Anthony Riches - Wounds of Honour

The one-eyed soldier stared back at him with an expression Dubnus found hard to decipher.

‘I’ll be a good boy from now, but not for you, Dubnus, I’m not scared of you. I’ll do it for the young gentleman.’

He turned and walked away towards the baths to start the first day of his punishment work routine, leaving Dubnus standing, hands on hips, watching him with a thoughtful expression. With the beginning of the gradual change from winter into spring the cohort accelerated its training programme. Sextus Frontinius, listening to the reports of a slow flame of resentment burning steadily brighter in the northern tribes, was keen to get his men into the field and training towards peak fitness, ready for the campaign he made no secret of believing they would fight that year. Twenty-mile marches became a thrice-weekly event, rather than the freezing misery inflicted on the cohort once a fortnight.

Marcus’s and Rufius’s centuries, the former properly re-equipped and both suddenly the envy of the cohort, eating the best of rations and appropriately vigorous, responded to their commanders’ different styles of leadership well. Whether it was Marcus’s blend of humanity and purpose, or Rufius’s legion training methods, quietly imparted to Marcus in conversations long into the night when their duties allowed, both centuries grew quickly in fighting ability and self-confidence. The 9th were driven relentlessly by Dubnus and his two new watch officers, hand-picked older men who understood what would be required of the century if it did come to war. With the open backing of the influential Morban the 9th quickly coalesced from a collection of indifferent individuals into a tightly knit body of men, and set about rediscovering the pleasure of testing themselves alongside men they were coming to regard as brothers. Rufius had put the idea to his friend in the officer’s mess one evening after their day’s duties.

Otho and Brutus were playing a noisy game of Robbers in another corner of the room, on a black-and-white chequered board painted on to their table. ‘Lucky’ was failing to live up to his title, as the boxer chased his few remaining counters around the board. He was picking them off one by one and laughing hugely with each capture. Rufius tipped his head towards the two men, lowering his voice conspiratorially.

‘And let that be a warning to you. Our brother officer might be called Knuckles, but don’t ever think he might be punch drunk. That’s the fourth game in a row he’s taken off Brutus, and there’s no sign of the streak being broken. A good game for the military mind is Robbers, teaches you to think ahead all the time. The only mistake dear old Lucky’s making is to worry about where his counters will go next, not where he wants them in three moves’ time. He plays aggressively, pushes for the straddle, while Knuckles, he knows the art of steady play, how to gently ease the opponent’s counters into position for the attack. There are lessons for life in the simplest game, but some lessons are harder won…’

He took a mouthful of wine, savouring the taste for a moment with a sideways glance at his friend.

‘Which leads me to a subject I’ve been pondering the last few weeks, watching you and Dubnus turn your lads from a rabble to something more like infantrymen. I don’t doubt for a second that you’ll teach your boys enough about sword and board work to make each one of them an effective fighter, but I can tell you from grim experience that isn’t the key to fielding a century that will grind up anything thrown at them and come back for more.

‘Let me tell you what happens when we fight the blue-noses. Before the battle, when our men are trying to keep from soiling themselves with fear, the barbarians stop just outside spear-throw and start shouting the odds like vicus drunks, how they’re going to carve off our dicks and wave them at our women before they fuck them to death, how we’ll soon be staring at our own guts as they lie steaming on the turf, all that rubbish. However, take note of a man that’s been there — it works. There’s a natural reaction I’ve seen in many a century and cohort when the barbarians are baying for blood, and that’s for each man to sidle to his right just a little, looking to get just a little more protection from his mate’s shield. Before you know it the line’s half a mile farther to the right than the legatus wants it, and the fight’s half over before it begins, just from sheer fear…’

He drank again, signalling to the steward for a refill.

‘The secret to winning battles, my friend, isn’t fancy sword work, or how well your boys can sling a spear, important though those skills are. It’s actually much simpler than that, but harder to achieve. All you have to do is to make the lads love each other.’

He sat back, cocking a wry eyebrow at the Roman.

‘And no, before you laugh at me, I don’t mean all that arse-poking in Greek pornography, I mean the love a man has for his brother.’

He paused again, judging the moment.

‘There’s only one way to explain this to you, and I apologise for the necessity. You had a brother in Rome, right?’

Marcus nodded soberly, finding the memory painful, but less so than before.

‘Well, what you would have done had you been in a position to fight his killers?’

The younger man’s nostrils flared with remembered anger.

‘I would probably have died with a bloody sword in my hand, and a carpet of dead and dying men around me.’

‘Exactly. And that, friend Marcus, is the love we need to get into the hearts of our lads. When one of your tent parties is in trouble, whether it’s a punch-up in a vicus beer shop or a desperate fight against hordes of blue-nosed bastards, their mates to either side have a choice, to look to their front and ignore their mates’ peril, or to dive in to the rescue. Orders don’t make that happen, and you can’t teach it on the parade ground, but if you get them to love each other, they do the rest for you, without even thinking about it. When you get it right a man will use his shield to protect the man next to him when he falls, and ignore the risk he runs in doing so, knowing with complete certainty that his mate would do the same for him without a second’s thought.’

He smiled conspiratorially at his friend.

‘And, to be honest, when me and my lads are knee deep in guts and shit, with the spears all thrown and our shields splintering under blue-nose axes, I want your boys to be straining at their collars, to be looking to you for the command to take their iron to our enemy, just for the love of my lads. If we can achieve that, we’ll both have a better chance of seeing next winter…’

The 9th’s tent parties exercised and practised against each other, each time striving to win for some inconsequential reward or other, their bonds growing stronger with each victory or defeat, vowing to do better in the next contest, the weaker helped and cajoled by the stronger. The trick was repeated with multiples of tent parties, the groupings changed each time and soldiers judiciously exchanged to equalise their relative strengths, until each octuple was used to fighting alongside every other, and knew their abilities. In the evening, watching their men down in the vicus, Dubnus and Morban reported back a new spirit, the other centuries quickly coming to recognise that taking on a single man from the 9th was offering a fist to every one of them, no matter what the odds. The respect in which they were held rapidly increased, to the point where it was rare for fights involving the 9th’s men to be anything other than between themselves, combat quickly over and insult swiftly forgotten as they closed ranks.

Marcus and Rufius, who had played exactly the same game he had preached with his own men, repeated the trick with their centuries, again exchanging soldiers, ostensibly to add strength or skills where they were needed, but in truth to build the same spirit of comradeship between the two units. At length, one night in early May, a tent party from Rufius’s 6th waded into an unfair fight on behalf of a pair of beleaguered 9th Century soldiers. It was the first sign for the two friends that they had achieved the breakthrough they were looking for. Prefect Equitius returned to the Hill from a senior officer’s conference in Cauldron Pool that same evening. He called for the First Spear to join him in his office shortly thereafter.