Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

The Empire meant nothing to me. Enlightenment? Romanization? They were fancy words for corpulent politicians. My world was the section, the mates on my shoulders. My world was now nothing more than the few yards to my front, seen over the axe-ravaged horizon of my shield’s lip. It was a small world, and one full of terror.

My smile dropped as I heard Pavo shout, ‘Here they come!’ The warning was redundant. A wave of screaming Germans sprinted towards us, a solid mass of shield and spear.

These were fresh troops, unbloodied, their eyes still sparkling with life. They hadn’t fought in the forest. They hadn’t bled on the wall. I hoped that their inexperience would allow me to see a few more seconds of this grey morning.

‘Brace!’ Pavo called, and I overlapped my shield with Cnaeus’s, putting the pathetic weight of my body behind my front leg. My limbs were weak, dying, and yet they obeyed. Adrenaline had fed them to this point. I felt the slip of the mud beneath my sandals, and ground them in deeper, knowing that every inch of push and shove would be a matter of life and death.

With a sidelong glance, I caught Cnaeus’s eye. Three days ago, this comrade had been a young warrior. Now, he was an old man. Even the stubble on his unguarded throat had grown white. He had done his duty, and showed the promise of a fine soldier. In another life, he could have risen far. In this one, he seemed certain to die on this track.

I pushed such thoughts from my mind as I turned my eyes back to the front. The Germans were now a few paces away, their faces screaming, cursing, twisted by both hatred and the scent of victory.

We clashed. It was shield on shield, grinding, creaking and splintering. It was metal into flesh, the resistance of bone, the break in through ribs, and the suction as the blade was drawn free. It was gnashing teeth, spitting faces and eyes dead with resignation or ablaze with defiance.

It was battle.

Once again in the face of death, time became meaningless. I measured life in breaths and sword strokes.

Beside me, young Cnaeus screamed like an animal as he thrust his blade into a German’s body. Pulling his sword free sent a cascade of hot blood spurting into the air and across my own skin. I tried to call out, more beast than man, as my own steel tore open a stomach, conscious of the hot entrails that fell across my sandalled feet.

‘Die!’ I screamed into the bearded faces of my enemy. ‘Die!’

And die they did. How many on my own sword? What does it matter? Only survival was important, and for that we needed victory.

But victory belonged to our enemy.

I stood, but hundreds had fallen. The line finally broke, Germans pouring into the breach like an infection, the fight of ordered battle lines descending into a melee of individual skirmishes.

Warrior after warrior came at me. Most were a blur – cut, parry, thrust and move on – but some details fought their way through the carnage to etch into my mind, destined to dwell there until my own final gasp: a legionary staring quizzically at the stump of his arm, hacked off by a German axe; a woman, a whore from the baggage train, holding spearmen at bay with wild swings of her own staff; a mule, thrashing in agony, eyes bulging from its skull in terror.

‘Rally, rally, rally! Form on me! Form on me!’ I heard the harsh call for order pierce the riotous cacophony of battle, and saw the broken line of soldiers fighting their way to my side. I did not know it at first, but the barking voice had been my own. Like the well-drilled strokes of a sword arm, my tongue had acted on its own initiative.

‘Kill them!’ Stumps screamed, blood pouring down his skull from a half-severed ear. ‘Kill them!’ he demanded of us.

We tried. Cut, parry, thrust: the endless repetition of death’s machinery, broken only when I felt a hand grip my sword arm.

I turned, and saw young Cnaeus falter.

The boy buckled to his knees, one hand desperately fighting for my attention, the other pressed to a wound on his neck that spewed crimson like a grotesque waterfall.

I knew that he was a dead man. His wide, terror-filled eyes told me that he knew the same.

The Germans gave me no time to delay the inevitable. No time to assure him that all would be well. No time for goodbyes. All I could do was cover the boy with my shield, fighting off attackers as he whimpered and choked to death on his own blood. Finishing off a swordsman with a thrust into his stomach, I finally had a chance to look down between my feet. Cnaeus lay there, his eyes open and unblinking.

The boy was dead.

I had no time to mourn him. Our small knot of men had to stand firm as the tide of German warriors swirled around us. Other groups of soldiers closed ranks, shields overlapped, swords and javelins held in shaking hands.

Here was the lull in the battle. Such hostility could not be continued indefinitely, and now was the point where men collapsed from exhaustion, or backed away to fill lungs with air and stomachs with wine. Men still died, but the initial clash of forces had dissipated into a handful of stand-off skirmishes and the dispatching of wounded. Tortured cries for mothers rang out in every language of the Empire and the German tribes. I knew battle, and recognized this lull as an inhalation before further exertion. The fight was not over. The forest seemed to hold its own breath, waiting for the next move.

‘Felix, are you all right?’ I turned, seeing Titus. He held a German longsword in one hand, an oval auxiliary shield in the other.

‘Cnaeus is gone,’ I managed, after spitting to clear my throat.

Stumps and Moonface were still with us. Micon too.

‘Stop crying!’ Titus shouted into the boy soldier’s face.

‘Cnaeus,’ the boy sobbed.

‘Do you want to join him, you tart?’ Titus challenged the youth. ‘Or do you want to live?’

‘I want to live,’ Micon finally stammered.

‘Then pick up your fucking shield,’ the man growled, and the boy did so, coming to stand beside me.

‘This isn’t over.’ Titus spoke confidentially into my ear, though any man could see that truth.

We cast our eyes over the German ranks opposing us, a mass of men that swayed with anticipation.

‘They’re waiting on something,’ I agreed.

It came a moment later from the head of the track: thunder – the thunder of hooves.

Titus spat. ‘Cavalry. Fuckers.’

Stumps grimaced. ‘See you on the other side, boys.’

The horsemen burst forth like blood from an artery, pouring into the narrow space between the trees.

‘Shields!’ Titus called. ‘Hold! Hold!’

The irrepressible flow of the cavalry swept up those Romans who did not hold their formations, men dying as they were trampled beneath hooves or spitted on the end of cavalry spears.

Other knots of soldiers broke in the face of this brute force, discipline replaced by animal instinct to flee for the illusion of safety in the trees.

Some men resisted this urge. Forced it down with clenched teeth and empty stares. They were the backbone of a legion, but the spine had long since snapped.

‘Get back, you cunts! Get back!’ Pavo called at the soldiers who ran for their lives. ‘Get fucking back here!’ This was the moment he had longed for: glory-drenched battle. The chance to carve a name, reputation and career.

It all came to an end in a clatter of hooves. I saw the centurion disappear beneath the trampling steed of a German nobleman, the shorn-crested helmet tossed into the air as if it were an afterthought.

‘Pavo’s gone!’ a veteran of our own century called.

And so it was that our own band split apart, soldiers I knew by sight bolting for their supposed salvation. Only the survivors of our section held together. We were blood-brothers who had slept, ate and shat together so often that we were almost of the same organism. By some mercy, our solidarity bought us a moment of respite, the cavalry mounts swerving around our unyielding shields, leaving the diehards to go in search of easier or more glorious prey.