Blood Forest Page 5

  Titus, quite clearly, was involved in some business outside the legion. As he wasn’t permitted to conduct any other kind of work, that meant it was black market, and so Titus knew secrets, kept secrets, and recognized when others were doing the same. He recognized that I was doing the same, and a last thing Titus wanted was attention drawn to the section and his own dark dealings. If an accident could befall me, then he would be all the happier. If it could not, then he simply needed to ride me to the point where I would snap, and give him justified reason for killing me in self-defence. These things happened in the ranks. Titus and the witnesses would say their piece, there would be a lot of head-shaking and tutting from the officers, and there the matter would end, with my body in a shallow grave, a spadeful of lime for company.

  Titus needn’t have worried. I would save him that bother.

  I strained hard at the rope to close the knot. The labour kept me warm in the water, but my hands had pruned, the wet skin coming apart with the work. I watched the droplets of blood fall into the water, to be quickly carried away by the current. They mesmerized me. One after another. Drip after drip. I swallowed, suddenly nauseous.

  I did not know why my stomach felt as if it were rising into my throat, or why my head throbbed as if there were an army inside, besieging the walls of my skull. I only knew that I had had this feeling before, during my long journey.

  Fuck. Perhaps I was dying?

  I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight, willing the sickness to go away. It wouldn’t, and so I went back to my task with vigour, attempting to fill my mind with the actions, willing nothing to enter my body but the feel of the rope in my hands.

  Eventually it worked, but the thumping in my chest did not subside. Something was wrong. I became aware of another sensation.

  It was one I was well used to, developed since childhood and honed on the far side of the Empire.

  I sensed eyes on me.

  It wasn’t Titus. It wasn’t any of the section, consumed as they were by their stacking of timber.

  Then who? What? Something had changed. I would stake my life on this sense. I had staked my life on it, and I was still drawing breath.

  It was out there, an indicator of combat – the presence of the abnormal. The absence of the normal.

  Fuck. The birdsong, in the southern treeline.

  It was gone.

  The German spearmen spewed out of the greenery a moment later, a dozen of them, their war cry bouncing across the water.

  One second there had been order, the Roman troops bustling like ants over the bridge and their tasks. Now, as savages screamed murder, there was chaos.

  Soldiers, stripped of weapons and armour, raced for the fort’s safety on the northern side of the bridge as a trumpeter blew a series of desperate, ragged notes.

  What had happened to the outpost of sentries, I had no idea, but neither did I care. My chance had arrived! I just had to swim with the current. I would be clear, and there would be no pursuit. Pavo would assume I’d died in the assault.

  But something, perhaps a primal sense of retribution, made me look back to where the section had been stacking timbers. Maybe I wanted to see Titus die. Maybe.

  Instead, I saw the big man pull his section together, marshalling them behind the stack of timbers. Their weaponry out of reach, he was urging them to pick up tools to defend themselves.

  The Germans had reached the bridge now, their spears plunging into the backs of the few Romans who had been too slow to outrun them or throw themselves into the water. One of these fleeing men, eyes wide in terror, screamed into my face as he waded through the neck-high waters. ‘Move, you stupid bastard! Move!’

  But I didn’t move. I watched men squirming on the end of the German spears. Spears that were between the section and the bridge. My section – my section? – were the only troops on the southern bank now, while on the north a squad of armoured Romans had appeared to block off the bridge. The German spearmen, bare-chested and bearded, showed no intent to take on this new force, but turned their attention to the men sheltering behind the timber.

  They came with a roar, blood up and sensing easy prey. The section, picks and axes in hand, waited to greet them, but the longer spears of the Germans would surely make it a one-way fight.

  Then, speartips split seconds from plunging into flesh, the German charge was halted as Titus, bellowing like a boar, hurled one of the timbers into the onrushing men. It tumbled end over end, striking one in the head, knocking the long spears down into the dirt.

