Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

I grasped his meaning. These tribesmen were preparing to fight a campaign, not an isolated skirmish.

I stepped around another of our dead, his legs coated with bright red blood. Steadily, the number of casualties grew so that I did not note their details.

A blond-haired brute led a charge at our own flank. We braced, as spearheads hammered into our raised shields. Behind the protection, Titus and Cnaeus counterthrust with javelins.

‘Put some fucking anger into it!’ Titus ordered the youngster, who then screamed defiance into the enemy’s bearded faces, his voice cracking and breaking with the effort.

Some of the Germans abandoned their spears, leaving them embedded in our shields, which were already heavy from the rain. Now they came with daggers and short swords, and I drew my own, beating aside an eager thrust, and crunching an elbow into the man’s face. Stepping back, I whipped the tip of the blade across his throat. The cut wasn’t deep, but he sank to his knees, blood bubbling. He’d die a long death.

Good.

Time lost all meaning as the enemy came against us. At first the withdrawal had been a series of short, sharp engagements, a few men involved at most, but now the Germans battered our lines from all sides. Some began to use stones to crash our shields apart, their comrades pouring into the gaps with spear and sword. The screams of the wounded drowned out the wind and the rain.

I glanced at the wild-eyed legionaries about me. I knew that it would take only a single man to run, and the others would follow; and once we ran, we’d die.

I wasn’t the only one to see it.

‘Hold the line!’ Titus bellowed. ‘I see your back, I’ll gut you and fuck your corpse, you cunts!’

A spear darted towards my face. I twisted, ducking beneath the attack, driving my sword up into the guts of the enemy. Hot blood cascaded over my hand as I struggled to pull the sword free of his sucking flesh.

The action left me momentarily outside of the line, and as I rushed to rejoin them, I saw what remained of our century – maybe sixty men – a tight knot of red amongst the dark-cloaked enemies.

‘My family are in the camp!’ Rufus suddenly shouted above the din, his words shocking his comrades even in the desperation of battle. ‘If I go down, keep them safe!’

‘You stupid bastard!’ Titus barked at his friend, pulling his sword free of a German chest.

‘Keep them safe!’

‘Keep them safe yourself! Stop fucking distracting me!’

Titus bent to the ground, freeing a short sword from a German’s dead hand and pushing it behind the leather belts on his waist.

‘Not the time for trophy collecting!’ Stumps shouted, holding a spearman at bay with feinted thrusts of his javelin.

‘You mind your own fight,’ Titus growled, ramming his fist into the side of the spearman’s head. The blow was enough to drop the German like a stone, and Titus followed through by stamping on the man’s skull; an eye popped free of its socket.

‘Close up!’ he roared, gripping men by their equipment and pulling the formation tighter.

Step by step, foot by foot, the battered century crossed the forest floor, the knot of shields steadily shrinking as German spears found exposed Roman flesh.

‘Just let us stand!’ Moonface screamed aloud. His wide face was painted in blood, and flushed with battle-madness. ‘Let us die standing!’

‘I’m not dying here, you mad bastard,’ Stumps chided him, hitting his friend across the back of the helmet. ‘And neither are you!’

His words held more certainty, his eyes more hope, than they had any right to. I followed his gaze to open ground.

Open fucking ground .

We were only fifty paces from the forest’s edge, but now, pushed on by our near escape, the Germans pressed home their assault, making us pay for every bloody yard. More men dropped in sight of safety than during the entire retreat, the rearguard wiped out as the formation finally buckled and became a circle of frightened men and overlapping shields. In such a formation, we stepped out of the darkness of the forest and into the open ground, the damp field as welcoming as the forum of Rome.

A few spearmen followed us from the trees to hurl final missiles and insults, but the charge of a patrolling cavalry unit was enough to send them scurrying for cover.

A young decurion, the officer commanding the cavalry squadron, pulled his mount to a halt beside the panting and bleeding men of Pavo’s command.

‘You’re the Second Century, Second Cohort,’ he announced.

Pavo emerged from the ranks. The horsehair crest of his helmet had been shorn almost in two by a German sword. His forearms were thick with blood from a dozen spear-nicks. He had not shied from the fighting and, with his proud chin and bright eyes, he made for a heroic figure. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘You’re the only ones still out there.’

‘The other work parties came back?’

‘Some of them did,’ the cavalry officer answered ominously, twisting in the saddle to peer at the forest, the trees as much of a barricade as any fort’s stone walls. ‘Someone doesn’t want us to leave this place,’ he concluded with a soldier’s grim resignation.

Pavo wasted no time, and marched – limped – the century back towards the camp. Through the rain, I took in the men about me. The section had come through the action alive, but not unscathed: Stumps’s shoulder wound had reopened, the stitches pulled free as he’d protected others with his shield; a deep gash ran across Titus’s forearm, a glimmer of white bone appearing within; Rufus’s shoulder was slumped from a slingshot’s strike; Moonface pressed delicately on ribs that were deeply bruised, if not cracked; young Micon’s helmet was dented and the eternally blank stare of his face was painted red by a cut across his forehead.

I took in these men, and in that moment I knew that I could not abandon them. Not while they were in this forest, besieged by enemies and by the storm. They had kept me alive today, and I owed it to them to return that service. A voice in my head railed against making such a promise, but I told myself that the oath was only to see the section clear of the forest. From there, I would go my own way, north to Britain, and a life free of Rome. Free of the legions. Free of war.

But for now, during the day’s struggle and slaughter, something within me had changed. Since my discovery in the grove I had fought against the ties of comradeship, but I could no longer resist those bonds, even if they were conditional, and it would be reasonable to assume that my about-turn had been prompted solely by the trials of combat. Reasonable, but wrong.

Because my decision was born of guilt.

Guilt that my actions had doomed these men, as they had others before them. Guilt that I could not resurrect ghosts. Guilt because, despite the adrenaline that seeped through my veins, despite the horror that we had endured in the forest, and despite the relief of escaping to the marching camp, the decurion’s words had left me reeling. Someone doesn’t want us to leave this place .

With blinding clarity, I knew who.

‘The chieftain Segestes is behind all of this,’ I told Pavo. ‘Arminius eloped with his daughter, and he wants him dead.’

We were in the centurion’s tent, Pavo having begrudgingly agreed to hear my petition. He was scrubbing at his helmet, working away blood that the rain had failed to wash clean.

‘He needs the army held up here because he knows Varus will come to Arminius’s rescue,’ I continued. ‘He’ll use the other tribes to keep us pinned down until he unites his own, and then we’ll be allowed to march on.’