Джерейнт Джонс - Siege

‘There’s a hand in its mouth,’ the boy soldier then told us, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Stumps carried the section’s torch; the flames spat in the rain as he used it to light the alleyway. We saw a set of legs poking out of the shadows.

‘Gods.’ Brando grimaced. ‘She can’t be more than ten.’

‘Get the guard commander,’ I ordered Stumps, anxious to have him clear of the sight. He passed the torch to Brando and made off at a sprint, sandals slapping in the rain.

‘You think they’re still around here?’ Brando asked me cautiously, hand on the pommel of his sword, eyes on the long shadows.

I shook my head. ‘They’re spreading fear. They don’t want an even fight.’

‘Who does this, Felix?’ the Batavian pressed me. ‘What’s wrong with these fucking Syrians?’

So he bought into the angry bile of those who blamed the archers for each of the gruesome deaths.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly, though I had my suspicions, which were that the killer had been born in the West, not the East. What better way to weaken the garrison’s resolve than by sowing fear and discontent amongst those that dwelled within the fort, and relied on each other for survival?

‘I think Arminius has men inside here,’ I finally concluded.

‘Warriors?’

‘No. No one could hide this long. It’s someone in the garrison. They either sympathize with him, or they’re getting paid.’

Arminius had shown in the forest that he was a master of tactics, and so surely he would have known that the forts would have to fall after the legions? To that end, there was ample time for him to insert saboteurs, spies and assassins.

And yet…

Something troubled me. The theory was solid, but Arminius hadn’t come to Aliso expecting a fight. He hadn’t expected a siege. Surprise had been Arminius’s ally as he took down the forts along the River Lippe. Was he so thorough that he had considered all eventualities, including a garrison being prepared for his arrival? His lack of siege ladders and ability to storm the fort’s walls would suggest not.

‘Guard’s coming,’ Brando put in, the rushed tramp of hobnails announcing the arrival of the fort’s quick-reaction force, a half-century of men.

‘Another girl?’ their centurion asked me. ‘Report.’

I did. All the time the man’s eyes were on the girl and her wounds. I wondered if he had his own children, and was picturing them cold and dead in the wet dirt.

‘You and your men wait here,’ I was then ordered. ‘Send for Centurion Malchus,’ he told a runner.

‘Don’t we need more men, sir?’ a veteran asked of his officer. ‘Last time the civvies caused a right fucking riot.’

The centurion shook his head. ‘The fuckers are sleeping, and even if they’re not, they won’t be coming out in this.’ He gestured to the heavy weather. ‘Best thing to stop a riot’s some rain.’

It wasn’t long until the imposing silhouette of Centurion Malchus appeared in the darkness. ‘Another?’ His voice carved out the question.

‘Younger,’ the centurion answered. ‘Looks like this one’s been raped, sir.’

‘Hmm.’

Malchus noticed me then by the torchlight, but made no acknowledgment – his face was tight with anger. He was a tethered lion, held from its prey. The fact that a murderer was loose on his watch could only further fuel his rage.

‘Get her out of here,’ he instructed the centurion. ‘Find somewhere to keep her dry, and tell your men they’ll pull a triple duty if one word of this gets out before the prefect says something himself, understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Malchus spat into the dirt, water falling from the crest of his helmet as he turned on his heel. ‘I just want a war,’ he growled. And then the beast slipped away into darkness.

The young girl’s death began a pattern as dark as the night her body had been found.

First there was the revulsion, fear and panic that such a crime could take place within the walls that were supposedly our bastion against such violence. Then came recrimination, and the primal urge to find and punish the source of such terror. Civilian blamed Syrian archer. Syrian archer blamed Roman legionary. Roman legionary blamed the civilians themselves. As the girl had been butchered, so too was the fort’s garrison carved into tribes full of suspicion and hatred.

‘If Arminius comes again, we’ll all be fucked.’ Stumps spoke up gloomily from the edge of his bunk.

Linza was with us, sitting at the end of my own bed and feeding sticks of wood into a small fire that was seeing off the worst of the autumn chill. Hard cold had followed the rains that had masked the young girl’s death, but flame and the warmth of bodies did enough to take the nip from the barrack-room air.

‘They wouldn’t come again though, would they,’ Linza stated rather than asked, the light of the flames rippling over her stoic face.

Every person in the garrison could see the truth of that now. Winter would do what Arminius could not. Through stockpile and the stripping of surplus buildings, there was enough firewood in the camp to survive two winters. But food was at a premium; even fishing in the river was doing little to bolster rations now that winter was placing its icy hand on the German lands.

‘You know what I miss?’ Stumps grumbled in an attempt to lighten the mood. ‘A big, fat, wobbling arse. Even Brando’s looks like a plank of wood now.’

The Batavian, whose face and long limbs had become considerably leaner, was in no mood for humour. The death of his best friend Folcher, and the guilt that he felt for the fate of Balbus, had silenced him in all but prayers and the acknowledgment of orders. And yet I had hope for the man.

I looked at Stumps. After the forest, he had been a shell of the man I had known in the summer camp of Minden. Having escaped slavery, Stumps had then wanted to do nothing but drink, and escape his memories. Linza was beginning to change that, I could see. We were far from being happy with our lot in life, but we were finding a reason to live with the memories, rather than to try and drink or fight our way into forgetting them. She was a reminder that there was more to our existence than as parts of death’s machinery.

Of course, I was aware enough to know that there was another reason I wanted the blond-haired woman around.

‘You got any sisters with fat arses?’ Stumps smiled at Linza, the question a happy and oft-repeated staple of their conversations.

‘You’re too short for them,’ the Batavian girl answered as always. ‘They like tall men. Real men,’ she teased, and I caught Stumps’s knowing look – I wasn’t much taller than my friend, and Linza was not far from my equal.

I let the two continue their usual dialogue of finding a suitably fat-arsed wife for Stumps. Though it was days since discovering the dead girl in the rain, my mind continued to slip back to that alleyway and my thoughts as to the identity of her killer. The more I mulled over the murders, the more I became certain that it was a servant of Arminius who had carried out the crimes – terror was splitting a garrison as well as any breach in the fort’s walls could have done.

I thought again of approaching the garrison’s command with my suspicion, but quickly dismissed the idea. To begin with, a soldier does not simply walk to the headquarters building and ask for an audience with its commander – I would have to go through my chain of command, and that meant Albus, my new centurion. Albus, a veteran long in the tooth, would look on any such venture as more work for himself and his century. The old soldier’s maxim of ‘never volunteer’ held just as well for information as it did suicidal missions.