  ‘Leg it! Fucking leg it!’ Stumps shrieked, and the section followed his charge to the bridge and freedom. They passed the Germans close enough to spit on them, but Titus’s action had bought them inches to escape and, in battle, an inch was enough. They would survive. All of them.

  If only Cnaeus had followed.

  But he was young, desperate to be accepted by his comrades and to prove himself a warrior. As the others thundered over the bridge, their hobnailed feet inches from my head, Cnaeus stooped to pick up a discarded javelin and shield, and turned back to face his enemy.

  Four of the Germans had stopped to haul up their comrade, knocked senseless by Titus’s timber. Another three were busy picking over corpses for loot, convinced that the Romans on the northern bank would hold their position. That left four, and at these spear warriors, hard-looking men all, Cnaeus charged.

  He had courage. The young ones always do. Courage, and enough stupidity to break the banks of the river. Perhaps, as he made his assault, he realized as much, but by then it was too late. Stupid bastard. Stupid, stupid bastard.

  I couldn’t watch him die.

  I pulled myself out of the water, my eyes on a German who had pushed himself ahead of his comrades, doubtless as young and eager to prove himself as Cnaeus. They came together in a clash, spear on Roman shield, javelin on German. My stomach lurched at a noise I had heard magnified a thousandfold.

  Cnaeus held his own, strong legs braced. As I ran I collected a pick in my right hand, putting my momentum into the swing as I tossed it; the tool took the second German in the chest, enough of a blow to discourage him from the fight, and then I was on Cnaeus’s shoulder, pushing him forward, smelling the wine-soaked breath of the German on the other side of the shield, his own comrades doubtless moving to take us in the sides.

  ‘Keep pushing!’ I shouted into the boy’s ear, and rolled left, surprising the man who had drawn a dagger and was aiming to plunge it into the exposed neck of my comrade. Comrade!

  My hand grabbed the tribesman’s as he shouted something into my face that I could not understand. I used my mouth to better effect, sinking my teeth into the bridge of his nose, feeling the bristles of his beard rub at my lips. I tore away. Most of the nose came with me. Blood pooled down the face as he howled in agony, thinking of the pain, not his dagger, allowing me better command of his fist; I twisted the blade towards its owner. At the same time I drove my knee up into his groin – his body sagged with the blow – before my left hand gripped his lank hair, pulling him towards the blade. I felt it bite, pulled him onwards, and the steel found a soft spot between bone. When he stopped struggling I chanced to look down, and saw that the blade was buried in the side of his head.

  Of the other combatants, there was little sign. At my own intervention the armoured troops had been ordered forward, and the spearmen had fled, leaving their doomed friend locked in my embrace.

  For the second time in a week, I found myself drenched in another man’s blood, and with open-mouthed Romans staring at me as though I were a phantom.

  ‘What?’ I shouted at the closest soldier, who took a step back at my hostility.

  He was right to. I wanted only to kill.

  It was the big man, Titus, who realized I was now a danger to my own side as much as I had been to the enemy.

  ‘Felix.’ He spoke to me from behind. ‘Felix.’ He had to say it again, the name still alien to me.

  ‘What?’ I screamed, turning so har
d on my heel that it pulled the dagger free from the dead man’s skull.

  And then I saw what – a pick handle.

  Titus slammed it down.

  7

  Titus brought the pick handle down and across, driving it into my stomach, and the wind from my lungs. I sagged, the dagger dropping to the wooden boards of the bridge. Before I could recover, he threw me like a child into the river.

  Gagging as I was from the blow, I sucked in a deep mouthful of water and liquid blocked my throat and nose. I was only vaguely aware of something splashing down beside me, gripping my jaw and hitting my back. Water and bile coughed up to run over my chin.

  ‘Felix,’ Titus said to me, holding my head as if in a vice. ‘I had to do it. You had a murdering look.’

  Not now. Now I was simply drained. Hands gripped me from above, hauling me back on to the timbers. I lay flat on my back, panting. My head lolled on the boards, and I saw the dead face of the German a few paces away, the bristly beard I had felt against my skin now thick with his clogging blood.

