Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

‘Titus!’ Pavo shouted. ‘Take the tools! Get him out and shut him up!’

Titus scowled, but moved away. I moved with them.

The boy’s pale face stretched with agony as he screamed. A comrade was holding him from above, his arms under the victim’s shoulders, trying desperately to stop the soldier from sliding further on to the stakes.

I knelt by the pit, seeing how one shaft had gone clear through the flesh of the boy’s thigh. Another had penetrated his lower back.

‘Get an arm!’ Titus ordered. ‘We’ll lift him out!’

Chickenhead stopped him. ‘Don’t. The stake’s packing the wound. We lift him off it, he bleeds out.’

The boy let loose another chilling scream.

‘He’s gonna bring every tribe in the forests on to us.’ Titus cursed, taking the boy’s neckerchief and tying it about his mouth. The screams continued, muted, but still loud enough to announce our presence.

‘Why haven’t you taken him out?’ Pavo snarled, arriving at the pit. ‘Or shut him up?’

Chickenhead’s milky eyes met Pavo’s glare. ‘We move him, he dies.’

‘So move him. You see a surgeon with us? He’s already dead, and if he keeps screaming, then so are we,’ the young centurion coldly explained.

For a moment, the only sound was the hammering rain and the victim’s panted gasps beneath his gag.

‘He’ll die,’ Chickenhead stated finally, and Pavo had the decency to meet his eyes, and then to look at the soldier he was condemning.

‘Pull him out.’

We did, the soldier coming free with agonized screams and wet sucking sounds as his body pulled clear of the trap.

We laid him out in the mud, his head in the lap of a crying comrade, no older than his friend. As Chickenhead had predicted, the wounds now leaked blood at an alarming rate; the mud beneath our sandals was soon stained red.

Free of the stakes, the screaming had stopped.

Chickenhead knelt by the boy’s side and pulled the gag free. ‘Let’s give him some fucking decency.’

And perhaps it was a sense of decency that kept us rooted to that spot, unable to take our eyes off the dying teenager, an honour guard all that we could offer his departing spirit. Perhaps that was it, or perhaps it was because the manner of his death terrified even the most experienced of us to our core. This was not how a soldier was supposed to die.

The boy began to mumble, pushing the last of his fleeting strength into his words. ‘Mother,’ he sobbed. ‘I want my mother.’

Chickenhead tried to soothe him. ‘Hush now, lad.’

‘Mother,’ the boy cried again.

‘You’ll see her soon.’

The torrent of blood became a trickle. The boy died. His friend wept, tears splashing down with the rain on to his young comrade’s face.

‘Make a litter for the body,’ Pavo ordered the section.

We went deeper into the forest.

Every action became automatic, and yet it required a total dedication of the senses. A foot couldn’t be placed without scrutiny. A branch couldn’t be moved without inspection. Soldiers followed my example, and took to sweeping and probing the ground ahead with their javelins.

Even without the rain and the buffeting wind, the work would have drained a man in hours. With conditions as they were, the century was soon hollow-eyed and gaunt, very different from the troops who had re-entered the forest that morning. We were tired, yes, but the picture of the boy’s death was enough to keep us focused – automatic, total dedication to survival.

The track had yielded surprises, and yet the greatest shock of all was that the enemy had not attacked us directly. Why this would be, I didn’t have time to speculate, only to offer a quick thanks for small mercies.

‘Another log on the track,’ I noted to Pavo. ‘Looks like a big one.’

‘Work party up,’ he ordered.

Titus appeared on my shoulder, the axe he carried looking like a child’s toy in his huge hands. ‘Go on, then, lucky one.’ He smiled sarcastically.

I left my shield with the section, using my javelin to test the way ahead of me. The track seemed solid. So, too, from a distance, did the fallen tree.

That was strange. Where the other obstacles had been rotting and wilting, this fallen oak seemed to be in prime condition.

Something was wrong. A familiar tingle began to creep up my spine. The log was the presence of the abnormal. It was a combat indicator. It took me a few more paces before I could see the evidence through the rain.

Saw marks. The oak had been cut.

I expected an instant onslaught of lead slingshot and spears, but nothing changed. The rain beat on my helmet. The wind shook the branches. I quickly moved back to Pavo to make my report.

‘Get up there and clear it,’ he ordered Titus.

‘What? You heard what he said! They put it there. It’s a trap!’

‘This whole track’s a trap,’ Pavo replied icily. ‘And we’ve got to clear it, so get up there.’

For a moment, I was certain Titus would plunge the axe into the centurion’s neck. Instead, it bit into the fallen oak with a savage rage. Whatever had been building inside the man since we departed the summer camp at Minden came forth in a flurry of blows.

‘He’s not goin’ to stop until I’m dead,’ he panted. ‘He’s not goin’ to stop until I’m dead.’

‘Pavo?’ Rufus asked. As Titus’s closest friend, he was the only one in the section who could ask personal questions.

‘Of course fucking Pavo!’

‘Why?’ the ruddy-faced Gaul asked, doubtless on behalf of the section’s veterans as a whole.

‘Dice.’ Titus cackled, pausing to inspect the damage wrought with his axe. ‘Day we got paid, he lost every coin he had to me and the QM, and then some. He figures the slate’s wiped clean if I’m gone, but fuck that. You promise me, Rufus. You promise me that if I die, you’ll get every coin owed to me out of that cocksucker. Get every coin, and then pay some drunk bastard to stick glass in his pretty face. Cut it up like a puzzle, but leave the eyes. No, leave one eye! Just enough so he can see what a mess he is.’

The violence of the words shook most of the men to silence, young Cnaeus open-mouthed at such blatant hostility towards a superior, but Rufus merely shrugged. ‘Fine. You feel better now?’

‘A little,’ he admitted, the axe biting down again.

The oak was thick and strong. I worked a two-ended saw with Cnaeus, Titus’s aim being to split the log into sections that could be manhandled on to the track’s verge.

‘Now, I don’t pretend to be Julius Caesar,’ Stumps began, panting from the labour, ‘but it seems to me that there are a lot of trees in this forest, and not so many tracks. Either Varus is plannin’ on opening a lumber business, or we’re goin’ to have to just make our best effort through the trees.’

Moonface disagreed. ‘The baggage train’s struggling enough as it is. No way it can make it off the tracks.’

‘So maybe we leave it behind?’

‘Not going to happen. Too much of an embarrassment,’ Moonface concluded, and Stumps kept silent in agreement.

With the sound of their conversation, and the ever-present tempest, it was a moment before I noticed a change in the forest’s symphony – the sound of something small, and hard, striking wood.

‘Is that…’ Titus began, pausing as something struck a resting shield with an angry thwack !

‘Slingshot!’ came from several voices.

Almost instantly, adrenaline-fuelled calls echoed from the far end of the century.

‘Enemy rear! Enemy rear!’

We weren’t the only ones under fire.

‘Get the tools. Let’s go!’ Titus ordered, and we sped with him back to the remainder of the century, the air by my head creasing as a slingshot zipped by. Ahead of me, I saw a man go down, his helmet sent spinning into the air by the impact of a lead weight.