Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

I did, but not in the way he was expecting.

I planted the crown of my skull into his mouth – I couldn’t reach the nose – and I felt a lip burst beneath the pressure. In the same movement, I reached down for my iron helmet, planning on bringing it crashing into the side of his head – if I could deliver a crushing, rapid assault on their leader, then maybe the others would back down – but he was faster, and harder, than I’d expected, and the helmet was only halfway through its arc when he recovered and threw his right fist into a savage uppercut.

I half stepped to my left, but even the glancing blow was enough to send my eyes bouncing in their sockets and a jet of blood shooting from my mouth where a rotten tooth was knocked loose.

The helmet completed its arc, but the power had been taken from my swing and the aim gone awry, so the metal thumped harmlessly into his shoulder, and then he was on me.

We went down into the dirt, and his comrades, their courage found and blood up, dived down with us. On the floor it was a blizzard of punches, kicks, elbows and bites. It was hard to know who hit whom, a friendly elbow no less damaging than an intentional one, but I caught enough that were aimed for me. I managed to get my teeth into the flesh of somebody’s ear, but before I could tear it away, I felt something crash into the bone beside my eye socket, and I slipped into the black void.

My unconsciousness was a short one, for when I came to I could still hear the panting of the men I had brawled with. I was in that beautiful moment where my body was so traumatized that the pain had not yet materialized, and so I kept my eyes clammed shut, marvelling at the copper tang of blood that ran over my teeth and dripped into my throat. Evidently, the big man had noticed that red liquid, and didn’t want me to die.

‘Roll the bastard on his front before he chokes.’ I felt rough hands grip me and turn me over. My nose pressed into the dirt, and I cheered inwardly to know that it had somehow escaped the fight unbroken.

I heard the tent flap being pulled open and the light increased. A familiar voice came with it. Centurion Pavo.

‘What the fuck have you done to him, Titus?’

Titus. So the big man was Titus, the soldier the quartermaster had been so interested in.

The man shrugged. ‘I can explain.’

‘Please do.’

‘He went for me. The other lads saw it.’

To this, I heard an echo of agreement.

‘Is he dead?’ Pavo asked them.

‘No,’ Titus replied, his tone betraying a little disappointment.

‘He didn’t forget how to fight, then,’ Pavo mused out loud. He then raised his voice, addressing the tent’s occupants as a whole. ‘Look, he’s in your section, so you’d better make it work. Titus, my tent. The rest of you, sort him out.’

Pavo left, the big man in tow. The other veterans lifted me on to my blanket while I mumbled incoherently, not entirely out of deception. I was badly hurt from the beating, shapes and colours drifting in front of my eyes. I would have happily dropped into unconsciousness again, but now the pain had arrived, a burning column of agony that marched the length of my body.

It didn’t desert me for the next two days, during which I drifted in and out of sleep, soon to be woken by sharp pains in my skull, my eye feeling too big for its socket. In this time I heard the men talk, my ‘comrades’, and I was often the subject of discussion.

‘He’s mad. He’s tough. He’s a bad omen.’ So, they had discovered where, and how, I had been found. That could work in my favour. If they were superstitious men, they would be more likely to leave me, and my past, alone.

On the second day in the tent I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer. I felt pus weeping from one of them, a fact confirmed when one of the veterans – a real ugly bastard with pockmarked skin and a sagging neck – began wiping at the corners. From the rough strokes, it was evidently a duty, rather than an act of charity.

‘Will he lose the eye?’ I’d heard Titus ask, a knot in my stomach. The other veteran had mumbled, ‘I’m no surgeon,’ which told me nothing.

‘It would be good if he did,’ the section commander had added. ‘Can’t have a one-eyed bastard in the fighting lines. Pavo’d have to move him to the baggage train or something.’

‘If he loses it, he loses it,’ the ugly veteran had replied, in a tone that indicated he would not hasten my blindness.

I learned a lot about the section during my few days in the blankets.

The leader, Titus, was absent much of the time. The others didn’t seem to know where he went, usually, only that he came back with coins, and shared a few with his comrades in return for them covering his duties within the camp. Pavo often called the man into his own tent, but no one was aware of the nature of their conversations. Likely, however, it was tied into those same coins.

As my eyes recovered, I was able to put faces to the names and voices I had become acquainted with. Lying on your back for days, and in search of any distraction from pain, you can learn a lot about people.

Titus’s four friends and followers were veterans, known as salts, or sweats, throughout the legion. The most outspoken of this clique was Stumps and, like most comedians, the twenty-something-year-old soldier was a sullen pessimist at heart. He had lost a couple of fingers during a skirmish with German tribesmen the previous summer, and from the way that he went on, it was he who was bedridden with injuries.

Rufus was of Gaul, a red-headed Celt who kept an unofficial family on the camp’s outskirts. He was a quiet man, which I took to mean that he was an unhappy one. He was also a duplicarius , meaning that he received double pay. To be the beneficiary of this award, he must have pulled off some heroic deed.

One of the younger veterans was a fanatic, worshipping both the legions and the Roman deities. During some of his sermons on the enlightenment that Rome was bringing to the barbarian people, I wished that my ears would give up as well as my eyes. I had heard that shit too often in my past, and knew where it led. The uncompromising soldier had been named Moonface for his pale skin and wide, oval visage.

The veteran who wiped the pus from my eyes was known to his fellow veterans as Chickenhead, for his pinched face and the sagging flesh of his neck. He was eight months short of completing his twenty years’ service, and so he was exempt from most duties. He’d put in the miles and the fights, and so Pavo seemed happy for him to see out his remaining days from the relative comfort of the tent.

The two younger soldiers were Micon and Cnaeus, but I saw and heard little of them, as they were essentially the slaves of the section, usually burdened with cleaning, cooking and completing any unsavoury duties that came along. As always with young soldiers, it was hard to gauge their true nature, as they were awed into silence and obedience by the veterans, whom the boys looked up to as demi-gods.

The section’s final member was unofficial, but held a higher office than all. He was Lupus, a grey-haired kitten, ward of Chickenhead in particular. During the veteran’s regular dozes, the cat would curl up alongside him, or in the ugly man’s iron helmet. In the evenings, Chickenhead would feed it with slivers of meat bought from his own purse.

‘I’ll move back to Italy when I muster out,’ he told me as he wiped at my eye. ‘And Lupus will come with me. He’ll have a whole farm to roam then, won’t you, Lupus?’ Chickenhead beamed. He was referring to the plots of land given to soldiers on their retirement, often barren tracts on the fringes of Empire. ‘Think of all those mice!’ the soldier teased. ‘Think of all those mice!’