  Soldiers were standing about him, prodding with their sandals. They were the younger men, eager for their first look at a slain enemy. At the far end of the bridge, legionaries on their knees spoke final words to comrades who had died spitted on German spears.

  It hadn’t been a battle. It hadn’t even been a skirmish. But for those who died, it had been enough.

  It had been enough for Cnaeus, too. The young soldier came over to me now, a wobble in his step, knees ready to give. On his cheek, he had a speck of vomit missed by the back of his hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ he told me. I waved him away, angry.

  Pavo had arrived, and cast a look of annoyance at the dead German.

  ‘How the fuck did they get by our sentries?’

  The answer came later. I was inside the fort, leaning back against my shield, a wineskin in my hand. Pavo’s exchange with me had been short, but he’d excused me from duties for the rest of the day.

  Two carts rolled inside the low ramparts, four Romans in each. A section, their throats slit. Their own weapons had gone, as had their armour, but doubtless they would have been unbloodied. Clearly, these men had been surprised, gathered and then butchered like cattle.

  Amongst the bodies was a veteran, grey temples, open eyes staring up at a cloudless sky. Titus saw him, and let out a cry of fury. ‘You stupid arsehole, Macro! You stupid fucking arsehole!’

  Chickenhead followed my look. My actions on the bridge had not won me acceptance by any means, but they had earned me a weary kind of tolerance.

  ‘Comrades in the desert war,’ he told me, as if that explained everything.

  To a veteran, it did.

  The camp was quiet that night. Here and there was a muffled sob from one of the younger soldiers who had lost a friend, but the overriding sense within the troops was that of simmering anger. They had lost eleven comrades, and none of those deaths could offer the consolation, however tenuous, that the men had died in combat, facing their enemies. Three had been skewered like trout in a stream. Eight had their throats opened, doubtless while they had knelt. From my own look as the carts had passed, I could see evidence that at least one had shat himself.

  Soldiers needed to find nobility in death, but today they had suffered death for death’s sake. It did not make for a happy group.

  Titus talked to no one. The death of his old comrade had hit him hard, and he barely moved, eyes fixed on the dagger he had driven into the ground.

  Moonface had offered prayer, endless prayer, petitioning the gods and his ancestors for their aid in bringing vengeance on the foe. Stumps, pessimistic at the best of times, had predicted doom for all, until the usually quiet Rufus had snapped, telling him that he’d slit Stumps’s throat himself unless he shut his fucking face. Only Chickenhead retained his usual character, finding comfort in the companionship of his faithful kitten.

  We buried them in the morning. Simple graves, a little downriver. Titus, and other veterans, promised that they’d come back for their comrades and see them enshrined on the Roman side of the Rhine in a mausoleum befitting their service. While the auxiliaries held the fort, the graves were safe enough, but men feared they would be desecrated if no Roman forces were present.

  And desecration was popular that day. I do not know who was responsible – not our own section – but the German I had killed did not survive the night intact. His body was hacked apart and fed to the four pigs that the auxiliaries raised within the fort. It didn’t matter to me. He was an enemy, he had tried to kill me, and now he was lining a pig’s stomach. At least he had control over part of that destiny, which is more than many people can ask for.

  Once the bodies had been placed in the grave, a comrade spoke on behalf of each soldier. As in all of the army, a soldier’s relationships were closest within his own section, but links grew throughout the century and legion, particularly for those men who had served the longest. Some would be on their second twenty-year enlistment, and now, as he moved to the graves to speak on behalf of his friend Macro, I learned that Titus was one of these ‘two-timers’.

