Anthony Riches - Wounds of Honour

‘Are you tired, candidate?’

‘Yes, First Spear.’

‘“Sir”’ will be enough for the time being.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do your feet hurt?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Could you march another ten miles if your life depended upon it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Very well, we’ll march.’

The officer accepted his cloak, sword and helmet from a soldier who had run to fetch them, handing over his vine stick while he buckled the weapon to his body. He looked inside the helmet to check the position of the woollen cap that nestled inside the bronze dome, catching Marcus’s sideways glance.

‘My one concession to advancing years. The old pot can be painful to wear in the absence of hair, even with the issue liner, and we don’t wrap rags round our heads under the helmet in this cohort.’

He secured the helmet by its chinstrap, taking his vine stick back from the waiting man.

‘Dismissed, soldier. I believe your century have drawn duty cleaning the bathhouse.’

They walked up the fort’s slope, past barrack buildings and staring soldiers, to the Wall itself, towering twelve feet above the fort’s stone roads. First Spear Frontinius led the way up the ladder of one of the two gate towers, bringing Marcus out on the rampart. The sentries looked on in surprise while he gestured for the Roman to look out over the scene beyond the Wall. A hundred-foot drop, almost sheer, fell away from the Wall’s base to the plain below, a mighty natural defence that must have made the military engineers salivate with its potential when the rampart’s line was first planned.

The escarpment ran in both directions as far as the eye could follow its sinuous path, the whitewashed wall that topped its line clearly visible for miles. Below the Wall the ground was more or less flat, until it swelled into shallow hills a mile or so distant, their slopes heavily forested.

‘We cleared away the trees from the land in front of the Wall.’

Marcus nodded his understanding. Such open ground would make any covert approach to the fort almost impossible. A fair-sized lake fed the Fort’s bathhouse, the water flowing down from its location on the higher part of the plain. A notch had been cut in the escarpment by the stream over the ages, and here, a hundred yards past the eastern wall of the fort, and behind the Wall, he could see the high-domed roof of the bathhouse. Frontinius tapped him on the shoulder, recapturing his attention.

‘This view shows our place and role here more clearly than any speech I might make. On this side of the Wall, there is order. Order, discipline, cleanliness, the right way of things. On the other side there is nothing better than barbarism, surly tribesmen with an appetite for Roman goods but little desire to enter our society. The tribes to our immediate front, the Selgovae, Votadini and Dumnonii, number at least a hundred thousand. The tribes from beyond Antoninus’s Wall, farther north, Maeatae and Caledonii, barbarous tattooed animals all of them, as many again. Even the people to our rear, Carvetii and Brigantes, would cheerfully put a dagger between our shoulder blades given half a chance, for all their veneer of civilisation. We on the Wall are ten thousand men in a sea of hostile spears — even the northern legions are several days’ march distant. If the natives decide to fight, which currently seems inevitable given that their leader Calgus has spent most of the last year whipping them up for it, we’ll have to face down several times our own number until the legions can get forward. And they won’t get here at all if the tribes in their own operational areas decide to join the fun. Life here is as dull as it gets most of the time, but it could quickly become a lot more exciting than any of us would wish.’

He led Marcus back down through the fort, out of the massive southern gate and through its small collection of houses and shops. Women and children in the street stood respectfully as the officer passed, even a couple of hard-faced prostitutes favouring him with smiles.

‘They depend on us for their livelihood. If the prefect decided that the Hill would be more secure without the hangers-on, they would be destitute. Mind you, there are so many men with women and children in the town now that I suspect they form no risk to our security.’

They marched over a bridge spanning the massive ditch that separated the civilian and military zones, Marcus readjusting to the renewed pain in his feet. The road fell away steeply towards the parade ground’s expanse, across which several groups of men were training with swords and shields. The older man marched briskly past them, barking directions to individuals whose performance caught his eye.

‘You, yes, you, with the red hair, lift your shield higher! You’re supposed to be stopping blue-nose spears, not protecting your bloody ankles! Chosen Man, show him what I mean, he clearly can’t understand… Well done, that man, excellent sword work!’

They passed the final group and left the parade ground behind before he spoke to Marcus again, talking at the air in front of him rather than turning to face the younger man.

‘Recruits. In two months we’ll have knocked them into rough shape, and toughened them up enough to give them a good chance of surviving a battle, and in six they’ll be every bit as good as any legionary. We’ve got men serving with ten and twenty years with the cohort, some who fought in the last uprising. What I’m being asked to do is put you in command of eighty of those men, all of whom, since they grew up playing at soldiers in the woods and fields of this area, have more idea of real soldiering than you do. The very idea of it makes me feel sick. This is my cohort, my fort and my parade ground. I was passed the leadership of them all, every man that serves here, by my predecessor, and when I retire I’ll bring the best centurion in the cohort down to that parade ground. I’ll make him promise me, and the shrines of Cocidius, Jupiter, Mars and Victory, to maintain the traditions we live and die by. I’m responsible for those traditions now, and for making sure that my decisions are made in the best interests of the unit. My cohort.’

He turned his head to look at Marcus’s face for a moment, checking for any reaction. The road ran arrow straight up to the next fold in the land, making Marcus open his mouth to increase his air intake, but he kept his eyes fixed on the horizon.

‘The prefect knows very well what his role here is, and so do I. He’s here for two or three years, to represent Rome, and make decisions as to the course of action the cohort should follow in Rome’s service. I’ve been here for my entire adult life, and I’ll stay here until I retire, or die in combat. My word as to the ways in which those decisions are carried out is final, although since we respect each other’s judgement he will usually issue orders upon which we’ve agreed jointly. I also make all decisions as to who is allowed to enter service, based on what centurions tell me and on what I see with my own eyes. And from what I see and hear, you represent a good deal of trouble to both the prefect and this unit. If it were a simple “yes” or “no” on those grounds I wouldn’t even be taking this trouble to understand you better.’

He fell silent for a moment as they marched on side by side, and then spoke again.

‘The prefect, however, sees something in you that he encourages me to consider before making that decision. Your threat of suicide found a chink in his armour you may not have appreciated. His uncle fell on his own sword after losing most of a cohort just like this one in the German forests twenty years ago, but not before writing to tell his nephew why he was doing it. Prefect Equitius still has the tablet. Consequently, his sense of honour is his prime motivation when he considers your case. Would you do the same?’