Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

I said nothing. We both knew the answer.

‘Rome is a light in the world.’ As Arminius spoke, I could feel his love for that place, and its principles. ‘But the torch is carried by the wrong people.’

‘How do we change that?’ I asked suddenly, needing to know the answer, certain that this man possessed it, and anxious to play my part.

‘What are you willing to do?’ he asked me, his blue eyes burning into mine.

I placed my hand on the pommel of my sword.

And so, as the screams of Roman justice echoed beneath us, Arminius told me how we would defeat an empire.

War is expensive. Neighbouring kingdoms must be bribed to either interfere, or not. Armies must be provisioned. Soldiers must be paid.

It was this last reason that gave me the chance to hurt Rome. As standard-bearer, the legion’s coffers came under my watch. I was supposed to be scrupulous, and incorruptible.

But I was set on my path to become a traitor.

And so, one night, I deserted my dear comrades, and fled my legion with those pay chests, taking them into the hills where the rebels were mustering to form a resistance against Rome’s iron fist. It is enough to say that I was distrusted at first, but chests full of gold did much to persuade. The final act of my confirmation into the rebel ranks left me with shaking knees and a belly of acid, and yet I did what needed to be done. The details of that act can wait in my soul’s black pit with all the others.

I was an accomplished warrior, known throughout Pannonia, and so I was placed on the staff of the rebel generals. It would not be unjust to say that my expertise was a large part of the reason that the war then dragged on for two blood-soaked years. It was only when Rome dispatched an army of unprecedented size that we finally became trapped in the harsh mountains.

It was then that I ran. I had already abandoned one set of comrades, though I knew that my reason for that desertion had been just. Leaving the hilltop fortress as the legions swarmed over the mountainside like lava, I had no such justification. The rebellion seemed lost. Rome had won. I simply wanted to live. When Marcus took his last gasp, I ran.

I ran. I ran northwards, because Britain was the only place where I – maybe – still had a friend.

I could not tell you when my mind ceased to function as Corvus the traitor. One moment I was running from the flames, the next I was alone in the mountains – it was only when I slept that the memories came back to me, but they began to grow distant, individual horrors replaced by the wall of blood that would wash over me and wake me screaming. Like a fort besieged by catapult and ram, my mind had crumbled in war. Now, on a battlefield a world away, it had been rebuilt by the man who had cut down an army.

Arminius.

I felt his hands on my shoulders, and opened my eyes.

It was then that I screamed.

I screamed.

I screamed again, and again, and again. Screams of frustration. Of hate. Of self-loathing.

Arminius pulled me to my feet and held my face tight in the iron vice of his hands. ‘Corvus.’ He smiled. ‘Stop this shit. Look around you.’ He gestured. ‘We’ve won.’

I did look around me. I saw bodies on top of bodies. I saw the ruin of an army. I saw an end to the ambitions of an empire. Three legions destroyed. Could Rome ever recover?

‘I did this?’ I managed to mutter.

For once, Arminius let a prideful smile play across his handsome features. ‘This was my work, Corvus, but the gods had their hand in it too. Why else would I have found you in that grove? They sent you to me.’

‘Why didn’t—’

‘I tell you?’ He smiled again. ‘Tell you what? That you were a traitor? A turncoat? Why? So that you could have been put up on a cross, and taken me with you?’

‘You should have killed me,’ I murmured.

‘I thought about it,’ Arminius admitted, still holding my face. ‘But the gods spoke to me in that place, Corvus. They told me that you would play your part in this, and you did. You saved me on the square. When my uncle wanted me imprisoned, or dead, you saved me. And so, yes, you made this possible.’

I looked about me at the bodies that would soon be flyblown and bloated. I wanted to throw up.

Arminius recognized my weakness. ‘I know an ally when I see one, Corvus. You showed your true heart in Pannonia. It is a good heart. The heart of a man who cares for ordinary people, and not the pampered life of a senator half a world away. I have seen broken warriors before, and I just had to let you come to me in your own time. Until then, I watched you. My men watched you.’

I looked up from the carpet of corpses.

‘The two legionaries and their centurion, buried in the manure,’ I realized. ‘They knew me. They knew what I had done. That was you.’ I meant that Arminius had killed them to keep my secret.

‘Berengar,’ Arminius confirmed, with a nod towards the giant bodyguard who now walked into my eyeline, his thick muscles painted with Roman blood. ‘Berengar took care of you, Corvus, because you’re one of us. You’ve seen the rot in the Roman Empire. Together, we can stop it spreading.’

‘We can,’ I heard a voice say, stunning myself as I realized that it was my own. ‘We can,’ I said again, and believed it.

For what was Rome?

Seeing the purity in Arminius’s eyes, I knew exactly what it was. It was a bully that masqueraded as a teacher. It was a tax collector that disguised itself as a philanthropist. It was a bloodthirsty executioner that paraded as a guardian.

Rome was poison.

‘Rome’s poison,’ I said aloud, as more wretched memories came rushing back, and I knew that I spoke the truth.

Had I not deserted the Eighth Legion in sound mind, desperate to prevent – or at least delay – the atrocities committed against the people of Pannonia? It was only bizarre fate that had seen me once again clad in the red tunic of the legions and marched off to war on Rome’s behalf. It was only the bonds of brotherhood to a few men that had kept me in the armoured ranks when the chance to escape had presented itself. The shared ordeal was the fabric of our binding, not the notion of Rome, or empire.

And now those battle-brothers were gone. Dead, deserted or missing. My ties to Rome were cut.

‘Follow me,’ Arminius offered, taking his hands from my face.

And so I did, and when I followed, it was not as a prisoner, but as an ally of the German prince.

It was as such that Prefect Caeonius now saw me. He had cast his hollow eyes back to take in the sight of the man who was his victor, and now the sole determiner of his fate, and by his side he saw the wretch that he had rescued from a tortured death on a cross. A man who, it must now be clear to him, had been a traitor all along.

I expected some fire in his eyes. A curse.

There was nothing. He had seen too much. Endured too much. I was simply one more blow in the barrage of deceit and misery.

‘What will you do with him?’ I asked Arminius, and the prince tracked my eyes to the leader of the Roman army’s remnants.

He did not answer. It was the first and only time I ever saw indecision cross his face.

I did not press him, my mind still swimming from my own revelation.

We followed the sorry survivors of Varus’s army through a gap in the ramparts of the final marching camp. Within the raised dirt walls, hordes of German tribesmen and camp followers picked through an army’s litter, searching for anything of value.

‘Stop your men there,’ Arminius called, and Caeonius ordered a halt at the camp’s centre. Men came to a stop as if in a dream, bumping and shuffling into each other’s backs.

Arminius walked forward and, given an encouraging push in the back by Berengar, I assumed that I was to follow on behind. So it was that I found myself within a javelin’s length of the Roman commander.