  They had served together as boy soldiers in the desert provinces of Judaea and Syria, a hit-and-run war against an unseen enemy, the conditions as hostile as the people. During one skirmish, Macro had broken ranks, fighting his way on to a rooftop where he was able to bombard the enemy spearmen with tiles. That quick thinking had forced the locals to give ground, enabling the Romans to regroup, and doubtless saving many of their lives. For his actions, Titus’s friend had been awarded the Gold Crown. At the end of their enlistment they had departed the desert, and each other’s companionship, with sadness – a sadness only matched by the joy of being reunited when both men had come to the Rhine to follow the eagles once more. Why there was a break in Titus’s service he did not say, but I could make my own assumptions on that. If I was right, then it would not do to press him on the subject.

  The other eulogies were shorter. Beside Marco’s long and venerated military career, there was little to say about the younger soldiers, whose day of death had been their first taste of combat. And, unlike Titus, the comrades of these younger men were uncomfortable addressing the century, their words sometimes hushed, often choked.

  I tried not to listen. I had no need to listen. I had heard such things many times before. Had I not been the speaker? Names and faces fought fiercely to break into my mind: Varo; Priscus; Octavius; good men doomed to bad deaths. I did not even know what fate befell Centurion Marcus. I could only hope that his end had been quick, but I had seen enough in those few days of war to know that that was a fantasy. No, it was not a time I wished to recall, and so instead I concentrated on Titus, painting in my mind the reasons for his leaving the desert, only to rejoin army life in Germany.

  The funeral rites complete, we fell to work on the fort’s defences. This wasn’t so much for our own protection – the general opinion being that the Germans were cowards, and would only engage in one-sided hit-and-run skirmishes – but because the auxiliary commander had begged Pavo for legion expertise in their construction, doubtless fearing what would become of his garrison if he was tasked to hold on through winter. Equally doubtless in my mind was that Pavo would have extracted a price for our labours.

  Our own section – Titus’s section – were throwing up dirt on to the southern rampart when the troop of cavalry arrived, a familiar face at the head of the dirt-flecked horsemen.

  Arminius, his eyes as sharp as a wolf’s.

  ‘Felix!’ he called to me with evident delight.

  Around me, men stood to attention at the approach of the officer, and yet I felt their eyes, wondering how I, a common legionary, was held in such esteem by this nobleman.

  I wondered as much myself.

  ‘Sir,’ I managed.

  He dismounted, clasping my hand in comradeship. ‘I’ve brought you a gift!’ He beamed, gesturing to one of his horsemen. I recognized him as the ugly sentry from Arminius’s tent, B
erengar, but it was what lay behind the trooper that the German was referring to.

  Prone in the dirt, attached by a rope from the saddle, was the body of the spearman Titus had hit with the timber. It was hard to tell at first, given the state of the corpse, which must have been dragged some miles, but the pattern of his cloak gave him away.

  ‘Where’s Pavo?’ Arminius asked of me.

  ‘His tent, sir?’ I guessed.

  ‘Show me.’

  As we walked through the camp, men snapped up from their duties to stand to attention in acknowledgment of the officer. He didn’t let one go unremarked, smiling and offering salutations to the troopers. Here, I thought to myself, was a man who knew that men would follow him and not his rank. It was noble birth and the class-based system of the Roman Empire that had given him his position, but Arminius would have risen as a leader had he been born to the lowest peasant.

  ‘Felix, how are you recovering?’

  ‘Mending well enough, sir,’ I answered.

  He smiled as he took in my black eye. ‘Of course.’ He placed a friendly hand on my shoulder, his voice lowered so that it was for my ears only. ‘The grove. Have you remembered anything before that? Where you came from? How you got there?’

  His eyes were kind. His interest was generous.

  And yet …

  ‘No, sir,’ I lied, not wanting to reveal the weaknesses in my armour, even to this man.

  His smile returned. ‘Maybe in time,’ he said, and then turned to greet a new arrival.

  Pavo, evidently alerted to the arrival of the cavalry, saluted the German prince, his usual scowl only slightly suppressed.

  Arminius greeted him, expressing sadness at the loss of the centurion’s men. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Pavo did and, to my discomfort, included my own action in the skirmish. At the mention of my charge in defence of the young soldier – Pavo did not know Cnaeus by name – Arminius’s face took on a reverent expression.