Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

I found them back at the section’s tent, their sleeping figures huddled against one another for warmth. I decided the news could wait, but Titus opened an alert eye and was soon demanding information. I kept to the facts, telling him only what I knew for certain: that our century would leave the camp at dawn, alone, and begin the work of clearing the tracks in the forest. Titus’s anger soon roused the others, the news eventually making its way to every set of ears.

‘Fighting I can handle,’ Stumps groaned. ‘But fighting and manual labour? That’s just not fair.’

‘So what else did you hear?’ Titus pressed me.

I told them that I hadn’t been privy to the orders group, having to wait outside the tent. Only one of the section was savvy enough to see through the lie, and he waited until dawn, when the others were busy donning their armour, to tell me.

‘Something’s shaken you,’ Chickenhead commented quietly. ‘What haven’t you told us?’

I met the veteran’s eyes in the gloom. He had shown kindness to me. After Arminius, he was the only one to have done so.

Arminius.

‘He’s dead,’ I whispered, suddenly desperate to confide in someone.

‘Who?’

I told him what I’d heard in the tent, and with each morsel spilled, my shoulders felt lighter. In the moment, I didn’t think of the repercussions, I just thought of how Chickenhead was a good soldier – a good man – and deserved to know. I told myself that this was why I opened up. It was all for the veteran’s benefit, not mine. This was duty, not friendship.

‘I know he was good to you,’ he offered, once I’d told him all I’d heard. Like the legate, he seemed unconcerned that the German reinforcements might not arrive, convinced of the superiority of Roman arms and the men who bore them.

‘But there’s more,’ he pressed, his bloodshot eyes boring into me. ‘That’s not what’s shaken you, is it?’

I wanted to tell him how wrong he was, but my sudden openness had already left me feeling anxious, and so I could not share with him how the news of Arminius had shaken me deeply. How the feeling of mourning – which had never truly abandoned me during my journey across a continent – was now fresh, an open wound atop the scabs. Chickenhead, immersed in comrades as he was, couldn’t have known just how desperate I was to latch on to the first voice that offered a path from the wilderness and the promise of something better. In Arminius I had seen the kind of leader that the world deserved: a proven warrior who would choose the head and the heart to solve disputes, not the sword. My loss paled compared to the loss for Rome, but still I selfishly grieved for him.

But the shrewd veteran was also right, and I almost hated him for forcing me to acknowledge that there was more. It had begun as a gnawing uncertainty in my stomach, but the more I considered the possibilities, the more I thought the instinct in my gut was truth. I prayed that it was not, but, right or wrong, I would keep the revelation to myself. Nothing could be gained by sharing it.

In an instant a clarity came to me, and with it, anger. It was wrong of me to have talked to Chickenhead. Hadn’t the ugly bastard kicked the shit out of me along with Titus and his friends? They were just using me now that we were in the field, seeing a tool that fit the task. Once we were safe, I’d be the one digging the shit-pits again. The section slave. The shunned.

So be it.

‘No, there’s nothing more.’ I added one more lie delicately on top of all the others.

‘You’re not worried about today?’

‘No,’ I answered, this time honestly. I was so sick of being within my own mind that the thought of action almost excited me.

‘Then maybe you’re not as clever as I thought,’ he grunted. ‘We’ve been fixed in place overnight. They’ve had a chance to concentrate their forces. Even if it’s just a few war bands, it doesn’t matter. Numbers don’t count in the forest.’

I made no comment, and Chickenhead, puzzled at my sudden about-turn, shook his head. ‘Just don’t tell the others, all right? They don’t need to know that our balls are on the chopping-block for this one.’

It was fair to assume that the other men in the section were under no illusions that it would be a parade, but neither did they grasp the significance that only our own century from the cohort would be pushing into the forest and into the killing ground of the waiting enemy. The perceptive veteran had seen the anomaly, and could determine the reason. Despite my sudden change in attitude, or perhaps because of it, he shared with me the reason why.

‘Ever wonder how a young lad like Pavo got a century, with no campaign experience behind him?’

I half feigned indifference as I pulled tight the straps binding my armour and equipment.

‘Depending on who you ask, he was shagging the legate’s wife, or daughter, but one of them did the whispering in the man’s ear and got him his century. Pavo had his eyes set so hard on the top, he didn’t even see that he was walking into a trap, and giving the boss the chance to see him off.’

I shrugged. ‘Somebody’s got to clear the tracks.’ I was abrasive in my embarrassment at dropping my guard.

‘Aye, that they do,’ the veteran agreed. ‘There’s always some poor sod that’s got to be the first.’

And there had been a time when that would have been me. Willingly. A time when my reckless enthusiasm had bordered on the insane. I had not been alone then, and the reason I was still breathing was because of men like this gnarled veteran before me. Those men had brought me through alive, and what had been their reward?

I shook my head to clear the images that were forming. I needed to concentrate my mind, and so I watched closely as Chickenhead squatted to the floor, worn-out knees clicking, to scoop up Lupus with both hands. ‘You’re staying here, little one, where it’s safe and dry.’

He kissed the creature on its tiny skull, and something in the kitten’s contented purring began to soothe me. The bitter anger I had been feeling at myself, misdirected at this man, melted away.

‘It was a long night,’ I apologized.

‘It’s going to be a long day.’ He smiled, all gums.

A helmet pushed its way through the tent flap, Titus’s grimacing face below the steel. ‘Get your cocks out of each other’s mouths,’ he snorted. ‘Century’s forming up.’

Our short respite was over. We were going back into the forest.

The dawn was dark, the sky thick with clouds that unleashed rain on the tiny marching column, four men wide and twenty deep. Wind buffeted our ranks as we slipped towards the encampment’s northern gate.

Sentries from an auxiliary cohort watched us pass, their dark features scowling against the storm, no doubt pitying those who were stepping from within the relative safety of the marching camp.

Pavo strode at the head of the column. With his drawn sword and his considerable height exaggerated by the crest of his helmet, he made for an imposing figure.

‘He’s keen,’ Stumps sneered.

‘Just wants to get this over, like the rest of us,’ Rufus opined, the usually silent soldier casting restless glances over his shoulder towards the camp’s centre.

‘Forget something?’ Titus asked him.

‘My guts.’ The Gaul forced a smile.

We cleared the rampart. The forest was three hundred yards ahead of us, silent and sullen. Behind the sheet of rain, it was impossible to make out individual trees in the dawn’s gloom, let alone any trace of ambush.

‘Cavalry are on their way out,’ Stumps commented as the first of the mounted detachments thundered their way from behind us, striking for their own chosen paths. ‘Lucky bastards,’ he added, enviously eyeing the troopers’ steeds.