Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

A roar, and I snapped my head up.

The horizon was growing red, and an immense wall of thunder was approaching. It was a wave, as high as any tower, and it was crashing through the forest, uprooting the ancient trees and carrying with it the bodies.

I knew that I must climb higher to escape it, but now the wings failed me, their beat becoming weaker. They shed feathers, which mocked me in their gentle spirals towards the earth. The wave roared closer.

Blood. A wave of blood.

I tried to close my eyes, but they would not obey. Instead, I watched the wave come closer, closer, trees and bodies churned in its red froth.

It was upon me.

I screamed.

The nightmare left me nauseous, as it always did. My breaths came shallow and ragged, as if the weight of a horse were upon my chest.

In the darkness of the tent I saw two sets of wide, white eyes upon me. They were terrified: the eyes of Micon and Cnaeus.

Another pair opened and, as my own sight adjusted to the gloom, I saw that these belonged to Chickenhead. Again, we were the only four present within the tent.

‘You woke Lupus,’ he told me, his tone as dull as his stare. In the man’s hands, I could make out the shape of the agitated kitten, struggling.

‘I’m sorry,’ I finally managed, still fighting for air.

The veteran got to his feet, cooing to his feline companion. His fingers had wrapped around the throats of enemies, but now they gently stroked his friend. Eventually the kitten calmed, and the old soldier turned his attention to me. ‘Outside.’

I followed, the cool air welcome on my livid skin.

‘Here.’ He handed me a cup, and I muttered thanks.

‘This is water,’ I told him, surprised.

‘You start drinking now, you’ll never stop.’

I nodded at the wisdom in his words. We drifted into silence, the cup soon drained. As he refilled it, I turned my eyes up to the skies, where the usual canopy of stars was eclipsed by a shadow of thin cloud.

‘How long?’ he asked.

I was too tired to offer resistance. I accepted the cup, and the offer of a veteran’s ear that came with it. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘But they’re getting worse?’

I nodded, and he must have seen the movement in my silhouette.

‘For two years, after Drusus,’ he told me, referring to the campaign of the famous general, and what must have been the first taste of battle for Chickenhead, the boy soldier. ‘The same one, over and over…’ He paused, and I thought his revelation was at an end. It wasn’t.

‘Fifteen legions we took into Germany, the strongest force in the world. The tribes stood, we scrapped, and by the time I was nineteen I’d lost count of the men I’d killed. I was fine with that. I loved that. But it was the other things that kept me awake for the next two years. The raiding parties – a nice name for butchering the local men, and raping the women.’

His voice had gradually grown weaker, echoing as if he were descending into the shaft of a mine. He took the cup from my hand and sipped, swilling the water around his mouth and spitting it on to the dirt.

‘This German girl, she couldn’t have been older than fourteen. First woman I’d ever been inside.’ I felt his sickened smile in the darkness. ‘Isn’t that something?’ he concluded.

‘You got past it,’ I said steadily, aching to know how.

‘I did?’ he replied with an empty laugh.

I thought our conversation would die there, the veteran doubtless picturing the young German girl he had raped when he was not much more than a child himself.

‘I’ve been stationed here my entire service.’ His voice creaked. ‘I’ve even been through that village again. When my twenty’s up, I’ll go back to Italy, but I’m not stupid enough to think that she won’t come with me. That’s the problem with what’s inside your head. It has to come with you. Don’t kid yourself that a few miles makes any difference.’

He was the first of the veterans in the section to talk to me as a man. Traumatized as I was from my nightmare, I was too shocked to see the sweat’s candour for what it was – a recognition of a kindred, tortured spirit. But if I was shocked by the veteran’s behaviour up to that point, his next gesture threatened to overwhelm me.

‘Here,’ he offered, holding out Lupus. ‘Hold him. Give him a stroke if you like. It helps.’

I took the struggling kitten in my hands, feeling the power of such a tiny creature hidden beneath the fur. With some encouragement from Chickenhead, the animal calmed, and I tentatively began to stroke its head and ears.

The veteran was right. It helped. Concentrating on the kitten’s tiny beating heart, my own returned to its usual rhythm, the threat of its bursting through my ribs at an end.

‘Thank you,’ I said, my eyes on the kitten.

‘You saved that lad,’ he offered by way of explanation. ‘He’s young, and that makes a boy do stupid things, but he didn’t deserve to die for it. If it was one of the others did what you did at the bridge, they’d be getting an award.’

I grunted at that, knowing the truth in what he had said. ‘Regardless. Thank you.’

‘Don’t tell the others,’ he answered, an edge of steel to his voice. ‘Bring him inside when you’re done.’

He left me then, the life of his most treasured friend in my hands. I stayed in that spot, stroking and cooing, until the sky grew amber with the dawn.

As I turned to step inside the hide structure, I felt a wave of troubled uncertainty wash over me.

‘Fuck,’ I growled beneath my breath, angry at my nightmares, and at myself. Angry, because I would no longer see the veteran as a soldier, a faceless killer in steel.

I would see a comrade.

That morning, formed up on parade, Chickenhead made no mention of our talk. He was his usual self with the veterans, a part of the whole and yet aside, and I wondered which, if any, knew that the most gnarled sweat amongst them suffered with the savage memories of his early service. Likely none, I surmised. Weakness was something we hid from those closest to us, no matter the cost.

Pavo approached the front of the parade, a creeping smile displacing his usual scowl. Titus knew his centurion well enough to read that omen.

‘We’re getting paid.’

And he wasn’t wrong. After Pavo had informed the century of that fact, and once the cheers had died down, we were marched to the centre of the fort to receive the third and final instalment of that year’s wage.

For a legionary, this pay would be three hundred sesterces, but the annual salary of nine hundred would suffer deductions for anything from equipment loss to donations towards a funeral fund. Every soldier grumbled that should they die for Rome, the least the Empire could do would be to bury them from out of its own pockets, but the reality was that each man was anxious for a good send-off, so that his spirits could be content and venerated by his ancestors. The last thing anybody wanted was to be a discarded corpse on a battlefield, and so the funeral funds and mess bills were paid despite the grumbles.

Arriving at the centre of the camp, we joined the other centuries of our own legion and cohort, the men filing slowly along to receive their pay. Though these soldiers belonged to the same unit as the troops of my own century, they were mostly strangers, the section being a soldier’s close family, and the century his extended.

As we drew nearer to the desks, my eyes were drawn to the gathered standards of the legions. These sacred totems had come from the hands of the emperor, and were topped by eagles crafted from silver, the bird of prey chosen because it was sacred to the god Jupiter. Each of these standards was a shrine in itself, but gathered here, under the watchful eye of the standard-bearers, the sight was almost too much for a reverent soul such as Moonface.