Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

‘They got me!’ Stumps squealed, dropping to his knees as the other men stood over their foes, panting from exertion and adrenaline, Rufus coolly dispatching the wounded with a blade to the throat.

I let go of Micon and ran to the wounded man’s side. Stumps had his palm pressed to his left shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers. Chickenhead tried in vain to prise back the hand and inspect the wound while Stumps shrieked in fear.

‘I’m done! Oh, fuck, I’m done!’

‘Shut up and let me look at it,’ Chickenhead ordered.

‘No! No! I need to keep pressure on. I’ll bleed out, Chicken, I’ll bleed out! Oh, fuck!’

‘There’s not even that much blood, you tart,’ Chickenhead chided his friend, and I was forced to agree.

‘Who asked you, eh?’ Stumps shouted back at me. ‘You’ve been nothing but bad bloody luck since you turned up!’

I was spared further insult as Micon appeared on my shoulder.

‘This is all your fault!’ Stumps cursed the boy, taking his hand away from the wound to point a bloody finger at the young soldier, who simply stared back. ‘Do us all a favour and fall on your sword!’

‘You’re OK. It’s gone clean through the flesh,’ Chickenhead informed his comrade, taking advantage of the moment to inspect the wound. ‘You’ll be fine, you baby.’

‘I will?’ Stumps finally managed, disbelieving.

‘Unless you get gangrene,’ Moonface couldn’t resist adding.

‘Oh, shit!’ Stumps groaned, fatalistic once more. ‘Why is it always me?’

No one had an answer for him. Not even Titus, who had returned soon after.

‘Enjoy your exercise?’ Rufus ribbed his good friend.

‘Piss off,’ Titus grunted, but with a smile, relieved to find his comrades intact, at least for the most part.

I rolled a German on to his back, my sandals squelching in dirt soaked by blood. The man had been stabbed several times around the kidneys, and the blood had come from him like a river. Looking at his face, I imagined he was around Micon’s age, his beard still patchy in parts.

‘Some of these tribes have a tradition of not cutting their beards until they kill an enemy,’ Chickenhead grunted, wiping his bloodied blade on the boy’s cloak.

Most of the other dead were just as young, and none had any great wealth on them. What little we found was given to Stumps as compensation for his injury.

‘Just boys.’ Rufus spoke quietly, doubtless thinking of his own sons.

‘Green troops,’ Chickenhead agreed. ‘That’s not good.’

It wasn’t. These were not the grizzled warriors we had faced at the bridge, but young men who had come of age under Roman influence on the region, and an indication that the animosity ran deep. Their motives couldn’t have been purely financial, as the army’s baggage train would have proved a far more lucrative prospect than clusters of soldiers in the forest.

‘Maybe they wanted to get themselves a reputation,’ Chickenhead surmised as their eulogy. If he was right, I hoped that the attitude was not widespread.

‘Enough of this,’ Titus said, eyeing the bodies. Perhaps he was picturing how, if not for Chickenhead’s quick thinking, it could have been our own flesh growing cold. ‘Let’s get back to the column.’

‘Let’s get back to the column,’ Titus had said.

If only it were that simple.

‘Where are we?’ Moonface asked no one in particular, his white face creasing.

‘Germany, you twat,’ Stumps piped up as he used the German bodies as stepping stones. ‘Which way back to the column, then, Titus?’ he asked as dead air escaped from the lungs of one of the fallen enemy. ‘Titus?’ he pressed, when no reply was forthcoming.

The section commander stayed silent. The whimsical smile on Stumps’s lips began to slide. He stepped on to the dirt. ‘Chicken? Rufus? I thought you fuckers had a good sense of direction?’

‘Shut up, Stumps,’ Chickenhead answered tiredly.

‘No. You’re always going on about how—’ His words ended in a cut-off gargle. Titus’s massive paw was around his throat.

‘Shut. Up,’ the brute whispered with iron in his tone.

Rufus caught Titus’s eye with a nod of his head. He stepped up to the big man and whispered something into his ear. After Titus gave a grunt of assent, Rufus began to peel away his armour.

‘Where are you off to?’ Though rubbing at his bruised throat, Stumps was unable to resist the hushed question.

Rufus gestured with his eyes towards the thick canopy above. ‘Find the sun,’ he murmured.

It was the only option I’d come up with myself. The column had been pressing north when we left its promise of protection, and our search for the screening troops had taken us east. Since then, however, we had become turned about through ambush and counter-ambush. I was certain that I could track our way back if needed, but that route would be twisting, and perhaps more Germans would come in search of their missing friends. No, better to find the sun and, by its position, launch a new tack through the forest to the legions.

‘Spread out. All-round defence. Get down on your belt buckles,’ Titus ordered, and so we fanned out about the tree that Rufus now began to climb.

Prone on the stomach, one began to notice the army of insects that busied themselves with their own life-and-death struggle in the forest, their movements as cautious and deadly as our own. Musty dark earth competed with the stink of German blood and open organs to fill my nostrils. Despite the evidence of death around us, the rustle of wind through the trees was tranquil. Calming. I wanted to sleep. I was not the only one.

‘Keep your fucking eyes open, Micon,’ I heard Titus warn.

I turned to my side, and saw that Rufus was pushing his head through the upper canopy. Within a moment, he was on his way down.

He pointed after he had dropped cat-like from the lowest branches. ‘That way.’

Titus squeezed his friend on the shoulder, as much a display of affection as I had ever seen from the man during my time in his company. Then he helped Rufus to slip into his armour, pulling straps tight and double-checking buckles.

‘Single file,’ Titus whispered. ‘Rufus is point man. I’ll bring up the back. Don’t want to lose any of you cunts again.’

Rufus moved off at a slow pace, his body almost bent double to maintain a low profile. I trusted his soldiering, but I had survived this long by my own skills, and so I made certain that I was behind him in the order of march.

‘Be my guest,’ Stumps offered, bemused, as I placed myself at the point of greater danger.

We inched our way through the tangle of shrubs and thorns. The sky above the canopy had grown darker, and light no longer played over the men’s armour. Instead, long shadows made us think of the threat of ambush and concealed enemies. Hearts skipped beats, breath died in the lungs, only for us to realize a second later that the crouching warrior was a tree stump, the poised spear a branch.

Maintaining the direction westwards was crucial, and so Rufus led us up and over the ditches and rivulets in as direct a line as possible. It was draining work for the man, always wondering if the next defilade held the enemy, and death.

It was as he began to crest a steep-sided bank that the redheaded Gaul stopped suddenly in his tracks, his limbs frozen. He stayed there for a few moments, and the other men of the section bit back the urge to call out, and to know what lay ahead. I fought against my own adrenaline. Was it a trap? How many enemies?

But then I heard it, and it was something that needed no explanation. It was something that I can never forget.

The most hideous scream.

The scream came again. Somehow this one was more awful than the first.