found the nerve to try.

  ‘They say you’re a ghost,’ he offered to the darkness.

  ‘And how many ghosts do you see standing shagging sentry duty?’ I asked, tired. Tired of the conversation. Tired of the life.

  ‘Where did you soldier, before?’ he asked, pushing his luck.

  A push too far.

  ‘Go get some rest,’ I told him, betraying a tone that was used to giving orders, and having them obeyed.

  He did as he was bid, leaving me to stare into the darkness.

  It beckoned me. I could slip away tonight. It would be two hours until I was relieved. Maybe Pavo would check the lines, but he didn’t strike me as the sort.

  But no. Not tonight. The nightmare had drained me. I wanted only to look into the black.

  In the morning, we set to work on the bridge.

  The river was the width of five horses standing nose to tail, a dark silver in the late summer. Hollowed banks betrayed its winter savagery, but now the current was lazy, the river’s floor smooth. Birds darted along the water, snatching at insects. The treeline of the southern bank was alive with their song and chatter.

  My hobnailed sandals felt their way along the silt, searching for a firm footing. I was stripped to my loincloth, the water slapping gently under my chin. Titus, much taller, had his head well clear, his eyes inspecting the bonds of the wooden pontoon bridge.

  ‘Worked on bridges before?’ the section commander asked me.

  I shrugged, then realized the motion would have been hidden by the river’s murky water. ‘No,’ I answered, flatly.

  ‘Then how you learn to do that?’ Titus pushed, pointing at a lashing between timbers.

  It was time for a barb.

  ‘It’s tying rope. Any idiot can do it.’ It was obvious who I was implying was the idiot, and Titus cast sharp gl
ances to the river’s banks and bridge. Half the century were present, many stripped down to their tunics or less, all engaged in the bridge’s maintenance. The other sections of the century, fully armoured, were pushed further out as a protective screen. One set of prying eyes was one set too many for what Titus had in mind, and I smiled as he forced his anger down into his thick chest.

  ‘Well, seeing as you did such a good job, you can retie the rest of the sections.’

  ‘I’ve been in here for hours,’ I protested, not wanting him to know that I’d got what I wanted.

  ‘Are you refusing to obey an order?’ he asked with glee, knowing that such a refusal would give him a legitimate reason for putting me in my place.

  Anger was so easily manipulated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a good boy.’ He took hold of the bridge and hauled his big frame out of the water, the muscles of his back bunching beneath the scarred skin.

  The work was harder alone, but that was how I wanted it. This way, I was able to secrete rope beneath the timbers. Rope that would bind a few planks together and take me along the river. All I had to do was slip away from my next sentry duty.

  I saw Titus join the rest of the section. They were on the southern bank, stacking the rotting timbers that we’d replaced that morning. No orders had been given as to what to do with the surplus beams, and Titus had considered how best to turn them into a profit.

  ‘I’ll talk to the auxiliaries later,’ he’d told the other veterans of his group. ‘We’ll get a cart from them – have to cut them in, of course – and try the local farms.’

  ‘But it’s rotting?’ Moonface had observed.

  ‘That’s why we’re gonna paint the stuff,’ Titus had told him, as if speaking to a child.

  ‘What about Pavo?’ Rufus asked his friend.

  ‘That arsehole will do as he’s told.’ Titus’s words dripped scorn for the century’s leader. It would all have been very interesting, if only I were staying.

  As I got back to work, the rope chewing at the puffy skin of my hands, I felt Titus’s eyes on me often. I didn’t know for sure why he hated me, and wanted me gone, but I had my suspicions.